I Was A Cop In A Country With No Guns: 6 Startling Truths

So what does it mean to police this neighborhood? Well, you get gangs, first and foremost. Cops love gangs. They give us a nice, easily-defined enemy, and they wear color-coded clothes for your convenience. Good old "us versus them," right? Nonsense. I've taken part in "rowdy buses," where we go about in groups and put hands in their pockets. For the most part, it ends up good-natured.

Once, in the middle of the swine flu crisis, I was full of the cold and sneezed mid-search. The gang member whose pockets I was delving for drugs and weapons giggled to himself and made a swine flu joke. I joined in the chuckles, until one of his compatriots loudly declared he didn't get it (he didn't know that swine and pig are the same thing). That set the entire gang off, and we spent a happy few minutes ripping the piss out of him. Next time I saw them, it was all smiles and jokes.

Ronaldccwong / Wiki Commons
Getting roasted is better than getting shot.

By contrast, a mate once stopped an elderly geezer, mostly to pass the time of day. He asked what the old-timer had in his shopping bag, only to be greeted with the severed head of the old boy's wife of 60 years. That put him off his breakfast.

I hasten to add that it's not that every gang member is a jocular scamp, scrumping apples and whatever tiffin is. [Ed. note: We have no idea what any of those words mean. We assume they only make sense to British people.] I was involved in the 2011 riots, and more than one occasion in Gilpin Square, or a Friday night in Shoreditch, has seen me outnumbered 200 or 300 to one, praying that the uniform and a good, commanding voice will keep them from realizing the odds. I made it, so I guess I did something right.

Raymond Yau/Wiki Commons
Still no guns -- this being the worst possible time to see if you're any good at using one.

One colleague, who has now left the job, was intentionally driven into by a bandit car recently stolen by means of burglary. She made it, but it was one of the more serious injuries, because a car was used, so it required a significant stay in hospital. She was, as is right and proper, visited by senior staff. As it was, she was out of her gourd on morphine, and greeted the commander of the North East Cluster by pulling up her hospital gown and offering to show him her gash. The commander didn't visit Hackney so much after that.

On the other hand, I was hopping the train home one day when a hand like a ham hock landed on my shoulder with a heavily-accented grunt of "DC Clark. Do you remember me?" In my line of work, this does not aid digestion, I assure you. I turned to meet the largest lump of Polish builder you have ever seen. Turned out I had investigated and charged him for assaulting his wife. He had spent three weeks in prison. Honestly thought I was going to die. He shook my hand and thanked me for getting him away from "that hateful bitch." Never have I been so glad I was decent to someone during interview. Oh yeah, we have interviews instead of interrogations. We're not even allowed to lie to the suspect about the evidence we have.

KatarzynaBialasiewicz / iStock
Truth, Justice, and the British Way.

That said, when there's power to be had, there's always going to be someone abusing it. Britain has had its issues with race and racist cops over the years. The '80s and '90s were a time of under-supervised police with a proclivity for violence, and what were known as sus laws. These meant that an officer could arrest if he had the suspicion that a person had committed an offense. A surprisingly high number of those falling under suspicion were black. In the end, the whole nick was demolished and rebuilt to try to rid the area of the stain of abuse of force. This was all long before I joined, but it was never too far from our minds.

West Indian/African Association
America has its own version of sus, sadly called "everyday life."

And when it comes to crowd control and the containment of protests, lawful and otherwise, the Met has a fairly checkered history. Kettling was a perfectly accepted practice of keeping protesters trapped in one place without food, water, toilets, etc., and was an arrow in the public order quiver until the sheer weight of legal challenges made it politically untenable. It was ruled lawful in 2012, but you'll not catch many public order commanders recommending it as a tactical option these days.

And all this, rather than guns and tasers, are the most common tools London police have to persuade a six-foot lump of psychotic anger that what he really wants is to put down the lamp post and sleep it off.

Do we want guns? If given the option of carrying a firearm on patrol, most London cops would refuse emphatically. The last survey I recall had only 22 percent of the rank-and-file wanting a gun [a study in 2006 showed 82 percent of police federation members did not want officers armed], and my personal response was always a firm "No thanks." I spent some time in the Army, so I'm no stranger to guns, but I've simply never needed the option of one, and most of my former colleagues feel the same way.

Kingston Police
All that free time not being spent on a gun range leads to learning way cooler skills, anyway.

Don't get me wrong -- it was a fairly common topic of conversation, and there were always young and new-in-service gung-ho types who thought we needed guns. They are usually the exact kinds of people you don't want to have guns. I remember a grizzled old sweat listening to a young pup talking about how we all should be issued with Glocks at once. His only response was a long draw on a roll-up and the damning proclamation: "Son, no sensible authorized firearms officer would trust you with fucking string, let alone a shooter." So that was that for his dreams of Hot Fuzz.

