Guns And Bobbies

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The death of Detective Constable Stephen Oake, an unarmed policeman stabbed last week by a knife-wielding suspect while other unarmed officers struggled to subdue him, raises a provocative question: Why don't British police routinely carry guns? With smuggled guns pouring into inner-city drug gangs and shootings on the rise, some citizens wonder if the venerable tradition of largely unarmed policing is one more sweet anachronism Britain can't afford. "The police have to have something more than they have," says Jo Coupe, a retired sales rep in Leeds.

But opponents are convinced that more extensive arming of police won't help. Police in the U.S. are almost always armed; 230 died in the line of duty in 2001, compared to about 70 in Britain in the last 30 years. And avoiding an arms race with criminals (virtually all guns are illegal) has helped keep Britain's firearm-murder rate to less than one-thirtieth the U.S. level. British practice relies mainly on gunless police, backed up when needed by units intensively trained not only in marksmanship but in how to discriminate among dangerous criminals, deranged people and lads larking with an air pistol. Scotland Yard now has some 1,750 officers authorized to use firearms out of a total of about 26,000, less than half of those authorized 20 years ago. The shrinkage is due to a policy of investing more training in officers allowed to pull the trigger, after a spate of incidents in which cops shot innocent people.

Police themselves aren't eager to obtain guns. The Police Federation polled its members in 1995; 79% opposed being routinely armed. Michael Yardley, an expert on armed policing, says "Many police officers will refuse to be armed, either because they are committed to generally unarmed policing, or because they might feel they are not well suited to it." Rod Dalley, a detective in Gloucestershire who is also vice chairman of the Police Federation, says "We police by consent. It has served us well for many years." Even in Detective Oake's case, it's likely that handcuffs or body armor would have averted tragedy better than having to shoot his assailant during a brawl in a crowded room.