The BBC mentioned a small section of something I said to one of their reporters on the subject of more armed police in the UK. I am somewhat bemused to find myself nominated by the Beeb as a spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance, a worthy organization for sure but although I am a member, I do not speak on behalf of it.
The broader sense of my remarks to the journalist was not that I oppose the notion of armed police per se but that I supported the right of everyone to be armed. However my reservation regarding more plod with guns in the UK was that the shooting of that hapless Brazilian demonstrated that when they use force in error, far from a policy of transparency and accountability, all we will get is lies and fabricated accounts of what occured. As a result, the fact the institution which fosters and protects these liars deserves neither our support nor more guns as they clearly cannot be trusted with the ones they have.
Moreover the notion of ‘what has gone wrong with society’ was referring to the idea that does not seem reasonable to leave fixing societies ills to the very people and institutions which are most responsible for those ills… i.e. the regulatory state, and that includes its armed officers.
Perry de Havilland writes:
“… they clearly cannot be trusted with the ones they have.”
Well said! That is precisely the point.
As ever in this benighted country, when something goes wrong (in this case the maintenance of law and order) the cry seems to go up: “This isnt working! We must do more of it!”
My son in law was shot by a policeman in Vancouver when they were sent to a report of a domestic disturbance, however the policeman that did the shooting, 3 rounds of hollowpoint at point blank range, was an immigrant English policeman. I suspect he was gun happy and was just real happy to get the shots off. How do police in England handle domestic disputes, I bet they don’t go in with guns drawn ready to fire.
Fortunately my son in law survived thanks to a magnificent trauma surgeon trained in Los Angeles. The police inquiry is not yet complete and we are waiting to se it.
I remember..(God, there he goes again)…when policemen, except for ‘Sydney Street’ occasions, were unarmed and happy with the idea….then, it simply wasn’t necessary. Any private individual could own firearms as long as they were registered which is reasonable in any civilized society composed of mainly good guys. Gun crime was almost unheard of. Bad guys have always been able to lay hands on shooters so what’s new there.
That gun crime is now the order of the day begs a question: What, in the intervening years, has been the radical change? As mentioned, guns have always been available to the police should they need them. As mentioned, baddies can always get guns…and do.
Dear readers, what on earth could be the answer?
( I hope nobody is crass enough to bring up Dunblaine.)
I have been informed that I might be smitten….I am agog!
Tranio: Sorry about your son-in-law. I don’t think that, in the Septic Isle, the police tend to ‘do’ domestics. It usually involves a battered woman whose fault it was anyway & in any case they’ve got better things to do like protecting Islamist marchers who certainly do ‘do’ domestics.
I remain smitten…I know not why. I am a guest here by grace & favo(u)r………but I didn’t say ‘knickers’.
Editor’s note: your earlier comment got moderated, it tends to happen to lengthy comments. You may find it hard to believe but the editors do have a life beyond Samizdata (really!) so sometimes it takes a while for someone to check for comments which are being held for approval.
Hmmm. I suspect this isn’t smart. I’ll probably regret it. We may all regret it.
Permanent Expat: What are you on about?
First, apologies to the Editor.
Second, CFM, see the posting above yours….or are you referring to my 02:01 comment?
In the referenced BBC report, it states UK police fired 18 shots in 2005. Elsewhere, it is reported that 8 of them were into Jean Charles de Menezes, ie at least 44% were fired in error.
While one year does not make a total case, it seems excellent news that the police fire so few shots. Anything that encourages them to fire more, such as the deployment of more armed officers, does not sound like the best of ideas.
Best regards
I remember..(God, there he goes again)…when policemen, except for ‘Sydney Street’ occasions, were unarmed and happy with the idea….then, it simply wasn’t necessary.
Not perhaps true, if you were to use the same conception of necessity that is applied by the authorities today. It was however a decision of principle. Peel’s officers were armed only with sticks for normal purposes – at a time when there was a great deal of street violence – precisely to avoid their becoming a separate occupying power of the state able to kill without responsibility and imposing a political will:
The Messrs Blairs’ approach amounts to the ‘bigger bully’ theory of policing, viz –
There are surprising numbers of Peelite police around, given 20 years of drift towards these new principles. But no doubt they’ll be purged eventually.
