The first casualties of urban riots are blameless people robbed of their livelihoods, their homes, their peace of mind, even their lives – nothing should come before easing their pain and striving to ensure that such barbarity is never again inflicted. The next casualty, cowering right behind, is the willingness of people in power and authority to get an intellectual grip on why those riots occurred, in order help prevent a repetition.

The starkest examples in recent days have been provided by Conservative Party politicians. Michael Gove’s performance on Newsnight was definitive. Fellow guest Harriet Harman’s mild observation that the causes of the riots are “complex” produced a barked tirade of rigid sanctimony – the first refuge of the right in denial. The politician responsible for children’s education presented himself as stoutly opposed to mental reasoning of any kind.

London’s top Tory hasn’t done much better. Boris’s approach has been to denounce what he called “sociological justifications” and indulge in the populist sharp practice at which he excels. His remark on yesterday’s Today programme that the government might reconsider its cuts to police budgets achieved its intended effect, intoxicating a media so addicted to Johnson’s rivalry with David Cameron that, with noble exceptions, it barely mentioned the Mayor’s own, continuing, contribution to reducing police numbers in London. It was initially left to journalists with lives outside the Westminster Village to point this out: Adam Bienkov and Martin Hoscik at MayorWatch.

The taboo against clear-eyed, realistic, intelligent diagnoses of a profound and terrifying rupture in London’s social order is so ferocious that any politician attempting it in public is effectively lynched. Ken Livingstone’s first statement about the trouble in Tottenham was explicit in saying “there can be no justification” for the destruction of businesses and homes, but he was dangled from the Daily Mail’s lamp post anyway for, albeit rather clumsily, daring to argue that government economic policy had helped create conditions for unrest. On no account must social context be permitted to dilute the orgy of self-gratifying condemnation, it appears. The irony is that Ken’s statement also called for a halt to police budget reductions, beating Boris to the punch by days.

It’s always entertaining to watch London Tories bashing Ken on crime: he’s every bit as pro police, pro stop-and-search and pro bobbies-on-the-beat as the are – every bit as Tory, in most ways. The big difference between Ken and Boris is that Ken is prepared to put council tax payers’ money where his mouth is, whereas Boris is not. Tories are frantically accusing Ken of exploiting the riots for political purposes. They are, of course, exactly right, but they don’t seem to mind their boy doing it too. Ken, meanwhile, has now joined the Labour mainstream in the inane “police numbers” bidding war, praising Margaret Thatcher in the process. This is, unless I’m very much mistaken, a little bid to outflank Boris on the right. At this rate he’ll have Brian Coleman crossing the floor.

Journalists too are menaced by Tory-led anti-thought policing, and the anxiety that their audiences will join in. On Tuesday morning I had the novel experience of first eavesdropping on then later hearing the broadcast of a radio interview. BBC 5 Live’s Aasmah Mir was one of several correspondents on central Hackney’s Clarence Road, scene of burning and looting the night before.

Her piece was first-rate, dead straight, street-level reporting, gathering the reactions of people from the Pembury estate to the destruction on their own doorsteps. Nearly as striking was her live preamble to it, in which she felt obliged to gently, almost apologetically break the news that almost no-one she had met had condemned the riots outright but talked as well about the frustrations of even law-abiding local youths. Warning: the following item contains truth; some listeners might find this enraging.

Our leaders could do much worse than pay close attention to what concerned, responsible members of riot-hit communities are saying. Some of my Hackney neighbours have joined the fearful clamour for tear gas and troops, but others know the counter-productive risks of the “tough” approach to enforcing the law, as they told Boris himself as recently as the end of May. Does any politician in this city really believe that the ruthless, pitiless criminal subcultures that have emerged so brazenly from the capital’s shadows can simply be “robustly” policed out of existence? How’s the “war on drugs” going, by the way?

My sense is that Boris Johnson did himself a bit of good with his Today interview this morning. His law-and-order line will play well with his London suburban core vote and others – some Hackney neighbours have told me they crave the military, tear gas and rubber bullets to deal with rioters. His titbit suggestion that the government looks again at cuts to police budgets is already being ravenously swallowed by a media that fails to grasp that Boris-biffs-Dave stories are to the political advantage of both men – so much so that one commentator with good Tory connections has claimed that they are practically staged.

And Boris needs to claw back all the credibility he can. A poll published today by YouGov finds that 54% of respondents think Boris has handled the riots situation badly – and YouGov tells me that almost all those responses were received before that uncomfortably heckled appearance at Clapham Junction yesterday, for which Boris has received an almost universally bad press.

But all of this makes me despair. Effective and properly resourced policing is, of course, an essential part of any approach to tackling criminality in communities, but the policing issue that Boris and other politicians, Ken Livingstone included, should really be addressing is not the number of police in London – a facile and highly-spun debate over a couple of thousand either way – but how productively police resources have been used in recent years.

