EXCLUSIVE: MyLondon Court and Crime Reporter Callum Cuddeford spent the day at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Gravesend where instructors explained how officers get ready for riots in London
Met Police Show London Riot Response
Akimbo, hips proud, leg cocked and bouncing to the chaos, Brian Spencer is a picture of confidence facing a dozen shielded policemen in the heat of the August 2024 riots. Then fly the bricks. First to the back of his head. Then Spencer’s balls.
A year later, at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Gravesend, Kent, public order instructor PC Tom Wright pauses a 16-second video of Spencer’s calamity and gravely scans the room with deadpan eyes. The laughing stops. We all go silent. I feel a pang of shame as a cool smile falls off PC Wright’s face.
“If nothing is done here,” he declares, “The consequences could be catastrophic.”
You might have watched the video at the time. Giggled at the absurd theatrical timing. The way Spencer swivels, clutching his head, only to take a shot to his testicles with only a few millimetres of paint-stained cotton tracksuit bottoms to protect them. But now it is PC Wright’s job to remind everyone of the two-kilo brick that hit Spencer’s head only a few seconds before.
These “wayward missiles”, as Merseyside Police termed them, might have been thrown by other frenzied rioters – rioters some people might find hard to sympathise with, or actively detest – but the merciless impact on a human skull is still the same.
As PC Wright explains to us journalists, like he does to every single recruit, your next move as an officer is just one of many split-second decisions to be made in the thick of the screaming-burning chaos: to protect life and property, prevent and detect crime, and maintain the King’s peace. And remember, this might be happening 24 hours into a single shift.
‘People are influenced by what they see’
An hour earlier, Sergeant Freddie Mills arrives at Gravesend station decked out in black coveralls with Met Police branding so dark it’s almost impossible to make it out. A bunch of spoddy hacks from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), have been sent to improve media relations with the UK’s largest police force. We have cameras and pens. They have bricks and bombs.
We are loaded into a ‘bully van’ (as the kids call them now) driven by a proverbial brick house of a man who could play double bass with his vocal chords. Later in the day I learn his nickname from an officer who tells me: “We used to have a guy called ‘Freak’, but he left. So now we have ‘Bigger Better Freak’.”
The training facility is square and magnolia, like a block of cold lard with windows. In the canteen, a twentyish lad walks by with a breakfast of four poached eggs. Another young man passes with three eggs and a slice. Thick biceps, tattoos, and buzz cuts, all are loading up on protein before the main course: organised violence.
The Met used to do riot training in Hounslow, but the locals tired of shouting, swearing, and banging. According to Sgt Mills, the only real fan was a curry-house owner who was more than happy to fund his holidays with the Met’s enormous calorie quota.
Sgt Mills and PC Wright look like unsparing men, but put them at the front of a classroom and they present as geeks with extraordinary legal powers. Sgt Mills is especially keen to show off his knowledge around the nuances of protest law at major sites like Parliament – demonstrating the breadth of information your average response officer might be faced with when they volunteer for a shift.
Both instructors also discuss crowd science, quoting the names of academics whose work has influenced the Met’s approach. “In one type of crowd, there are many different types of belief system,” says Sgt Mills, “But people are influenced by what they see.”
This means controlling the narrative. Sending out officers into the middle of the crowd to communicate with protesters in real time. Press officers now sit alongside Gold Commanders so they can share it on X in real time, dispelling misinformation and creating a record of the Met’s story of the protest as it unfolds.
With London facing bigger crowds, and no more space to put them, the job of keeping people safe often falls to the likes of Sgt Mills and PC Wright in the training, and the meticulous planning that goes into ensuring those inside and out the Met know their role.
Though Sgt Mills and PC Wright are here to give us a taste of the introduction to public order training through their usual lecture presentation, inevitably the mischievous questions come thick and fast – some more personal than others.
One hijab-wearing Muslim reporter asks why she was not treated like a journalist by officers, despite showing her press card at a Palestine protest. Gracefully, Sgt Mills tells her that should not have happened and he would not expect her to change what she wears.