Actually, UK police now spend much of their time dealing with domestics, because they are required record a crime, even when neither party accuses the other of doing anything. This was brought in because women are frequently afraid to press charges against their partners.
The result, however, is that every shouting match phoned in by the neighbours, and every drunken slap on the high street consumes huge quantities of police time. Hey ho.
Guy Herbert: Thank you for the specifics….I was generalizing; dangerous, I know. Although having ratched up a few years, I don’t go back to Peel’s time but am sure that you’re right that officers still exist whose methods & conduct could be construed as Peelite. That they are few is a pity. When I said ‘unarmed’ I was talking about shooters, not truncheons. I particularly like the seventh point in your first list.
Guy wrote: “* The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it”
And permanent expat praises him for it.
So do I.
However, I think the accolade should belong to (or blame be laid at the door of) the whole of the criminal justice system.
My argument for this is that relating to deterrence.
Would be criminals who are deterred do not offend.
Deterrence is affected by two things in particular:
(i) Chance of being caught (which is down to the police);
(ii) Severity of punishment (which is down to the courts and prison service).
In the ‘wet’ approach to ‘ii’, not enough punishment is delivered, thereby weakening the overall effect, leading to more crime, which leads to overloading of the police doing ‘i’, which leads to not enough deterrence being delivered, and round and round.
Having got into this mess, it is going to be very expensive to get out of it. The most effective measure, IMHO, is in the short term to markedly increase ‘ii’. Bang them up for longer; building more prisons as necessary (though they might be required for only a decade or so). Such an approach is guaranteed to have positive effect; more through deterrence than keeping the bad guys away from the public. Any measures on improving police efficiency are, though desirable, less guanateed in effect on deterrence; hence they are secondary measures to improve the situation.
Apologies to Perry for continuing the hijacking, somewhat, of his orignal posting.
Best regards
Apart from PC (I don’t mean coppers) madness & concurrent moral decline, Nigel Sedgwick is correct in identifying the ‘wet’ judiciary as the arch-culprit. But it, too, has been & continues to be subject to PC & moral decline. A vicious circle. We have laws which are not obeyed & judges who aren’t prepared to uphold them. I personally do not see much separation of judiciary from government. Am I alone in this perception? An incompetent (lousy) legislature guarantees a like judiciary.
I’m grateful to permanent expat for such support as his has given for my argument. However, my accusation of ‘wetness’ was at the lack of adequate punishment rather than the more detailed allocation of blame for said failing.
Personally, I don’t have a clear view of the allocation of blame for lack of punishment of criminals. It seems a disparate blame, perhaps also spread through society as well as the different wings of the state. However, …
Currently, full prisons and constraints on the judiciary concerning sentencing do seem to be an issue making the situation worse. It may be that, in the past, other issues such as those mentioned by permanent expat lead to worsening of the situation. Also, parliament and the executive together have made many more criminal laws. This itseslf worsens the situation, by diluting the available resources for law enforcement away from the more important criminal activities that have been unchanged over many years (and millennia in some cases).
Finally, if lack of deterrence is a major cause of the current problem of criminal activity, and there is a positive feedback, then I would like to repeat my argument that the best way out of this feedback loop is longer prison sentences for serious crime. This is, IMHO, more for deterrence than it is for keeping the bad guys/gaps off the streets.
Best regards
I understand that imprisonment was always (& anywhere) meant to be a punishment & deterrent. The question is: Is it? I am singularly unqualified to express an opinion but, from what I have read in recent years, the ‘system’ is riddled with PC, rights, colo(u)r TV, readily available drugs & general laissez-faire.
If this is really the case it is a complete & very expensive waste of time. I am told that the annual cost per person exceeds that of Eton……which, I gather, is a tad more punishing.
My impression is that before the Second War the populace in Britain was pretty heavily armed. Maybe that’s why police didn’t need guns. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, regularly carried a revolver, as did Watson. The disarming of the law-abiding population gave a tremendous advantage to the armed criminal.
