British cops knock hiring of ex-NYPD chief

LONDON -- Police tensions flared yesterday over Britain's recruitment of a veteran American police commander to advise the government on how to combat gangs and prevent a repeat of the past week's riots and looting.

No major disorders were reported on the first weekend since rioters raged through suburbs and town centers. Thousands of extra police officers were watching over the streets.

Leaders of the police unions in London and the northwest city of Manchester criticized the appointment of William Bratton, former commander of the police forces in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, as an insulting stunt.

Their criticism follows rising friction between Prime Minister David Cameron and senior British police officers over whether the government, or the police, deserve credit for bringing four days of riots under control.

"America polices by force. We don't want to do that in this country," said Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers in the British capital. Deller, a 25-year Met officer, accused the government of not being serious about following Bratton's recipe for reducing crime.

"When Mr. Bratton was in New York and Los Angeles, the first thing he did was to increase the number of police on the street, whereas we've got a government that wants to do exactly the opposite," he said, referring to Britain's debt reduction efforts.

Ian Hanson, chairman of the federation's Manchester branch, said local officers knew better how to police their own communities than "someone who lives 5,000 miles away."

Police have been on the defensive over their slow initial response to riots that rapidly spread Aug. 6. Cameron also criticized their tactics as too passive and announced Friday that his government would receive policy advice from the 63-year-old Bratton, who resigned as Los Angeles police commissioner in 2009 after overseeing reductions in gang-related crime.

Five people were killed during the riots.

Although rioters came from all Britain's ethnic communities, the violence stirred fears of heightened racial tensions -- especially in England's second-largest city of Birmingham, where three South Asian men were killed Tuesday when they were hit by a car, reportedly driven by black youths.

The trio were struck by a speeding car that appeared to be driven deliberately into a crowd of South Asian vigilantes protecting a strip of family-owned shops in west Birmingham.