Met Police slams PM hint of army use

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/193992.html

The suggestion by Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron to use the army to suppress persisting unrests in the UK has angered the country's top police officials.

"It is the government's responsibility to make sure that every future contingency is looked at, including whether there are tasks that the army could undertake that might free up more police for the front line," said Cameron in an address to parliament members.

Cameron added that 'far too few' officers had been deployed when the unrest broke out and that the police had initially treated the violence 'too much as a public order issue' rather than as one of criminality.

Metropolitan Police acting Commissioner Tim Godwin, however, said that he would only agree with the deployment of the military to quell the unrest in London after “every one of my officers and borough commanders are standing on the police front line.”

Godwin also blasted Cameron's decision to appoint American William Bratton, former commander of the police departments in major US cities of Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, as the advisor to the British government on combating gang crime.

“I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them. It seems to me, if you've got 400 gangs, then you're not being very effective. If you look at the style of policing in the States, and their levels of violence, they are fundamentally different from here,” Daily Mail quoted Godwin as saying on Sunday.