Robert Speirs: Absolutely correct. See my comment at 02:01 AM today.
As Holmes once said to Watson, “Always carry a revolver when east of Whitechapel after-dark”. I used to live in Stepney and I thoroughly concur with such advice.
The rise in gun-crime (I also used to live in Nottingham – the EUs “shooting capital”) is probably caused by a number of things. I would posit that the catalyst though is an influx of foreign criminals such as Yardies and Turkish heroin gangs for whom shooters are de-rigeur. This has considerably upped the ante for our home-grown scrotes. Add the fact that a 9mm pistol is as cheap to manufacture as an MP3 player and has much more street-cred and the result is punks wandering the streets armed to the teeth.
Personally, I’m more scared of knives. People are more likely to actually use one, rather than just threaten with one.
For our non-Yankee friends, Radley Balko’s blog is the best place to keep up with police state developments in America. Balko runs a “Militarizing Mayberry” series about how small-town (~10k) police forces are arming themselves like an occupying force, often with federal subsidy.
Are they still looking for people on Sark? Guernsey?
– Josh
I get a D- for my HTML.
– Josh
Well the police certainly did have guns then and there really wasn’t that much of a difference in crime levels (taken in proportion to population levels), just that in modern times there is more extensive categorisation of offences and better crime statistics maintained. Despite capital punishment for homicide the murder average stayed constant at around 7.9 m/mp (murders per million of population) until the late 1940’s when the figure started to drop, bottoming out at 6.2 m/mp in the early 1970’s and thereafter increasing to more than double to the latest recorded figures in 2002 of 15.1 m/mp. Firearms in those days were generally limited to revolvers and the Lee Enfield .303 so it would probably be hard to find an officer between the 1920’s and the 1950’s who did NOT have extensive experience and training with either of those weapons. Certainly I don’t think that the population then was heavily armed at all, beyond the occasional shotgun or (legal) pistol; people could trust the police to protect and serve them and could certainly trust the courts to see that dispensed justice served the victim and certainly not the perpetrator.
It is however quite fascinating to observe that crime levels under Labour governments, from MacDonald onwards, have actually increased, albeit moderately, and then significantly drop once the Conservatives are back in power.
In the referenced BBC report, it states UK police fired 18 shots in 2005. Elsewhere, it is reported that 8 of them were into Jean Charles de Menezes, ie at least 44% were fired in error.
Surely that is only the number of times they actually hit who they were aiming at?
Permanent Expat:
Ah, THAT kind of smitten. Thought perhaps we’d be regaled with a tale of your being dragged off by a beautiful maiden and . . .
Your 2:01 post: Quite so.
CFM: Chance would be a fine thing………….
Guy wrote: “* The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it”
I wish I had. It is Robert Peel, slightly paraphrased.
“My impression is that before the Second War the populace in Britain was pretty heavily armed.”
Not really. While many (especially the gentry) owned shotguns and such for hunting, pre-WWII Britain was hopelessly unarmed.
When the Nazis were about to invade Britain, Churchill’s government pleaded with the United States to send rifles over so that the populace could be armed against invasion.
As the U.S. was itself busy rearming and building up its armed forces (after years of neglect), we were unable to help — at least, at a governmental level.
So Americans donated their rifles to the cause, lending their private firearms to Britain — some even getting their names and addresses engraved on the stocks, to make return easier. The rifles were sent to Britain, and distributed to the people, with a register kept as to who had received what, so that the guns could eventually be returned.
Well, the Nazis didn’t invade, and the war ended.
Whereupon the socialist government of Clement Attlee went round and confiscated all those American rifles from the British people (using the registration documents to locate them).
Then the guns were loaded onto ships, but not returned to their American owners. The guns were simply dumped overboard in the middle of the Atlantic, and many precious family heirlooms, donated in the spirit of utmost charity, disappeared forever.
The story still resonates with Americans.
Atlee was the beginning of the rot…and that’s why the Isle is Septic & not Sceptered any more. Weep!
The police should all be armed. Its gods will