When I ask Sgt Mills about my arrest at a Just Stop Oil demonstration in Hammersmith in 2022, and whether police officers have learned to be less surprised by the presence of a reporter, police staff in the room talk about the training that has been done, with the help of the NUJ, to ensure journalists are recognised as such, even when reporting on covert direct action.
Other questions ask for simple advice about what to do when it all goes pear shaped. Sgt Mills proffers both reassurance that journalists can always ask a police officer for help if they believe they are in danger, while adding that there is a known element of risk when reporting on public disorder. “We are all adults here,” he grins.
‘What are you gonna do?’
Outside the classroom, in a fictional town that looks like Call of Duty’s take on the death of the English coastal resort, we all press ourselves against the guardrails of a fictional rooftop Tube station, feverishly waiting for the imaginary amphitheatre gates to swing open.
Bigger Better Freak appears to be among the officers who nonchalantly stroll around lobbing petrol bombs at trainees clad in riot gear, helmets, and a mix of ‘one size fits nobody’ rectangular shields and big see-through dinner plates that mean you can see the bottle flying towards your head right until you instinctively cover your face.
Another instructor, armed with a wheelbarrow full of wooden blocks, takes a more frenzied approach than the moping petrol bombers.
“There’s definitely an art to it,” Wright tells us with glee, “Some of my colleagues down here would have been absolutely phenomenal NFL quarterbacks.”
Wheelbarrow-man is a menace. His eyes dilate every time an officer leaves a slice of daylight between their shield and helmet, pelting lumps of wood at them with malice. After each mean hit, he swells with laughter. I am told they use real bricks sometimes, but the sessions are significantly shorter to reduce injuries. Sgt Mills, a former medic, points out where the treatment zones are.
I spend most of the hour-long session tracking the movements of a masked petrol bomber dressed in a yellow t-shirt and black boiler suit. He is built like a Judoon, the rhinoform humanoids of the Doctor Who universe who are known for brutally upholding the law.
You would think throwing bottles of flaming petrol is straightforward, but some of Yellow-shirt’s Molotov cocktail’s bounce along the ground, putting out the soaked newspaper fuses before they can smash and burn at the feet of the trainees.
When his bombs do go off, they leave an impressive trail of fiery black smoke. For the officers who take a direct hit, their only defence seems to be frantic stomping and running in any direction away from the licking flames.
I note, like all good bullies, Yellow-shirt is relentless, toasting the socks of his po-faced victims with bottle after bottle of hot fuel. Occasionally I hear a jibe too. “Get back,” the officers scream. “What are you gonna do?” slithers Yellow-shirt right back at them.
While there is the occasional peer-to-peer burst from a mini fire extinguisher, Sgt Mills says a key reason for carrying them in a real protest is the risk of a self-immolating demonstrator. A good sign to leave if you ever find yourself accidently in a protest.
Apart from going home immediately, if you find yourself stuck in a riot, Sgt Mills also suggests removing your football shirt and wearing something made of natural fibres – it tends not to turn into napalm when burning.
‘Mutual understanding’
When the whistle blows for the end of the hurling match, the officers pick up their weapons and two of Britain’s busiest street cleaners ride down the crackling roads, hoovering up a million shards of glass in one sweep.
The visit was billed as an opportunity to “develop a mutual professional understanding between journalists and the police”, so after the demo, I sit with Sgt Mills for lunch and we discuss the unusual flavour of the fishcakes. Of course we discuss other things, but in the spirit of developing a mutual understanding I haven’t written everything down.
What struck me most from a day observing the Met’s Public Order training did not come from an officer though. It was a talking point from an NUJ organiser that reminded journalists they should not be attending protests as both activists and reporters.
It should be obvious, but when you have activists and streamers without accreditation muddying the waters about what it means to be a journalist, the commitment to impartiality by bona fide members of the press must be firmer than ever.
As Sgt Mills would say, everyone in a crowd has their own belief system, but it’s the job of a professional not to let emotion cloud their judgement.
Want to contact Callum about this story? Please email [email protected] or Signal +447580255582
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