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The majority of these officers will not be on duty at any one time. Not all of them will be routinely armed, even when they are on duty. And the vast majority will be trained and used only for the ‘bread and butter’ gun work of dealing with armed criminals. (The sharp fall in gun crime — in 2014, armed police fired lethal weapons only twice in anger — explains the drop in their numbers.)
Only the tiniest fraction of firearms officers are the elite ‘counter-terrorist specialist firearms officers’ — the guys with the G36s, trained for Paris-style hostage situations, marauder attacks and sieges. In London there are currently 130 such officers, about 6 per cent of the Met’s total armed strength. The number in even the largest provincial forces is understood to be minute.
It is those numbers, particularly in the provinces, which the authorities are now racing to increase. But for the foreseeable future, as Simon Chesterman, firearms lead for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, admitted last year, ‘a series of no-notice attacks…would significantly stretch our armed resources and very quickly we would be asking for military support’.
Detachments of the SAS and SBS are on permanent standby at army barracks in London: they, too, may carry out mobile patrols. The army is buying them the Osprey V-22, a combination helicopter-plane that can take off and land like a helicopter but travel at the speed of an aircraft.
It is hard to argue that any of this is unnecessary. What’s more troubling is the stealthy leakage of militarised policing, and military-looking policemen, into everyday operations. Plod’s new favourite weapon is the electric-shocking Taser, described as ‘non-lethal’, though in fact several people have been killed by it.
Thousands of officers all over Britain are now routinely armed with Tasers, including (among others) neighbourhood police in that notorious hotbed of violence, Cambridge. The weapons were used 10,000 times in 2014, an increase of more than 40 per cent in four years, even though there is no evidence whatever that crime, or violence against the police generally, increased in that time. It’s all rather a long way from Dock Green.
Because you read about metropolitan police
Also by Andrew Gilligan
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