I closely witnessed the incident that marked the start of the first wave of trouble in Hackney on Monday, opposite the railway station. A large group of riot police emerged from a trio of vans and detained two men, whom they interrogated in front of a diverse crowd of around a hundred. When one of the men was released a cheer went up, and the situation deteriorated from there. This brought to mind a public meeting held in May, a five-minute walk from Monday’s riot scenes, addressed by Boris, his policing deputy Kit Malthouse and others.

The audience predominantly comprised concerned black adults – responsible local people. They expressed a range of views. Some said there weren’t enough police on the streets, and doubted Boris’s (questionable) assertion that their numbers were increasing. Others drew attention to the high rates of exclusion of black children from schools and the lack of corrective supervision for them afterwards. But the biggest cheer of the night was for the comments of a local churchman, Wayne Malcolm. Here’s what he said:

There appears to be a disconnect between people’s actual experience of the police on the street and what the statistics say…[there] is a very real sentiment as far as many young people I’ve worked with, as far as my own children [are concerned], a perception that the police are not on their side – on the side of law-abiding people – that they are thuggish, that they are pretty much another gang, and that they are abusing their power of stop-and-search, and they’re treating people and speaking to people with such lack of dignity or respect that…

At this point his words were drowned out by clapping. He resumed:

We on the [youth] mentoring side are saying, ‘You are someone, you can be someone, you can become something,’ and their experience with the authorities is ‘You are nothing, you are in the way.’ The perception is real, and it really has to be managed.

More applause. Both Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are supporters of stop-and-search, the former conspicuously so. Yet it has long been far from clear that the tactic has had any benefit in terms of reducing knife and other violent crime against young people, which have risen under Boris. At the same time it is regarded by mature and intelligent adults to have had a very bad influence on the relationship between young Londoners and the police. The post-riot debate should not fixate on the quantity of police resources, but the effectiveness – or disastrous lack of it – with which they have used.

Update, 11:25 As Adam Bienkov and MayorWatch point out, Boris’s suggestion that cuts in police budgets might be reversed looks a bit iffy in view of his record.

Sir Paul Stephenson’s “goodnight all” statement has swivelled the media lens David Cameron’s way so completely that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities with regard to the Metropolitan Police are in danger of being forgotten. The Today programme this morning seemed far more interested in the tiresome Westminster Village game of finding Dave-Boris splits than whether Mayor Johnson should have made it his business to ensure the Met got to grips with the phone hacking issue.

Boris-friendly newspapers have eagerly conveyed details of his (surely genuine) annoyance with Sir Paul over not being informed about the Met’s employment of former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis, but asked few questions about his decidedly hands-off attitude to the hacking issue, which has echoed the Met’s throughout. Last night he was allowed to play the saddened statesman over the commissioner’s departure, unencumbered by inquiries about his dismissal of the hacking allegations as “codswallop” last September.

It isn’t good enough for Boris to simply note with regret the “crap” past decisions of the Met and stealthily distance himself from them. He is a Mayor who came to power promising to take “personal responsibility” for policing, placed himself in the chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority and wasted little time in forcing Sir Paul’s predecessor to resign. The immediate intensification of the anti-street crime initiative Operation Blunt 2 showed a service responding to mayoral demands. But while Boris has been prepared to muscle the Met when it suits him, he has been equally quick to duck out of sight when it doesn’t.

His resounding silence in the wake of widespread concern about the policing of the G20 demonstrations in 2009 – Sir Paul’s first big public test – was in sharp contrast to his incautious mockery of demonstrators in his Telegraph column preceding it. His “codswallop” dismissal was not the only example of his apparent determination to make light of the hacking allegations and hope they would go away. Perhaps he really believed they weren’t important at the time. But the facts are that Boris has long had plenty of motive for keeping the lid on the hacking can of worms.

His eagerness to maintain good relations with News International is clear from his acceptance of six free meals from various members of its top brass since becoming Mayor. These have included “dinner for two” in Mayfair with Rebekah Brooks (Rebekah Wade as she was then), a lunch with James Murdoch and a dinner with Rupert Murdoch. Only last month he briefed the NI board about the forthcoming Olympics in the company of Games organiser Sebastian Coe (the latter has come to the Guardian office to talk about the Games, but didn’t bring the Mayor with him).

As I wrote at Cif on Saturday (before Sir Paul resigned), Boris has long had a second motive for playing the hacking allegations down. He is, of course, himself a phone-hacking victim. Questioned by Labour London Assembly members last Wednesday he made plain his long-standing reluctance to assist in any prosecution that might entail details about his private life being once more dragged into the limelight. That reluctance is understandable, but still forms part of the context that make Boris’s hands-off approach to the hacking scandal and his support for the Met’s disinclination to re-investigate last year subjects that demand scrutiny.