OUR POLICE DON’T HAVE THE GUNS TO PROTECT US
Following the Paris massacre, the Home Secretary has been indulging in predictably tough rhetoric about beefing up Britain’s security, border controls and intelligence. But the strong words are hardly matched by the reality. The truth is that our police, especially the armed response units, remain pathetically ill-equipped and inadequate for the job of protecting the public. when an islamist outrage occurs on our soil, as it inevitably will, our forces may have neither the firepower nor the numbers to overwhelm the terrorists quickly before mayhem occurs.
what was striking about Paris was how effectively the well-armed French police went into action, preventing even greater carnage. Yet our officers have nothing like the same strength or weaponry.
incredibly, there are 40 times more armed officers in France than in the UK. nor is the equipment used by the police’s armed response vehicles (ARVs) remotely adequate for the task. As we saw in Paris, the islamist killers generally use the AK47 Kalashnikov, an automatic machine gun that fires 7.62 millimetre rounds at a rate of up to 500 per minute.
British police armaments are no match. The two main rifles carried by the ARVs are the Heckler & Koch g-36C and the Colt AR-15 Defender, both high velocity, capable weapons, but inadequate for combating the newest breed of terrorist, since their calibre is only 5.56 millimetres and they cannot be fired automatically.
So in any head-on-confrontation with a Kalashnikov-wielding fanatic, the police officer is likely to be defeated. Experience from Afghanistan shows that, with this calibre, repeated hits are needed to put the target down – not easy with a single-shot rifle.
The decision not to purchase automatic guns was a typical British compromise, based on a reluctance not to totally abandon our tradition of an unarmed police that dates back to the early 19th century. But an ideal that might have once seemed noble is now putting lives at risk. As a former police officer and soldier who served in iraq, i know that i would not want to go into a warzone armed with the current standard weaponry issued to the police.
Even the Metropolitan units that protect Parliament, Scotland Yard and Downing Street are insufficiently armed. They use Heckler & Koch MP-5 singleshot carbines, ineffectual against Kalashnikovs. it is telling that when a US President visits london, Scotland Yard is told to provide protection with automatic submachine guns.
The issue is compounded by other factors. one is that, in a further decision to downgrade the effectiveness of equipment, many officers are instructed to carry only 15 rounds, even though their magazines can carry 30. Similarly, police body armour is simply not thick enough for these kind of incidents.
Above all, we just do not have enough armed police. As Paris showed, speed is key in any fight against these terrorists. The long-standing British police tactic in firearms situations has been to ‘contain and negotiate’, but this is useless against islamists who are only interested in mass slaughter. They have to be killed as swiftly as possible.
That means we need far greater numbers ready for action. And it is a myth that the terrorists will only strike in urban areas such as Manchester or london; they could just as easily inflict their savagery elsewhere. Scotland has about 280 firearms officers for the entire country. Most counties in England have only four or six armed officers.
The failure to provide an effective armed police reflects wider inadequacies in UK security. For all the talk about crackdowns, our borders remain far too porous, easily penetrable by jihadists.
As the Police Commissioner for Surrey, my patch covers a large section of the M25 and i often reflect on how many illegal immigrants are being stowed away on foreign lorries on our motorway network. But at least it is possible to detect humans in transit through the latest scanning equipment that can pick up heartbeats, body heat and carbon dioxide.
THERE is no such technological capability with smuggled weapons. it is a disturbing fact that one human body takes up the space of ten AK-47s or 70kg of explosive. Contrary to what Theresa May said recently in another of her hollow boasts about Home office effectiveness, there are probably large quantities of imported arms circulating in Britain.
only in August, police seized a haul of guns that had been smuggled across the Channel, including 22 automatic assault rifles, nine Skorpion machine pistols and almost 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
i have been argued for years that our police were under-powered and underprepared for the terror crisis that is looming. Paris should serve as an alarm call. it is no use recruiting 2,000 extra intelligence analysts – as the government announced yesterday – if the frontline force cannot act on the information.
if we are really going to be ready for the fight, we need to stop the police cuts, develop proper response plans with the Army – and above all give armed police the weapons and numbers they need.