Police Shooting - Update

And here it comes; no weapon discovered 'so far' in the GMP shooting incident. What will the line be if they find a gun locked in a metal case, in the boot? That, because he didn't raise his hands he was going for a gun, which we now know he had? Really the things we are supposed to take as serious comment these days is beyond parody. In Alice in Wonderland the eponymous character says she is able to believe six impossible things before breakfast. This is a feat routinely achieved by politicians and senior police officers these days and something they think we share with them.

Once again, what really happened, I feel sure, is that poorly trained officers were given guns and sent on a mission. Their weapons, para military garb and aggressive training were combined with a briefing that they should expect to face men 'with weapons'. Now, as the stand-off in the film Crocodile Dundee 2 proved, it is the nature of the weapon that conditions the response.

If you have a man with a knife in your gun sight you do not have to shoot him until he is in a position to actually harm someone. If you have an armed man besieged, you do not shoot him to get it over with, even if it is disrupting traffic in Chelsea.

The tactics and deployment of armed police is, I maintain, flawed psychologically. Worse, I think this is recognised but for some reason it has been decided not to address it. The IPCC assiduously avoid asking difficult questions that would reveal inadequacies in the police use of firearms. Training is conducted in a strange way that seems to assume Britain is awash with guns and anyone is a potential killer.

Children are castigated for playing openly with patently toy guns, because 'it could get them shot'. which is true, but instead of the police seeing the children as at fault we should recognise the danger lies in the faulty thinking of the men with real guns; the police.

The need for more armed police these days is an unfortunate fact. The need to have them trained to the highest standard would have seemed pure common sense. Apparently not.