Middle class individuals with well-paid jobs and cozy lives ‘misplaced all the pieces’ in summer time riots, policing chief claims

A Labour policing chief has claimed that some middle class people with well-paid jobs ‘lost everything’ when they got drawn into taking part in the summer riots. 

Matt Storey, the commissioner for Cleveland, said they had ‘really settled lifestyles’ which had now evaporated. 

He said he will be going into prisons to speak to those convicted to ask: ‘Why did you do it?’ 

Mr Storey suggested some of the ‘mindless violence’ had been carried out by people who held anti-police views. 

The latest figures show that policing the disorder over the summer cost £31.7million – but this sum is expected to increase once all forces who provided mutual aid cover report their own data.

Over a 12-day period, officers clocked up more than 40,000 hours of public order shifts, the National Police Chiefs’ Council said.

So far 1,590 people have been arrested, of whom 17 per cent were aged under 18.The total number of charges brought is 1,015.

Of the arrests made so far, 99 were for offences committed online.

Mr Storey was speaking at the National Police Chiefs’ Council conference where he suggested why some people decided to join in or start the chaos, reported The Telegraph. 

In Middlesbrough he said the riots had largely been started by people who wanted to ‘exploit’ the Southport killings so they could ‘voice offensive views and prejudices’. 

While he claimed some with anti-police views had started the carnage in Hartlepool. 

‘[Police] have told me of people who had really good jobs, really settled lifestyles, middle class, and have lost everything because they basically got drawn into it,’ he said. 

‘I think that restorative justice work will be really important in a preventative sense, because we need to make sure these things don’t happen again.

‘And that’s not going to happen if we don’t understand from the people who did it why it happened in the first place.’

He said he would be going into prisons to understand why some people hold prejudice views and how to educate them to make them not have those anymore. 

Mr Storey said much of the violence was motivated by hate and racism, with people exploiting the Southport tragedy to give voice to prejudiced views which they already held.

Britain’s head of counter-terror policing Matt Jukes has said that misinformation which helped fuel the summer’s riots was ‘turbo-charged’ by foreign bots.

False information about the alleged perpetrator of the Southport attack received more than 27million impressions on Twitter as violence erupted in 27 towns.

Mr Jukes also criticised ‘unhelpful’ commentators who know that certain information cannot be released while legal proceedings are active but presented this as ‘evidence of cover-up and conspiracy.’

He said there was a misconception that the ‘thought police’ had arrested hundreds of people for voicing their opinions. 

‘The reality is the hundreds and hundreds of people who were arrested were arrested because of their suspected involvement in violence, criminal damage, direct harms in communities,’ he said.

The vast majority of misinformation spread online was driven by people within UK communities, but foreign interference played a huge role in stoking violence, Mr Jukes added.

A Mail investigation revealed obscure platform Channel3Now spread false rumours that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker and on an MI6 watch list.

And Mr Jukes said misinformation of this type was further ‘turbo-charged’ by foreign bots, some of which were of Russian origin.

‘And so as we were tracking the amount of traffic, hateful traffic, during the 24-hour period across the days, we would see tremendous spikes as around midnight, bots kicked in,’ he told reporters at a policing conference.