LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday said “nothing is off the table” to regain control of British streets — telling the nation that rubber bullets had been authorized and water cannons were on standby after violence and looting hit Manchester, Birmingham and other British cities.
London, the capital, was mostly quiet overnight. But the riots that began last week after a police-involved shooting continued to rock other British cities. Under fire for the government’s handing of the disturbances, Cameron said the relative calm in London spoke to the forceful deployment of 16,000 troops on the streets.
More than at any time since the riots began, Cameron talked tough. He said it was clear something was “sick” within British society, calling the crisis “a moral problem as much as a political problem.”
In an effort to track down offenders, he vowed to publish images of rioters captured by closed circuit cameras, and not to “let any phony concerns about human rights get in the way.”
“This continued violence is simply not acceptable, and it will be stopped,” Cameron said. “We will not put up with this in our country. We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.”
In Birmingham, police were investigating the hit-and-run deaths of three men, reportedly vigilantes who had turned out to protect their neighborhood from looters. If those fatalities are ultimately linked to the riots, it would bring the toll to four since the disturbances began.
Though more than 1,000 people have been arrested since Saturday in connection with the riots, many here have said the British police have thus far shown restraint. A new poll suggested the public was losing patience with a path of tolerance.
The YouGov poll published by the Sun newspaper on Wednesday showed 90 percent of Britons calling for the use of water cannons, 77 percent supporting the deployment of the army and 33 percent saying police should be permitted to fire live ammunition at rioters.
More than half of those surveyed — 57 percent — said Cameron had been managing the situation badly. On Tuesday, he flooded London’s streets with police officers, sending pockets of the city into virtual lockdown, with shops closing and helicopters buzzing overhead.
With London jails filled to capacity, the government faced the challenge of maintaining law and order in a country where the sense of security had suddenly been shattered. After a glorious spring in which a royal wedding celebrated all things British, the riots piled on to a summer of discontent plagued by a phone-hacking scandal, painful austerity and stock market drops.
At the same time, the trail of destruction after three nights of mob rule in sectors of the capital and other British cities left the nation confronting an overarching question: Why?
On a street corner in Hackney, site of some of the worst riots Monday, Sivaharan Kanbiah, a 39-year-old Sri Lankan immigrant, stood shell-shocked outside his ransacked convenience store as residents packed bags and fled in fear. “You work all your life, and in one night, they come and destroy it,” he said. “They did not just steal everything. They tore out the ceiling. They broke up the floor. They ripped out the shelves. I don’t understand such hate.”