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Both Liberty and Big Brother Watch demanded that the "headline-grabbing initiative" should be immediately abandoned and warned that lack of police powers was not the problem in last week's urban riots in several cities.
But Theresa May insisted it was necessary to look at giving the police the power to impose immediate curfews covering wide geographical areas in order to tackle the kind of fast-moving disturbances that swept across many of England's major cities last week. May is also keen to extend existing limited powers to impose curfews on individual teenagers aged under 16.
In a hastily arranged speech in London to senior police leaders, the home secretary defended her police reform programme, including the introduction of elected police commissioners, arguing that the events of the last 11 days had made the matter more urgent. She also rejected calls from senior police officers to halt the 20% cut in Whitehall grants to forces over the next four years and insisted that policing was about the effective deployment of officers rather than the number employed.
The home secretary publicly confirmed for the first time that she had rejected pressure to delay the appointment of the new Metropolitan police commissioner to allow a foreign national such as the US retired police chief, Bill Bratton, to apply for the job.
"As long as the Metropolitan police retains its national policing duties, including counter-terrorism, the commissioner will have a unique policing role relating to national security, which is why the post has always been held by a British national," explained May, adding she had no time for the pessimism that a tough crime fighter could not be found among the ranks of British officers.
She also confirmed that the Home Office had made clear to the police there was nothing to stop them using baton rounds or rubber bullets, and that water cannon stationed in Northern Ireland had been made available on 24-hour standby. In reply, the police had made clear that they did not want to use them and instead relied on a surge in officer numbers and more robust tactics.
She said however that the new curfew powers were being considered because existing dispersal orders – which have to be applied for in advance – were no longer adequate to meet the fast-moving nature of modern public disorder.
"Under existing laws, there is no power to impose a general curfew in a particular area, and while curfew conditions can be placed on some offenders as part of their asbo, criminal sentence or bail conditions, there are only limited powers to impose them on somebody under the age of 16. These are the sort of powers we are considering."
The home secretary is already committed to introducing new powers to extend gang injuctions to young people under 16 and strengthen the right of police to remove face coverings from individuals. This will be enacted in the protection of freedoms bill currently going through the legislative process in parliament.
Isabella Sankey, policy director of Liberty, said: "The authorities already have a range of curfew, dispersal and anti-social behaviour powers, but how useful are they in a riot scenario?
"Someone who thinks it is fine to commit violence, theft and criminal damage is hardly going to take notice of a police request to kindly leave the area. And isn't it better to arrest them for their crime than for breaching a curfew notice?" she said.
"Calls for tough new measures are predictable, but it wasn't a lack of police powers that was the problem. As the home secretary said, it was an increase in officer numbers that brought the situation under control."
Daniel Hamilton, director of the libertarian campaign group Big Brother Watch, added: "The home secretary should focus on beefing up police numbers rather than announcing headline-grabbing initiatives like this.
"The very principle of imposing blanket curfews on the British public runs contrary to any concept of liberal and democratic values. This proposal should be abandoned immediately."
Since the 18th-century Riot Act, which carried the death penalty, was repealed in 1973 there have been no powers to impose a curfew on the public in a specific geographical area. However, Labour's 1998 Crime and Disorder Act did introduce the power to impose curfew conditions on individual offenders as a condition of an asbo or as part of a criminal sentence or bail condition.
Laws that gave local authorities and the police the ability to impose a curfew in a designated area on under-16s were actually repealed two years ago. They had never been used.
A range of "dispersal powers" do enable police to order groups of people off the streets in areas where there is a risk of disorder and not return for 24 hours. They can also take home any child under 16 who is out on the streets in a dispersal zone between 9pm and 6am.
There are also other dispersal powers under "alcohol disorder" legislation. These powers require police to apply in advance to a court to declare a designated area. The Home Office recently proposed consolidating them into a single "direction power"
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