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The recent riots have led commentators to question how police intervention in the years preceeding the riots and what should now change.

more force is needed:

"The only way to stop them - the good kids and the bad - is to frighten them home with the real threat of reciprocal violence. Tim Montgomerie of conservativehome.com, the unofficial leader of the Tory grassroots, called on the police to 'baton charge the yobs: without fear of the police there can be no order'. He is right.
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"David Cameron, announcing the near-tripling of the police presence on Tuesday, has firmly asserted the primacy of the law. (It is a side issue for now, but this episode confirms the case for elected police chiefs - the police hate political oversight but they derive their authority from it, especially in times of crisis.)"

a message to the home secretary that he thinks she has the total consent of the public to use hoses, baton rounds, dogs, the Army - "whatever it takes":

"Brave police officers have risked their lives, going into inner city war zones with just plastic shields for protection.
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"Now they must be allowed to take back the streets, meet violence with violence. If some of the mob get hurt then that's their own fault. Don't expect me to shed tears if a masked youth with a 42in Panasonic in his arms cops a baton round. Society has rights, too, and it's time to exert them. No more hugging hoodies."

Former chairman of the Government's Cobra intelligence group that the public need to be more forgiving of police in public order situations:

"This institutional nervousness is the consequence of a lack of robust support for the police over many years by political leaders and many sections of the fickle British public. It is reflected at the level of individual officers. I have worked alongside the Metropolitan and City of London police and their coolness under fire, professionalism and sheer courage have never failed to impress me.
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"But increasing criticism of their actions in public-order situations, most recently over the handling of the Whitehall student demonstrations, has led in some cases to risk aversion. The police must be accountable for their actions, but violent disorder, in many ways akin to military combat, is often confusing, chaotic and unpredictable. Even in our human- rights-dominated, health-and-safety- obsessed world, police must be allowed sufficient latitude to take risks without a disproportionate fear of prosecution."

he believes this culture of fear among police allowed the further riots:

"The police, bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots 30 years ago and the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994, have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order. And the places that have really suffered as a result are the most deprived: they have to bear the brunt of the criminality and the fear, squalor and alienation that accompanies it...
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"The police lost control of the streets not in Tottenham, last weekend, but many years ago. Arguably, their failure to intervene robustly on Saturday and to let the looters carry on unmolested for hours owed much to the non-confrontational nostrums that have guided the policing of ethnically diverse areas, with disastrous consequences. On this occasion, they let the impression develop that here was a chance to plunder with impunity. Once that had taken a grip across the capital, and elsewhere, it became far more difficult - if not impossible - for the police to regain control."

rioters' sense they won't be punished could be misplaced:

"There seems to be another aspect to the impunity - that the people rioting aren't taking seriously the idea it could rebound on them. All the most dramatic shots are of young men in balaclavas or with scarves tied round their faces, because it is such a striking, threatening image. But actually, watching snatches of phone footage and even professional news footage, it was much more alarming how many people made no attempt at all to cover their faces. This could go back to the idea that, with the closure of a number of juvenile facilities and the rhetoric about bringing down prison populations, people just don't believe they'll go to prison any more, at least not for something as petty as a pair of trainers. I feel for them; that may be true on a small scale, but when judges feel public confidence seriously to be at issue, they have it in themselves to be very harsh indeed (I'm thinking of Charlie Gilmour)."