Don't Mention the 'G' Word

The Met doesn't like talking about Guns, but does it have a choice?

Officer Safety Training - too infrequent and inconsistent?

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There was recently another tragic incident in London involving edged weapons. A teenager was murdered and several adults seriously injured, including two police officers who attempted to arrest a suspect armed with a sword. One nearly lost her hand. My thoughts go out to all concerned, especially the parents of Daniel Anjorin.

The suspect was finally arrested by local response officers armed with batons, incapacitant spray and (crucially) taser. You may have seen the video from a door-bell camera capturing the arrest. They were incredibly brave.

Inevitably, social media lit up with discussions about police use of force and whether (yet again) it was time to routinely issue UK police with firearms. Yes, this most ancient of chestnuts. However, I think the discussion’s changed over the years, not least due to the ubiquity of video cameras; once we see something for ourselves, it’s very different from a verbal account. Watching that young officer’s face as she advanced on a sword-armed suspect, taser ready, was one of those occasions where a picture really did paint a thousand words.

As usual, commentators ranged from the knowledgeable and experienced, to the curious, to the usual bloviating no-nothings. The Centrist Dad-types chimed in too, with the usual platitudes and macro-solutions (well, if we changed ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ in society, it would be a less violent place and this wouldn’t happen). Quick message; last Tuesday, ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ weren’t in place, never were and quite probably won’t be anytime soon. So either join the police, volunteer as a special constable or STFU. You aren’t expected to confront the Angry Man, so why not listen to those who have?

Hurty Fact Time: humans - particularly men - are violent for a host of societal, psychological and physiological reasons. Someone has to protect the peaceful majority from those who are compelled, or choose, to be violent. Few of us like it, but that’s the way it’s been since cavemen discovered they could smash each other’s skulls in with a rock.

So how do we train and prepare those we depend upon to use violence on our behalf (given our limited rights concerning self-defence)? This article isn’t specifically about the Hainault incident, but rather the difficult questions it raises for an unarmed police service. A service still in thrall to the polite fiction of ‘Policing by Consent’.

To wit; do UK police services take the likelihood of violence seriously enough? How does police ‘Officer Safety’ really work? Is it fit for purpose? In an era of clown-show IOPC scrutiny over use of force and an increasingly aggressive society, where are we headed next? The general public are woefully inconsistent - one moment they claim to support robust policing, the next they lament police brutality.

Given these ever-shifting sands, will those in charge finally acknowledge the bloody obvious truth that first responders - the poor bloody infantry of policing - require an upgrade in training, equipment and (yes) pay? This, incidentally, is possibly the only way to avoid the eventual arming of our police service.

And do senior officers, the Home Office and government really care? I don’t think they do. This is partly due to them taking our policing model for granted - that is to say complacency. Some of it’s down to denial about the scale of the changes required. No, they don’t care. Not really. ‘Hold on Dom,’ I hear some of you say, ‘how can you possibly know that?’

Well, because if they cared, things would change. QED.

Armed Response Vehicles - should they become a devolved resource?

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I recently spoke with a Met response officer. We ended up comparing our experiences of police ‘Officer Safety Training’ (OST). Despite her having only five years service, they seemed remarkably similar to mine - despite the fact I joined the Met in the early 90s and retired six years ago. The obvious difference, of course, was Taser (which I never used) on which she’s qualified and approves of immensely.

Mind you, we were talking about refresher training. My initial ‘arrest and restraint’ classes at Hendon felt straight out of the 70s. Police officers, once upon a time, were overwhelmingly recruited from the male working and lower-middle class. More than a few were ex-servicemen. Unsurprisingly, recruits were expected to be handy with their fists. Furthermore, there were no CCTV or camera phones to capture any ‘street justice’, which (like it or not) helped keep local wrong ‘uns in check.

Then concerns about brutality and racism came to the fore. Accordingly, the police began broadening their recruitment pool. This also included formal training in ‘Home Office Approved’ arrest and restraint techniques. The concept of officer safety also evolved in tandem with wider areas of law; litigation by police officers and the Police Federation, as well as developments in Health and Safety legislation (and, of course, the Met’s attitude regarding vicarious liability). It’s a never-ending game of chequers between injured cops, the courts and the Met’s lawyers.

Anyhow, at Hendon I was taught by Physical Training Instructors (PTIs) who were police constables, although many hadn’t worked on the streets for years. Even in the early 90s, the emphasis was on ironing our horrible shorts and PT vests and army gymnasium cosplay (‘with the speed of a thousand gazelles, go!’). The training was rudimentary in scope, but complex in method. Which is to say we were trained in a small number of fairly technical self-defence and restraint techniques. Unless you were using and practicing them frequently, they were of questionable efficacy.

As I’ve written elsewhere, as a clumsy, left-handed young officer of unaggressive disposition, I remember trying to remember my ‘hammer-lock and bar’ on a suspect. Who, by the time I got my act together, had already punched me on the nose. Twice. After that, I will admit, I ‘free-styled’ my way through any physical confrontation.

