When Would You Pull The Trigger?

Thanks to the Inner Temple (easily the best of the four Inns of Court, incidentally, for any aspiring barristers) today I was able to gain a rare insight into how the police train with and use firearms. I visited the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre down in Kent where I was shown the training officers go through and given the chance to step into their shoes by participating in simulated exercises.

Like many people, before the trip I regarded the police as somewhat trigger happy when given the chance to run around with guns. Having read about cases like the de Menezes debacle, and more recently the murky shooting of barrister Mark Saunders, it's fair to say I didn't have a great deal of faith in the police's ability to exercise restraint.

My pre-conceptions were turned on their head by some of the things I learned. Firstly, the police instructors demonstrated the rigorous testing firearms officers have to undertake in order to carry a gun and the equally demanding re-accreditation programme they must pass each year in order to maintain their license. The officers are all required to hit moving targets from large distances with all kinds of weapon, including pistols, and to do so with 80% accuracy. Some of the more specialist guys are required to hit targets in combat situations, being fired at and challenged by difficult circumstances. To think that cops in the US and most other countries carry guns as of right is unbelievable in comparison to the high standards of assessment UK officers are expected to meet. It certainly made me feel a new found sense of confidence in the Met's ability to handle firearms incidents.

Secondly, all the officers are put through a series of simulated firearms scenarios. These will involve situations like high-school shootings and domestic violence. The officers are examined on when they choose to fire and why. You might think this is relatively simple; surely they shoot the bad guys, and only when they are being shot at first? Well having taken part myself, I can assure you it's not so easy. I found that I was the most trigger-happy of the group, prepared to fire whenever I saw a person with a weapon.

Cases like the Stockwell shooting and the Saunders tragedy will be scrutinised by the media and the courts for years after the event. Experts will assess whether the officers made the right decision. Sometimes, inevitably, they will get it wrong. But when you have literally split-seconds to make hugely complicated judgment calls, you do not have the benefit of careful, considered analysis. You have to do what you think is right there and then, often on the basis of incomplete information. After taking part in some fake exercises with no real sense of pressure, I certainly will think twice before criticising the police for making mistakes in these situations.

Take the de Menezes case. Clearly there were serious flaws in the intelligence, which the Met has rightly been chastised for. Can anyone really blame the officers that fired though? They saw a man running into a Tube station days after the worst terrorist attack in recent British history. They had reason to believe that he was a suicide bomber, intent on blowing up the tube. Should they have (a) waited and done nothing; (b) shot him or engaged him in a non-fatal way; or (c) shot him in the head?

Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, option (a) was the right choice. That is easy for us now, six years after the event following a number of investigations. It wasn't so obvious to the officers at the time. They genuinely believed they had to disable a man in order to prevent him killing scores of men, women, and children. Those officers did not have the time to enter into such considered analysis.

If anyone disputes my point of view and believes that firearms officers should always know when to hold their fire, I challenge them to go down to Kent and take part in the simulation. They may just find that they are surprised by how eager they are to pull the trigger.