The point is that once you have a protest and a counter-protest, at that point it's pretty hard to tell who is who anyway.

> “We’ve got criminal damage, violence, weapons offences, football banning orders. These are criminal thugs. Any suggestion that they’re patriots, or they’ve got a cause that they’re protesting about is nonsense, and frankly, most of them are going to be charged with violent disorder and most of them are going to prison for a few years.”

The police interviewed in the article heavily imply that the vast majority of crime is being done apolitically by opportunists - how much they hate or love immigrants is fairly irrelevant - people are showing up just because there is a protest to smash and burn things.