A man jailed after admitting to rioting is a former teenage thief who burgled a charity providing accommodation for young people.
Declan Geiran, 29, pleaded guilty to violent disorder and arson over unrest in Liverpool city centre on Saturday afternoon.
Geiran was shown in a TikTok video lighting a fire in a parked police van that caused the vehilce to be written off.
The clip showed him at an open window on the driver’s side as he set the seatbelt alight before smoke billowed out.
The rioter, of Kelso Road, Liverpool, was then seen to sit casually on the fountain outside the Walker Art Gallery and take out his phone to film the van, prosecutor Christopher Taylor told Liverpool Crown Court.
He is one of the first people to receive a prison sentence over the nationwide unrest that followed the Southport murders of three young girls. Geiran is now serving a 30-month term.
In 2013, he was jailed for 12 months for ‘pre-planned’ burglaries at properties run by a charity.
Then aged 18, he admitted two charges of burglary and one of theft.
All three offences related to properties owned by the Lily Housing Project, which provides supported accommodation for youngsters, and were captured by CCTV.
Geiran stole a multi-piece ladder in one of the thefts in March of that year, before returning a couple of weeks later to take an Xbox and television from a communal area as well as cash and two laptops from an office.
The burglar and an accomplice also stole cash from another property in the early hours of the same morning during the later offence.
He had used his knowledge of the properties’ layout as he lived at the addresses previously.
At the time, Judge Roger Jarvis said one of the ‘particularly concerning features’ of the crimes was that they affected a charity which was ‘doing its best to help all sorts of people’.
He told Geiran: ‘I’m quite clear that you targeted and pre-planned these burglaries.’
Geiran’s latest sentence is among the first cases stemming from the disorder to be fast-tracked to the crown courts after the prime minister promised quick punishment for the culprits.
He had been quickly tracked via CCTV and arrested a short time after setting the police van alight in William Brown Street, the hearing was told.
When interviewed by police, Geiran said he had attended a protest at Liverpool’s Pier Head waterfront alone to ‘show his support’ for the families of the murdered girls.
Mr Taylor told the court: ‘He heard shouts of “burn the van, burn the van” and stated he felt under pressure.
‘He didn’t believe his actions had caused the damage.’
Brendan Carville, defending, told the court that his client had emotionally unstable personality disorder and was ‘not a clever man’.
He added: ‘He doesn’t understand what far right and far left means. He simply went along with the flow.’
Geiran had 13 previous convictions for 18 offences between 2011 and this year with a ‘varied record’ involving criminal damage, burglary and supplying Class A and Class B drugs, together with a number of failures to follow court orders, the court was told.
Judge Andrew Menary KC said a community order was imposed last September after the defendant sent a threatening communication.
The judge said: ‘In fact, this is illuminating. Sending messages to a woman threatening to “get” her and her children, and pretending you were travelling to the south of England in order to harm her.
‘That’s the sort of brave and principled man you are. You did very little to comply with any of those community order requirements.’
The judge noted that ‘unbelievably’ he had told police he went to Pier Head in support of the bereaved families.
Geiran was sentenced to 28 months in jail for violent disorder, handed a 12-month concurrent term for arson and given a consecutive two-month prison sentence for breaching his community order.
Speaking after the hearing, Assistant Chief Constable Paul White of Merseyside Police said: ‘In this case and others, officers have acted swiftly to detain an offender, the Crown Prosecution Service have rapidly approved charges and the courts have moved very quickly to secure a sentencing.
‘Just four days after trying to burn a police van, Geiran has been driven in the back of a prison van to serve a 30-month term in jail.
‘The message is clear: if you get involved in disorder, don’t count on ending the week at home with your family.’
More than 428 people have been arrested since the nationwide disorder began in Southport on July 30.
The disturbances spread in the aftermath of the murders of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, with anti-immigration activists targeting mosques and asylum accommodation.
The prime minister has described the unrest as ‘far-right thuggery’ and promised that those involved will ‘face the full force of the law’.
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