The police should “get medieval” on troublemakers to avoid a repeat of the 2011 riots, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has said as he backed plans for the first water cannon on the British mainland.
Mr Johnson said he believed the police should have access to all the tools and weaponry they may need to quell any future riots, but predicted water cannon would be used “vanishingly rarely”.
He said it was unlikely that cannon would have been deployed in the 2011 riots - which caused up to £300 million of damage - and suggested that “assertive” policing would have been more effective in stopping trouble which flared in Tottenham in the wake of the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
“You get medieval immediately on these people and you come down much harder, and you don’t allow a mentality to arise of sheer wanton criminality,” Mr Johnson told members of the London Assembly.
“I don’t think a water cannon would have made a blind bit of difference in Tottenham. We would never have got the machines there in time, and it was a question of nipping it in the bud.”
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Mr Johnson added that a situation which developed later in the riots in Croydon, south London, when a family-run furniture shop and other premises became the focus of rioters and arsonists, could have been helped by water cannon.
Members of the committee raised concerns about the risk of injuries from water cannon and about the police using “military” weapons.
Mr Johnson said: “They are not military weapons. They would not be much use in warfare and I’m not aware of any regiment that deploys water cannon.
“The police already have access to much more violent means of crowd control. If you look at a baton round, it’s no joke if you get that in the eye.”
Mr Johnson has asked Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to licence the use of water cannon for the first time, and the Metropolitan Police have asked the Mayor to approve funding for three second-hand water cannon from overseas.
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