A FLASH-mob street party pumping out “throbbing music” could have been used to distract scores of young people being sucked into the Birmingham riots.
That was one of the examples put forward in a new report commissioned to examine how to prevent similar violence in the future.
Author Professor Peter Latchford said the idea was designed to illustrate how city leaders needed to think and act differently to tackle the kind of unprecedented scenes of rioting that exploded last August.
“If they are dancing, they won’t be smashing,” the report said.
He was asked by Birmingham City Council to write an independent assessment of how civic leaders responded to the trouble and their “action to mitigate reoccurrences”.
The interim report, called They Moved Like Fish, identified how the council did well to get the streets back to normal, prevented more youngsters from becoming involved and used community contacts to help restore peace.
