U.K. police hit out at Cameron's hiring of U.S. crime guru (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – British police chiefs Sunday hit back at Prime Minister David Cameron's plans to enlist a U.S. crime expert after last week's riots, as the conservative leader vowed "zero tolerance" against street violence.

Cameron, criticized by some in his party as being too liberal on crime and punishment, has taken a tough stance after four nights of looting and arson hit cities across England.

"We haven't talked the language of zero tolerance enough, but the message is getting through," Cameron said in an interview in the Sunday Telegraph.

The prime minister, who has suggested the initial police response to the riots was too timid, has enlisted former New York, Los Angeles and Boston police chief William Bratton to advise his coalition on how to tackle street gangs, which he blamed for much of the violence.

But senior police officers, who have criticized the Conservative-led coalition's plans for police cuts, have reacted skeptically to the plan. "I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them," Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Independent Sunday.

"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 so fundamentally different from here," said Orde, a front runner for the position of head of London's police.

Cameron has dismissed suggestions that political and economic grievances lay behind the violence which killed five people, calling it "criminality pure and simple."

More than 2,800 people have been arrested and courts have worked around the clock and during the weekend to clear a third of those cases.

Two men, aged 17 and 26, were charged late Saturday with the murder of three Muslim men knocked down in Birmingham while trying to protect their communities.

About 20,000 people were due to attend a multi-faith peace march Sunday in the central England city with the aim of keeping a lid on any potential racial tension.

PUBLIC UNHAPPY WITH RESPONSE

The riots have shocked Britons, many of whom are still asking why the mass disturbances occurred, and were allowed to spread so quickly from London to other major English cities with arsonists and looters seemingly taking over many streets with ease.

A ComRes poll for the Independent Sunday and Sunday Mirror newspapers found only 29 percent of voters thought Cameron and his government had handled the riots well, while 48 percent were dissatisfied with the response.

The mass disturbances, the worst in decades, began in Tottenham, north London, after a demonstration against the police shooting of a suspect.

Most offenders are unemployed young men, though they have included a millionaire's daughter, a charity worker, a journalism student and a soldier.

The Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner, have been more restrained in their comments, and its deputy leader Simon Hughes, writing in the Observer newspaper, advised against "knee-jerk solutions including over-hasty moves to change the social contract and approaches to sentences."

Planned police cuts include reducing the national police budget by 20 percent, with the loss of about 16,000 officers, as the government deals with a record budget deficit.

Theresa May, the interior minister, said the planned cuts would go ahead. She told Sky News: "I know it is possible to make cuts in police budgets without affecting their ability to do the job the public want them to do."

Finance minister George Osborne told the BBC Saturday that throwing money at the problem was not the answer, saying the country needed to tackle deep-seated social problems.

But the ComRes poll showed 70 percent of people thought the cuts should be immediately reversed.

Opinion polls during the past week have seen Britons calling for stronger police measures, including imposing curfews, being allowed to use water cannon and rubber bullets.

Cities were largely quiet Friday and Saturday after police flooded the streets again to ensure weekend drinking did not reignite the rioting.

"What became clear was that although the Met had put more officers on the streets Monday night that hadn't actually been sufficient," May told Sky News.

"The Met commissioner came forward with proposals, the prime minister and I were very clear about two things. We wanted to see a presence on the streets, we also wanted to see a tougher arrest policy, that has been followed through."

The government's police cuts have been questioned by Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson, less than year before the city hosts the Olympics.

"The general movement (of police numbers) has got to be static or at least upwards, and that is vital for policing in London," he told Sky.

(Editing by Rosalind Russell)

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Drunken driving, traffic crime deportations way up (AP)

WASHINGTON – Huge increases in deportations of people after they were arrested for breaking traffic or immigration laws or driving drunk helped the Obama administration set a record last year for the number of criminal immigrants forced to leave the country, documents show.

The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals. Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided to The Associated Press.

An additional 13,028 were deported last year after being arrested on less serious traffic law violations, nearly three times the 4,527 traffic offenders deported two years earlier, according to the data.

