JIM SPENCE: Giving Scotland’s police officers guns would make us safer |
The warning by David Kennedy, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, that there was a risk of anyone wielding a knife in Scotland being shot by police should tell us how dangerous the times we live in are.
Kennedy isn’t advocating that all police officers carry guns, but wants a New Zealand style system in Scotland where all officers are firearms trained and all police cars carry guns stored securely, so that officers have rapid capability to access them in life-threatening situations.
I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio Scotland on this on Tuesday and I’m of the view that in an increasingly dangerous world the old ways of doing things can no longer keep us sufficiently safe.
So it’s time to allow our cops access to guns to keep us and them safe from the bad, the mad, and the dangerous.
‘Police officers don’t have Batman’s powers’
There’s a pitiful naivety among many folk on this very serious issue and it’s a guileless position in an increasingly threatening world.
Folk who’ve never faced imminent danger or deadly threat expect cops to face crazed individuals with knives, chainsaws, or guns, when most are armed only with a small metal stick and can of spray.
Using those against someone armed with a knife requires being within deadly proximity of an attacker, and they have extremely limited effect in subduing or incapacitating someone armed with evil intent.
When it comes to the threat posed by knives it seems that some folk have watched too many Hollywood movies.
They labour under the delusion that police officers have superhero powers to disarm dangerous individuals with some nifty footwork or self defence moves.
But this isn’t like Batman on the mean streets of Gotham City; the jokers are those who fail to realise that the truth is much more real than anything the caped crusader faced in a big screen work of fiction.
‘Response times are crucial’
That’s proven by the ‘Tueller Drill’, which is a self defence training exercise developed by an American police officer Sgt Dennis Tueller. That demonstrated that an attacker with a knife covers a distance of 7 yards in 1.5 seconds before an armed cop can draw their weapon to stop the threat.
The combined gun slinging skills of Wyatt Earp and Jesse James would struggle to deal with a threat executed that rapidly: now imagine the average Scottish police officer armed with a small extendable metal stick facing that threat and trying to stop a crazed knife attacker as he or she comes under deadly attack at close quarters.
Around 2,000 Scots officers are trained to use tasers but they still have to be relatively close to draw and use them and they don’t always successfully incapacitate the attacker.
There are only around five hundred authorised armed cops in Scotland and that’s before taking into account their shift systems, rest days and holidays.
So if someone takes to the streets with a chainsaw as happened in Paisley two years ago when a thug chased a police officer down the street brandishing the deadly weapon, the response time of an authorised armed unit reaching the scene of the attack is crucial.
And in remote and rural areas the response times – as we saw with a deadly shooting in Skye in in 2022 where armed cops had to be sent from Inverness – can be an hour or more.
In that case, unarmed officers were left to pursue a dangerous armed murderer who had just carried out a heinous crime: it can’t be right to expect men and women to put themselves at that kind of risk.
‘Rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf’
The potential dangers from those armed with blades or worse, often high on a cocktail of drugs which warp their minds and give them abnormal strength and resistance to pain, is now too great to deal with in the way we’ve always done it.
How quickly could a city like Dundee cope with an attack by an unhinged individual or group armed with bladed weapons or worse?
Let’s hope we never have to find out, but it’s far better to be prepared for an event which we hope will never happen than be unprepared if it does.
There’s a quote attributed to George Orwell which I’ve used previously and make no apologies for doing so again; “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”.
Modern police work is far more complex than doing violence but to keep us and themselves safe our police have to occasionally use major force against those who themselves are capable of a level of violence most of us cannot contemplate.
It’s long past time we gave them the tools they need to do that job effectively to keep us and them safe from harm.