[shots, perhaps because he was in a car…]

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shots, perhaps because he was in a car and therefore a more difficult farget. Instead he has a so far unexplained fracture of the skull.

The US police have not won themselves a reputation for exemplary restraint in the use of force. What conclusion are we to draw about the behaviour of the British armed police?

Shooting to kill is not the act of one attempting "to defend human life', ' but of the assassin.. or executioner.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Kenneth Newman, in a feeble attempt to somehow, anyhow, place the Kensington shooting in a more favourable light, drew attention to the many. occasions on which unarmed police have "tackled armed suspects' and successfully arrested them.

Far from getting the Metropolitan Police off the hook, this only underlines the fact that, in the overwhelming majority of cases in which police confront these supposedly dangerous suspects, they do not meet any serious resistance.

At the end of the "60s the News of the World devoted its front page to a story which it obviously considered alarming and sensational: The story was... that the Glasgow police were considering the purchase of half a dozen US riot-guns (short-barrelled repeating shotguns which, at close range, are devastating).

The article quoted a Metropolitan Police spokesman's words, to the effect 'Heaven forbid that we should ever consider acquiring a weapon of this kind? In .1975, during the Balcombe St. siege, a policeman appeared on the balcony adjacent to the besieged flat. He was armed with a riot gun.

It was also at Balcombe St. that men of DIl - Scotland Yard's elite unit which has no duties except training in, and the use of firearms - made their first open appearance, wearing military berets and flak jackets.

They were at first assumed, by television viewers, and by the media, to be members of the Army, called in to support the police. The revelation that they were, in fact, members of the Metropolitan Police, was the first the public knew of the creation of a purely military unit within the London force.

It is clear that the transformation in State policy on the use of armed force by, the police took place in the period 1969-75. During that period forces throughout the country acquired arsenals which include submachine guns, riot-guns, and highvelocity automatic rifles.

The Diplomatic Protection Group was created, the London SPG expanded, and specialist firearms units set up within many other Constabularies. This was combined with a huge increase in the percentage of 'ordinary' police trained to use guns. James Jardine, Secretary of the Police rederation, acknowledges that, while in the mid-'60s the police were 'virtually an unarmed service', the changes of the 19/0S mean that 'we can no longer pretend that ours is a totally unarmed service.' Why did these changes take place?

The official answer for public consumption is that the changes in question were a response to the dramatic increase in 'armed crime' over the last fifteen years or so, and particularly to the increase in 'armed terrorist activity' over the same period. But this explanation makes little sense, when the facts are examined. i As we have seen, shootings are, in general, more likely to occur where the 'armed criminal' is confronted by armed than by unarmed police. So, if the massive arming of the police is meant to prevent shooting, this is an irrational and mistaken policy.

In fact, this was well understood by past generations of British police, who recognised that they were safer by virtue of being unarmed. A story which illustrates their then characteristic attitude is this ... In 1939 the IRA carried out an extensive bombing campaign in' Britain. Eventually, Scotland Yard arrested a group of men in connection with the bombings. The senior officer of the squad instructed to If the transformation of the police from 'virtually an unarmed service' to a heavily-armed one began as a response to this incident then it was a response mysteriously delayed by years. To go back much further, the shooting of several policemen in the events leading up to the Siege of Sidney Street' in 1910 did not lead to any dramatic increase in the arming of the police.

This demands a question as to how often 'armed criminals -armed in most cases with dummy guns, or with firearms loaded with blanks or 'reduced' ammunition, and generally offering no resistance - would have been shot dead if they had been unfortunate enough to run into armed police.

And the figures released by Scotland Yard, under pressure following the attack on Stephen Waldorf, show how the chances that the 'armed criminal' - or some 'law-abiding person' - will find themselves suddenly confronted, or shot without warning, by armed police, are continuously increasing.

The Metropolitan Police figures state that, in the first nine months of 1982 they issued guns on 4,346 occasions. Official figures for the year 1970, for the whole of England and Wales were... 1,072 occasions!

Even this comparison does not convey the extent of the increase, for the figures presumably do not include the permanently-armed units - such as Dil, the Diplomatic Protection Group, the Special Patrol Group - which either came into existence or were expanded during the "70s.

The 1982 figure, we have been told, does not include arms issued to the Special Branch (which is not, in practice, under Metropolitan Police control) - a somewhat sinister omission. Neither figure takes account of the issue of guns for 'protection duties, which, as the police admit, are becoming increasingly common.

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Organiser no.127 April Page

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