The spike in the numbers of people deported for traffic offenses as well as a 78 percent increase in people deported for immigration-related offenses renewed skepticism about the administration's claims that it is focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

President Barack Obama regularly says his administration is enforcing immigration laws more wisely than his predecessor by focusing on arresting the "worst of the worst." He promised in his 2008 presidential campaign to focus immigration enforcement on dangerous criminals. As recently as May 10, Obama said in a speech in El Paso, Texas, that his administration was focused on violent offenders and not families or "folks who are looking to scrape together an income."

Most of the immigrants deported last year had committed drug-related crimes. They totaled 45,003, compared with 36,053 in 2008. Drug-related crime — described as the manufacture, distribution, possession or sale of drugs — has been the No. 1 crime among immigration for years. Drunken driving was third in the number of offenses last year.

An illegal immigrant from Bolivia, Carlos Montano, is awaiting trial in Virginia on charges of involuntary manslaughter in a drunken driving incident that killed Benedictine nun Denise Mosier and injured two other nuns. The case fueled national debate over deportations of criminal immigrants because Montano had two previous drunken driving arrests, in 2007 and 2008. He was not held by ICE or deported after the arrests. An ICE report concluded that new federal immigration policies would have prevented Montano's release.

But the rise in traffic offenders in the deportation statistics and in some other categories worries immigration advocates, particularly because traffic stops are largely made by police, sheriff's deputies and state highway patrol officers. Local law enforcement has become more involved in immigration enforcement because of new programs that encourage it.

Officers "are using their new authority to remove as many unauthorized people from their jurisdictions as they can, and that frequently means going after traffic violators instead of serious criminals," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University Law School. The institute is a Washington-based think tank on migration.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano noted that most people in the United States are arrested for misdemeanor offenses. But she told the AP that the percentage of felons deported will change over time.

"The more serious offenders are still in prison," she said in an interview Thursday. "We're not going to see them reflected in the numbers until we can begin to remove them."

The issue is one Obama is trying to carefully navigate in his bid for a second term as he relies on the record deportations numbers to bolster his tough-on-enforcement stance while trying to convince immigrant and Latino voters he deserves more time to get a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress.

Marshall Fitz, immigration policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, said some of the people being counted as criminals have committed traffic violations that would usually draw a traffic ticket. But when the driver can't produce a valid license, the officer pursues questions about immigration status.

Illegal immigrants caught in traffic stops often are pressured into signing an agreement to leave the United States and to pay a fine or somehow acknowledge responsibility for the traffic offense and thereby end up in the statistics as criminals even though they never went to court, Fitz said.

Kumar Kibble, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy of immigration, said in some cases people picked up on traffic offenses are found to have committed other crimes. But ICE attempts to categorize each deported immigrant in its statistics based on the worst crime in the person's record. ICE says the statistics involve only people who have been convicted of a crime.

Darrel Stephens, executive director of Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of sheriffs and police chiefs, said the data show ICE is deporting criminals. He noted that even though traffic offenses have more than doubled, they are just 7 percent of the total criminal deportations. Meanwhile, dangerous drugs and drunken driving deportations comprised 23 percent and 14 percent of the criminal deportations, respectively.

The drunken driving deportations are particularly important, he said. Fatal drunken driving accidents involving illegal immigrants often cause outrage in communities where they occur.

"That's a crime that people look at in a very serious way right now," Stephens said.

There are an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally, 7 million to 8 million of whom are believed to be adults.

Kibble said the numbers show his agency's system of giving priority for deportation to people who pose a public threat is working. Last year, 36,178 criminals were deported as a result of the Secure Communities program, now in place in more than 1,400 jurisdictions, up from 14 in 2008. It's expected to be in more than 3,000 jurisdictions nationally by 2013.

Secure Communities is the Homeland Security Department's system of identifying immigrants for deportation through fingerprints taken by local officers when booking people on criminal charges. The local law enforcement agencies routinely send the prints to the FBI for criminal background checks. The FBI shares the fingerprints with Homeland Security to look for potentially deportable immigrants, who can be in the country illegally or legally.

"The numbers are going in the right direction," Kibble said.

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Online:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement: http://www.ice.gov

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