Shooting to Kill?: Policing, Firearms and Armed Response PDF
Preview Shooting to Kill?: Policing, Firearms and Armed Response
Contents Cover Half Title Page Title Page Copyright Preface About the Authors Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Chapter 1: Introduction: The Hardest Job in Policing? Shots Around the World Controversy Changes, Mistakes and Learning in Police Circles Contexts, Command, Frequencies and Victims Structure and Contents Timeline on Police Weapons and Firearms Chapter 2: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and ‘Operation Kratos’ Stockwell, 22 July Briefing and Kratos Chapter 3: Old Myths and Changing Realities Discourses Within and About Policing Tooling Up? Driving out the Dixon Myth New Problems and ‘Exceptional’ Measures Chapter 4: Shootings, Policy Shifts and Competing Pressures Continuing Official Caution Hungerford Tragedy and Farce After Hungerford ‘Event Driven’ or ‘Gun Driven’ Shooting to Kill? Men, Guns and Ammo Replica Arguments and Replica Weapons Chapter 5: Police Politics and Morale Hanging, Shooting and Opinion Polling Click by Click? The ‘Greatest British Defeat since Dunkirk’ New Frontiers and Supply Side Questions The Most Important Decision for the Future of British Policing – Since Last Year War and Order: The New Continuum of Force The Dunblane Primary School Massacre and its Aftermath Chapter 6: Policing in a ‘Gun Culture’? Policing of Guns and Policing with Guns Unpacking the Notion of a ‘Gun Culture’ Guns and Gangs Gang Studies and ‘Cultures of Violence’ Policing and Enforcement Action in ‘Gangland’ Gun Crime Hotspots and ‘Problem-oriented Policing’ Operation Ceasefire Bringing It All Back Home: ‘Gunchester’ Policing of Guns, Policing with Guns Chapter 7: Intelligence Dilemmas, Armed Response Policy and Research Gang Culture and the ‘Trident Model’ From Reactive to Proactive Intelligence-led Dilemmas Research on Recent Police Shootings Chapter 8: Critical Case Studies of Selected Police-involved Shooting Incidents The Shooting of James Ashley in Hastings, 1998 The Shooting of Harry Stanley, 1999 The Shooting of Andrew Kernan, 2001 Caution at Highmoor Cross, 2004 Ambush at Chandler’s Ford, 2007 Chapter 9: Concluding Themes: Losing by Appearing to Win? Bibliography Index Shooting to Kill? This edition first published 2010 © 2010 JohnWiley & Sons Ltd. 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If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Squires, Peter, 1958– Shooting to kill? : policing, firearms and armed response / Peter Squires, Peter Kennison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-77926-2 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-77927-9 (pbk.) 1. Police shootings– Great Britain. 2. Police–Great Britain. 3. Gun control–Great Britain. I. Kennison, Peter. II. Title. HV8195.A2S69 2010 363.2′3–dc22 2009053130 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Preface This book represents the coming together of two sets of interests with two quite different starting points. For Peter Squires the project that turned into this book developed originally as a spin-off from Gun Culture or Gun Control (Squires, 2000b). The original proposal for that book had included a chapter on police use of firearms. The underlying argument to be developed explored a relationship between rising gun crime and an increasing resort to police armed response. In turn, an increasing resort to arms by the police might have important consequences for the nature of policing in the UK. The argument being developed was that a growing proliferation of guns in a society, even if in the hands of the police, might be something inherently problematic. Words written for that original book – rather too many for a single chapter as it turned out – formed the basis for a continuing interest which was pursued as and when time permitted. Unfortunately as an academic project, this was going nowhere fast until Peter Squires met up with Peter Kennison, while working as an external examiner at Middlesex University. At the time, Peter Kennison was already working on a separate article on the Stockwell shooting. Peter Kennison's interest in armed response policy was greatly influenced by his own police background and especially his previous experiences as a trained Metropolitan Police Firearms Officer in the early 1980s. There he had witnessed many of the events, situations and policy changes first hand as they occurred. The developing project, relating gun crime, violence and terrorism and police armed response was animated in part by the fact that many commentators were discussing the seeming ‘inevitability’ of more, and perhaps eventually even ‘routine’, police arming. In that sense this book was written partly against these assumptions and towards maintaining a more ‘routinely’ unarmed ethos – even if the need for a specialist firearm support is now incontrovertible. But the book is more than this as it takes a broad criminological approach covering a wide range of literature and data on relationships between forms of crime, types of violence and weaponry. In addition, the argument tackles the political, media and public debates on these issues; as well as the police community's own response both in its role as a powerful lobbying player in the ongoing debates but also as professionals engaged in what is meant to be a continual learning process about managing and delivering violence. Yet while we are often critical of the ways in which armed response policies may have developed, we are almost never critical of the officers who have to perform what is, arguably, the hardest job in policing, where a decision made in seconds can have repercussions for years. There can be relatively few occupations in which individuals assume the responsibility for such life or death decisions even while facing potentially life-threatening situations. In that sense the book acknowledges something of a tribute to those men and women who assume this responsibility on our behalf. Where we are critical it is chiefly in regard to the processes by which officers arrive in such dangerous and confrontational positions in the first place. As we argue in the book, since 2004, led in part by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the police have adopted a ‘New Public Management’ agenda in which they seek to ‘learn from mistakes’. Our aim with the book has not been to return to a ‘blame
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