My experience of French riots persuades me that kneejerk reactions are not always wrong.
My kneejerk reaction on witnessing, in 2006, boisterous but peaceful anti-government marches in Paris degenerate into violence was to praise the police snatch squads I had seen in operation.
They, too, looked like thugs, not the sort of people you'd choose to bump into in a dark alley. But how efficient they were, moving swiftly into action after spotting cuprits or being directed towards them by telltale stains of paint sprayed by other officers.
The arrests were executed as forcibly as the level of resistance made necessary. But since a lot of the troublemakers were vicious louts, in the from the banlieues and interested only in theft and violence, with genuine protesters among their targets, it seemed nitpicking to complain.
A TV suit is de rigueur, even on riot duty
I stand by my kneejerk approval of those tactics and, during the last few days, have seen countless examples of filmed looting in the UK that could done with a similar police response.
Other kneejerk reactions are understandable but wrong.
In my report on the disturbances in Ealing which you can read at this link to the National, I quoted a barber who told me as I paid for a rather severe cut after my walk around the riot-affected area: "It won't happen, but the only sure way to stop it would be to shoot a few of them."
Draconian punishments, or indeed the fear of being shot dead, might deter a few of the yobs and yobettes marauding the streets in search of the kind of "fun" that harms others.
They might even persuade their utterly useless parents they have certain responsibilities, not least to stop their lawless children descending into lives of criminality and incarceration.
Battered entrance to a small Ealing shopping mall
But we have to go deeper and look for a more structured response to the mayhem unleashed on London and provincial cities since the weekend.
Those convicted of serious crimes, from incitement to rioting via Twitter to looting and setting fire to shops regardless of the risk to life, should be hit hard. Adequate punishments are available to the courts, even if they are not always applied.
Lots of people would love to see the parents locked up and their scummy kids "hit hard" in the literal sense. When not calling for a return to barbaric sanctions, members of this hang 'em, flog 'em brigade often call for a restoration of national service.
In my reactionary advancing years, I see some merit in the latter proposition.
I would not oblige conscripts to serve in the Armed Forces, but would cheerfully require them to join a national community service if they declined the military version.
Such service could involve a mixture of hands-dirty, elbow grease sorts of tasks - cleaning up after graffiti and the aftermath of riots? - and constructive, vocational training.
The idea would need to be thought through, with attention to funding, duration, grounds for exemption and so on. This is not another idea borrowed from France; it strikes me as being a classically English kind of response.
One snag, relevant to what we have seen in recent days in London and elsewhere, is the very young age - much younger than 17, the minimum for conscription until it ended in 1960 - of so many of the participants. You can hardly pack off a 12-year-old off for a year's compulsory community service. But the punishments open to the juvenile courts to impose could be made more imaginative, to allow some shorter, custodial equivalent. And they'd eventually be called up for the real thing in any case.
I do realise that a proportion of young people performing obligatory community service would simply put their criminal careers on hold and return to mugging, burglary, criminal damage and worse the moment they were discharged.
All the same, we could be grateful for the respite and then work constantly to evolve some such system, modifying it as we go along according to need and its successes and failures.
It would seem worth the effort even it did no more than produce greater levels of articulacy and rational thought than shown by two 17-year-old girls who, between sips of looted rosé wine at 9.30am, shared their philosophy with the BBC:
Girl 1: "Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles - it was good, though."
Girl 2: "It's the Government's fault. I don't know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It's the rich people who've got businesses and that's why all this happened."
Haven Green, Ealing: riot zone Monday night, haven again in the afternoon sunshine
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