Liverpool Riot Report Tuesday August 10, 2011

Liverpool endured another night of trouble on Tuesday in the Toxteth area, south of the city with rioters playing a cat and mouse game with police in the area’s narrow, terraced streets.

In the hours around midnight of Tuesday I saw approximately 50 young men masked-up and running in and out of the streets to terrorise police.

A resident on Park Road told me he had seen police injured during the confrontation and said the mob had: ‘Chased the police away’.

One group helped themselves to bricks out of a skip to lob at the ten or so riot vans in attendance, I saw a man smash a paving slab on the road, to provide throwable missiles.

At 12.30 am I saw two cars parked sideways across Lawrence Road as a barricade to police. They had been torched and were burning fiercely, sending plumes of smoke 50ft into the night sky. This scene was attended by three fire engines - two of which subsequently had their windscreens smashed.

I saw ten or so of the Liverpool Council’s purple wheelie bins overturned and set alight and observed the windows of the Granby launderette smashed.

As the police helicopter illuminated the area, police attempted to seal off the area, with 40 or so police in riot gear around Lodge Lane, stood seven abreast to block the tiny side streets. Police parked their cars and vans across the major roads out of Toxteth, which prevented the mob from making its way down Princess Avenue towards town as it had done on Monday night.

By car, the area is not easy to exit as, after the riots thirty years ago, many of the terraced roads around Granby Street had bollards installed to turn them into dead ends. A mob on foot, however, proved impossible to contain as rioters drifted in and out of the side streets like shadows.

The people I saw confronting police were aged between 16 and 30, exclusively male, dressed in dark clothes, with hoods, scarves or high-zipped tops to disguise their identity. The mood of the rioters was relaxed, mischievous even - they chatted between themselves in between sporadically lobbing missiles at the police vans and fire engines.

Some police, by contrast, sounded angry and stressed as they ran in groups to cordon off the streets. A police van driver wound down his window and yelled at me, as I sat in my car to observe, shouting : ‘Do you want to get burned out? What the hell are you doing here at this time of night. Get out!’.

I didn’t see the anger which was exhibited in the Tottenham crowd after Mark Duggan’s family protested his shooting. I heard that missiles had been thrown at the riot police on foot, but I didn’t see this and I saw noone injured or arrested. The police appeared to be taking the softly-softly approach of containment, rather than push for arrests.

The area thronged with residents, around the heart of the trouble, they stood in large groups in the streets, watching, talking. I saw one mum, cowering behind a male friend, stood 100 yards from the confrontation, clearly terrified. She shouted to her friend: ‘Where’s my son, where is he? Tell him to come out. Go in and fucking get him, now!’. One group of young women, not 50 yards from burning cars, had taken their kitchen chairs out to sit on the pavement in their PJs, share cans of beer and enjoy the show.

A number of residents told me trouble had been happening intermittently over the previous 48 hours but by 3am the area was deserted and silent.