I may be in a minority but i often am, i enjoy watching the traffic cops, interceptors etc and i find it more disturbing that the cars are single crewed and this policeman is supposed to stop cars in the night, having no idea what he will face.
Arming cops is a reactive answer to a problem which should be caught with proactive policing, more police on the ground, CCTV is great but when the nearest officer to a violent incident is single crewed and maybe 4 miles away, we are giving offenders a head start.
Giving all officers Tazers is something i would consider.
Agreed, one of the major problems is the shortage of police officers. The government has got rid of 21,000 of them in the last 9 years, despite the fact that the police now involve themselves in a lot of things that never used to fall under their remit, stretching resources even further.
And even if we believe political claims to bring the police back up to strength, it's worrying that just last week the government awarded a £300m contract to Babcock International Group Plc. Their role will be to provide basic training to police officers. Even if this happens, and even if Babcock do the job well, this looks very much like the thin end of the privatisation wedge to me . . .
Single crewed police cars place police officers in even greater danger, it's theoretically a good use of resources because it means that they can keep the same number of cars on the road with just half the number of officers, but apart from the increased personal risk, it isn't easy to both look around and drive at the same time. When police officers are in danger they can usually get help extremely quickly, simply by pressing and holding their orange "chicken button" but they are still expected to take grave risks.
But would guns really help, even if the majority of our existing officers were prepared to have them?
Guns (or at least the handguns that would inevitably be issued) are far from accurate and require a very high level of training to make them even useful. The Glock 17 has the advantage of holding 17 rounds, it's light in weight and very cheap, but it suffers badly from recoil, so shots fired in quick succession are very likely to miss. They're OK on a range, with nobody shooting back and plenty of time, the problems arise when they need to be used in an emergency. Personally I've never had to shoot at a target that wants to kill me, but I have had to shoot animals that have been writing in agony, and that's difficult to do quickly. The effective reasonably accurate operating range of a handgun is only about 5m, what the media like to call "point blank" although point blanc actually means something very different.
I would think basic training and proper training would be one and the same.
I can't agree with this. The specialist police firearms units are largely trained in police procedures and containment of threat. They don't get a lot of actual practice and their standard falls way below that of both military and enthusiast civilian training. I don't claim to have anything special in the way of firearms competence, but even I fire around 200 rounds each year from my rifles, way more than the police, plus around 10,000 shotgun cartridges. That's what's needed for accurate shooting that reduces the risk of civilian casualties.
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