I’ll say it again - self-defence techniques require training and frequent practice. Police officers, who are busy enough doing their day jobs, don’t receive anywhere near the time required to keep their officer safety skills up-to-date. Violence is something too many managers (who in my day were exempted from officer safety training once they hit chief inspector) think doesn’t happen often enough to justify the effort. Not when there’s so much other training to do.

Which is why OST occasionally felt like a tick-box, arse-covering exercise. Can you put on a pair of handcuffs? Check. Hit a dummy with a baton? Check. Deliver an open-handed strike. Check. Play water pistols with your CS spray? Check. Off you go. See you in four months. Some lessons, usually those tailored to an officer’s specific role, were good. Others were hopelessly generic.

I imagine some senior managers rationalised it thus; ‘most uniform police work nowadays involves hospital guards, paperwork, chasing MISPERS, safeguarding checks and guarding crime scenes, right?’

Until, as we saw in Hainault the other week, it doesn’t.

Then, they reason, ‘well, they can back off and contain the scene until the TSG / dogs / firearms arrive.’

Which is all very well, but the clue in the term first-responders is the word ‘respond’. Sometimes officers don’t get the chance to ‘contain’ (whatever that means), not if they’re going to stop the utter lunatic carrying a katana from hurting anyone else. Which is what the public, realistically or not, expect their police to do. I alluded to this conflicted attitude by Policing PLC, albeit in the context of off-duty arrests, here.

We know what we really expect you to do, but giving you the tools is a bit, er, tricky.

The 1990s saw a significant shift in terms of equipment and officer safety, including the introduction of rigid handcuffs.

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During my probationary period I noticed a sea-change in officer safety equipment and training. I was originally issued with a small wooden truncheon and a pair of Hyatt chain link handcuffs. Oh, and a whistle. Female officers were given an even smaller and more useless truncheon, designed to fit inside their stylish, Met police-issued leatherette handbags (I’m not making this up). That was it. For men, the truncheon was hidden in a special concealed pocket of your uniform trousers, so as not to alarm the general public. There was no body armour. Given the body-armoured ‘paramilitary dustman’ look of modern officers, it sounds terribly quaint, doesn’t it?

After a series of violent incidents, including the murder of Pc Patrick Dunne in 1993, UK police forces began to modernise. By the late 90s, officers had access to long batons or friction-lock ‘Asps’, speed-cuffs, body armour and CS spray.

Then, when another police officer was murdered or seriously injured, the debate about arming would begin all over again. Yet we all knew, really, the powers-that-be would never contemplate arming. How many jaded canteen conversations have I heard, ones where coppers pondered the acceptable death rate before they finally offered us guns?

To be fair, most officers didn’t want to be armed. What they did want, though, was (a) faster armed support (armed response vehicles were introduced by the Met in the mid-1990s) and (b) proper sentencing for violent criminals. The fact of the matter is thousands of people are wandering British streets who shouldn’t be. As far as I’m concerned the CPS, parole boards, probation services and judiciary all have blood on their hands too.

As for the police, it would be unfair to criticise the instructors who deliver continuous training. Most of them (well, the ones I encountered) were decent, knowledgeable and supportive. The same couldn’t be said of their puzzle palace bosses, fond of issuing new diktats after every incident involving an injured officer or death after police contact. This was, if I’m being charitable, well-intended. It also occasionally reeked of arse-covering. The organisation saying, ‘look we trained them! It’s not our fault they fucked up.’

I remember one OST class after a spate of high-profile firearms incidents involving unarmed officers. I attended training with a mixed bag of coppers from other units, including a sergeant who’d recently transferred from the Territorial Support Group. TSG officers, who deliver what I call ‘kinetic policing services’, usually complete their OST training as a team. If you were in an office job or a detective or whatever, you entered your name into the computer and booked a session. You’d never get the date or location you wanted, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the recent shootings were mentioned. The puzzle palace, our instructor said, was trialling a new technique for disarming someone carrying a gun. A demonstration followed. I’ll simply say (as a fan of martial arts movies) it looked like serious Chuck Norris shit. Dear reader, I am manifestly not Chuck Norris. Yes, I once had a gun pointed at me. I’ll happily admit to hitting the deck, rolling into cover and having it on my toes. As I’m alive to write this article, I would argue my tactic was effective.

After we tried the exercise a couple of times, blue rubber Glocks flying everywhere, the ex-TSG sergeant shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, a pained expression on his face. ‘This is bullshit. You should stop teaching this technique, before someone gets killed.’

‘Sorry?’ asked the instructor (who was only teaching what he was ordered to teach, although I suspected he knew it was bollocks too).

The TSG sergeant, it transpired, was himself an ex-OST instructor and a former military guy - he was more Chuck Norris than anyone else in the room. He explained that unless you were practising this stuff daily, at a much higher level of fitness than the average copper, it would all end in tears. ‘The Job needs to shit or get off the pot,’ he said. ‘Either arm us or tell us to run away. Anything else is dishonest and dangerous.’ That, by the way, is what they call in the trade ‘moral courage’, as he could easily have been reported for disrupting mandatory training.

