U.K. braces for more riots. Why has the violence been so hard to stop?

And yet police were bracing for more widespread rioting across England on Wednesday, after online sharing of an apparent “target list” of community centers and legal services providing help to refugees and asylum seekers.

The country is asking: Why can’t the violence be stopped?

Police, lawyers, criminologists and experts in “hooliganism” say that it is harder than it looks.

Police in Britain have a free hand to arrest those who attack officers, set cars on fire and loot stores. They can also charge people for online incitement of violence, racial hatred and terrorism.

But experts say that even with the ability to monitor some online activity, it can be difficult to anticipate where the next riot will break out and to assemble the security force that will be required.

Police have arrested hundreds, and yet the investigations and court cases are just beginning, and it may take a while for a deterrent effect to be felt.

One thing is clear: the British public is revolted by the violence.

“Even if you think that migration needs to be controlled and it’s fine to send people to Rwanda, you can still draw a line at smoking people out of a hotel, because that’s attempted murder,” said Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. “These are very extreme behaviors that don’t have wide support.”

That lack of support could make the riots difficult to sustain. But there’s also plenty of grievance to go around in Britain that could continue to stoke the violence. Experts say the riots could fizzle — and, like a brush fire, emerge again.

The current unrest broke out after a July 29 stabbing attack killed three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. Within hours of the attack, social media posts shared by prominent far-right figures described the assailant as an asylum seeker, with an Arabic name, who had crossed the English Channel illegally on a raft.

None of it was true. The stabbing suspect was later identified as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Wales. His religion is unknown. His parents are from Rwanda, where the vast majority of people are Christian.

But efforts to disentangle the stabbing from concerns about illegal immigration have had little impact. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots have swept through 15 cities in England, as well as Belfast in Northern Ireland, amounting to Britain’s worst disorder since 2011. Mobs chanting “we want our country back” have stormed a library, a mosque and a hotel providing shelter for asylum seekers. Police in helmets brandishing plastic shields have found themselves deluged with flying bricks and bottles.

In his first big test as prime minister, Starmer — a former top prosecutor — has urged police to hold the line. He wants them to protect life and property, and pursue mass arrests, using all the tools at the state’s disposal, including widespread coverage in British cities by surveillance cameras, abetted by AI-assisted facial recognition software.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council said that as of Wednesday afternoon, nearly 428 people had been arrested and 120 people charged.

Starmer’s new minister of police, Diana Johnson, said that courts could sit 24 hours a day to handle “thugs who maraud our streets.”

The government pledged that 567 extra places were being opened in Britain’s overcrowded prisons to take room for rioters.

But experts say the police and courts and prisons are overstretched — partly as a result of a decade of funding cuts.

With so many hotspots emerging, it can be difficult for police to “flood the streets” and overwhelm the rioters, said Tim Newburn, a criminologist at the London School of Economics

“These are very fast moving events, popping up here and there, in cities across the country,” Newburn said. “There will be four or five one night and more the next night, in different cities. The police have to be very agile.”

In Britain, experts say, police do have extensive powers to make arrests.

“The police can pretty much arrest you for any kind of violent disorder,” said Geoff Pearson, an expert in crowd policing at the University of Manchester Law School.

But when police are overwhelmed, their first duty is to protect life and property — to keep the mob from setting fire to a mosque or an immigrant center, or to keep protesters and counterprotesters apart. Arrests may come later.

To be sure, not everyone amassing in the streets is engaging in illegal activity. Newburn estimated that at demonstrations involving a couple hundred people, dozens have been throwing bottles and bricks at police, while most of the others have been shouting and filming each other with their mobile phones.

It appears the current riots are mostly leaderless, although they are attuned to far-right influencers and have been organizing themselves on social media, often on encrypted groups such as WhatsApp.

Starmer has branded the rioters as “thugs” — and there is broad agreement by the public. A YouGov survey found that 85 percent of Britons oppose what the pollsters called “the recent protests and unrest.”

But if Britons are firmly against the riots, many are unsettled by high numbers of immigrants arriving in recent years.

More than 125,000 people illegally crossed the English Channel in small rafters since 2018 — 900 crossed on Tuesday, with 12,313 making the perilous journey so far this year. Some 36,000 asylum seekers are residing in British hotels at a cost of $10 million a day. In addition, the previous governments have granted visas for a surge of students and workers. Net migration to Britain last year was 685,000, a record.

Nigel Farage, the leader of anti-immigrant Reform Party, which won five seats in the last election, has decried the riots and distanced himself from them, but said there are “deeper, longer-term” problems that remain.

“The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal,” Farage wrote on X.

The criminologists who study riots say these are likely to run their course. But they worry that the stage is set for more unrest — as the agitators have clearly captured the public’s attention.