But for the most part, we'd quite like everyone to have a taser. The only circumstances we could all agree on for routine arming of all constables was rock-solid intelligence of a Mumbai-style atrocity. Mind you, criminals firing on coppers are a vanishing rarity, which probably sways our opinion some. Basically, it comes down to the fact that our conflicts so very rarely involve firearms that we simply don't need them. If I knew every drunk or crackhead I stopped to search had a concealed carry, I would be the first in the queue at the armorers.

Now, I'm 5-foot-8 in good shoes and 14 stone of mostly kebab and Guinness. The nearest unit would take at least eight minutes to get to us, which is rather a long time when someone's eating your face. This is a good time to mention that I was puppy-walking Tom, teaching him how to be a good copper, because he was pretty new. Despite backup being a ways out, retreating was not an option because the subject was so close to the kids. If you can't go big, you have to go subtle, and that was the approach I took. I put my hands in my pocket and sauntered over, calling his name. As soon as he saw the uniforms, he immediately went from zero to 60. The lad, and I could see now he wasn't much over 18, dropped his trousers to the floor and started shouting.

Steve Punter / Wiki Commons
For those keeping score: angry violent man, no pants, children nearby. And still no guns.

The conversation went something like this:

Him: Well go on, fucking search me, then! I know you want to.

Me: Not really, squire. I was pretty much hoping not to have to take my hands out of my pockets today.

Him: You wot?

Me: You got anything naughty on you?

Him: Fucking search me, fed. Find out.

Me: Nah, your word's good enough for me. Got some folks here worried about you, John.

Him: Ain't you going to cuff me up?

Me: Hadn't planned to. You want to do anything that'll need cuffing?

Him: No.

Me: Well then. All settled. Let's get you to a hospital, shall we?

Jorge Royan / Wiki Commons
Charlie wouldn't confirm or deny whether they stopped for tea first.

And basically, that was that. No handcuffs, no shouting, and, most critically, no guns. John got treatment at the local mental health wing and was fine until the next time he went off his meds. Of course, I found out that the next time, officers listened too closely to their radios and went big early. John broke one of their arms and bit a finger nearly clean off.

I'm lucky enough not to have had a gun pointed at me during my time in the police. I was shot at once in Glasgow before I joined up, but that's another story.

I've known a few friends who've been fired on by suspects, and on every single occasion, the shooter was brought in alive and very unhappy with his decision. One silly boy decided to evade a search by shooting at Task Force, our plainclothes cars. He fled the scene, and both he and his mates were collared by the deeply disgruntled Task Force boys. The shooter was in custody 16 hours later, and I, being a freshly-minted probationer at the time, was given the job of guarding him. One of the officers he had shot at dropped by, and they had the kind of chat you'd expect from two geezers in the pub. I only found out later that less than a day ago, one had tried to kill the other.

william87 / iStock
It's an unwritten rule that whoever threatens the life of another has to buy all the rounds.

When we have intelligence that a gun is in play, we call in Trojan, the Met's armed response units. These boys and girls are incredibly well-trained with a gun. Not so much with a pen, but that's just carping [complaining]. Trojan comprises 5,647 authorized firearms officers in the UK, with 2,800 of them in London alone. If the wheels do come off, they are exactly the people you want coming over the hill. Footage from the Lee Rigby murder shows how fast and how certain they are in a phenomenally challenging situation. For those who can't see the video (and if you can, I apologize profusely, as do all Brits, for Piers Morgan): Trojan arrive at speed, take down both targets, and go straight to lifesaving first aid in less than six seconds. Both killers survived to stand trial and be jailed for life.

I would take a small handful of highly-trained professionals over giving every copper a Glock and a few days training any day of the week. This system works for us, but it's hard to imagine the Trojan cars ever slowing down if they were working in a country where any given citizen could be armed to the teeth.

I love the job and think I always will, and I love the fact that I never strapped on a gun and never had to make that kind of decision in the heat of the moment. Guns make every decision binary -- shoot or don't shoot. They leave no room for doubt or other options, other points of view. Guns reduce very complicated decisions to the simplest of choices, and that is something I am eternally glad I didn't have to be a part of.

Charley left the Met to become a writer, and wiffles improbable nonsense on Twitter and blogs with significantly less restraint, far more profanity, and lashings upon lashings of British slang on police and policing at Encroaching He occasionally misses shouting at large violent men, but a stiff drink usually makes that feeling go away.

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