Verily, we all looked unto the sergeant and nodded sagely, for he spoketh much wisdom. The instructor cleared his throat. ‘Thanks for your input, Sarge. Right, shall we do something else?’

Police officers, even on response teams, spend more time doing paperwork than fighting - this invariably informs organisational attitudes to training and resources.

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The officer safety conundrum feeds into another polite fiction - that all sworn police officers are the same deployable resource because they carry a warrant card.

They aren’t.

Detectives, intelligence officers, child protection specialists, surveillance operatives, computer forensic examiners, financial investigators and dozens of other flavours of police specialists carry warrant cards and have a power of arrest. However, they aren’t first-responders. If necessary, they can be given uniforms and put into the front line, sure, but in that context they’re more like army reservists. It isn’t what they do day in, day out.

Nonetheless, these officers still contribute to public protection - they also occasionally put themselves at risk of significant personal harm. I’ve discussed this, albeit in the context of how we reward firearms officers, here.

Then there are police units which are unashamedly kinetic, which is to say their role involves the application of force to achieve policing objectives. Firearms is the most obvious example. TSG, dog section and even (in a public order context) mounted branch also provide muscle. However, these are support assets who are most often called upon by who?

That’s right, the poor bloody infantry - Response Officers - who are the first on scene at most serious incidences of violence. Then they wait for support, which could be anywhere. It’s a roll of the dice. Until then? Deal with the sword-wielding maniac and get on with it. It’s a unique role, which carries possibly the most physical risk of any in the police service (apart from surveillance 4/2s of course). In rural areas, you can double or even treble that - officers work single-crewed a long, long way from back-up.

My argument is, and always has been, this; Response is a specialism. It’s an uneven mixture between community ‘bobby’ and kinetic cop, depending on the circumstances. It should be treated, trained and rewarded as such. This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean they should routinely carry firearms. Response officers should absolutely remain part of the local policing ecosystem, not become paramilitaries.

This is the point where I’ll offer a suggestion on a way forward;

1. Response officers should undertake a specialised and enhanced officer safety regime, with a proper training cycle similar to those of firearms teams. All should be taser-qualified. Response vehicles should carry ballistic shields suitable for protection against edged weapons. All officers should undertake advanced first aid training of the sort police protection teams receive (anyone wanting to know why should research London Ambulance Service response times).

2. Response officer training cycles should include increased interoperability with support units such as TSG and firearms. This includes agreed tactics and a realistic approach to what ‘containment’ looks like.

3. Response officers should receive enhanced pay contingent on satisfactory performance and successfully passing all mandatory training. This would increase officer retention and experience in a role many seek to escape from at the earliest opportunity.

4. Here’s the big one, which would send MO19 management into a spin (sorry, not sorry). Some kind of Armed Response Vehicle (ARV) capability should be devolved to Basic Command Unit (BCU) level, along with locally-qualified firearms BRONZE / SILVER command. I’m not going into the technicalities, as (a) it’s a bit spotter-ish and (b) things have changed since I was in the job. However, the premise is simple - every local response team should have an armed officer or officers attached to it. I know, the ARVs sitting around Westminster might have to schlep out to Redbridge and Hillingdon. Diddums.

This might sound simple, but in the feverish, politicised world of the Metropolitan Police (and its empires of specialist units) what I’ve suggested equates to Martin Luther-level heresy. It would also require buy-in from a hopeless left-wing Mayor / ‘PCC’ (you there, at the back, stop laughing) with little interest in policing, let alone robust policing.

Some might (not unreasonably) suggest devolving firearms is a slippery slope to full arming. Yes, it might be. However, I think the opposite. I’m not actually in the ‘arm everyone’ camp. I was a qualified AFO and know its not for everyone. The move to a fully armed service would mean losing thousands of excellent officers who never signed up to carry a gun. What I’m suggesting, therefore, is the opposite of a slippery slope. It’s something that will put off the day we decide to arm all of our police.

My point is simple; what if the local BCU, on that terrible day in Hainault, had a single armed officer onboard a response vehicle? The outcome would probably have been very different. Lives might have been saved. Injuries avoided. Please, persuade me otherwise.

In the meanwhile, this argument will chunter on like a broken record. People will still die. Then something genuinely terrible happens - something so obviously preventable - that our collective hands are forced and we end up giving everyone guns. Then we’ll lose even more officers - the IOPC doesn’t have a great record of treating firearms cops particularly fairly, does it?

I’m still of the view unarmed policing is special and worth conserving. I’m also of the view the public, and the people who protect them, deserve better protection than we currently offer. This is a circle that could be squared, if the will existed.

Which brings me back to my original point - do our senior police managers really care?

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Thanks for reading. My Substack is free because that’s how I roll. However, if you want to support my writing, you can find my Amazon author’s page here. It would be great if you checked it out.

Dom