‘It’s a tragedy for everyone’

A TRAGEDY took place in Shildon two nights ago. Somebody died.

When I heard of the death of Keith Richards at the hands of Durham Police firearms officers in the early hours of yesterday morning, I was saddened.

Of course, for the right reasons – this was a tragedy for all concerned – but also for what I knew would inevitably follow.

I was right: it was a given that before the bloodstains had dried, phrases like “shoot-out”

and “shoot to kill” would be trotted out. When I heard a news commentator saying that this was only the second time that Durham Police had fired “a shot in anger” something snapped.

I was there on the day when that first shot had been fired and there was no anger in doing it.

Very few people have any real appreciation of what police firearms officers do and what is asked of them.

At the extreme ends of policing, their professionalism has to be exceptional. In today’s blame and compensation culture they are very well aware of the implications of any action which they might take, but that is secondary to the effect it will have on them and others.

Such sensitivity was not always the case.

In a recent episode of Heartbeat, firearms were issued to counter a lone gunman apparently firing randomly at anything that moved.

Firearms (well, some Second World War pistols and Lee Enfield rifles) were issued to “anyone who had been in the Army”.

When I first came to the world of police firearms in the Seventies these weapons were still in use and the training staff were usually such servicemen.

Both weapons and training were of a good standard for the time, but as more was required of the police, the firearms departments had to move on.

In Durham, a vast information-gathering exercise began to determine best practice and find the best equipment to do the job.

From this emerged a firearms unit the envy of many other forces in the UK and elsewhere.

Many people refer to friends and colleagues saying that they would trust them with their life, but very few have ever had cause to do so.

I was reminded of this by the loss of a very dear comrade to whom I had entrusted with my life on many occasions, sure in the knowledge that, should I be in danger, he would take whatever steps necessary to save me. He was not the only one; there is a roll call of hundreds who I have trained or worked with, of whom I can say the same with pride.

It doesn’t involve liking or admiring someone (although that helps), it is just about doing your job.

That is why phases like shots “fired in anger” are guaranteed to make the blood of those police officers who have carried a gun in the course of their duty to boil furiously.

There is little of rage in such situations, but more of calm. There is an element of slow motion about the instant someone is shot; the thought process far exceeds the physicality.

The first such shot fired by a Durham Police marksman “in anger” took the best part of three days to emerge from the barrel of a gun.

Fifteen minutes before that finally happened one of the firearms officers involved in that siege had recognised that the tempo of events had changed and that it was apparent “something was going to happen”. It did.

Someone was shot and a life was saved.

Never have I ever seen someone so absolutely alone as the officer who fired that shot: it was his responsibility to take that shot and his alone. In 1992, when I sat with the deputy chairman of the Police Complaints Authority as I recounted the events, he expressed the view that we would have been justified in taking that shot on the first day. That is not a matter of pride, simply of fact.

The luxury, if that could ever be the right word, of time is not always available. On Tuesday, it took just 50 minutes from first report to a shot being fired.

The training did its job, so did the officers, but that does not mean that the officer(s) who took the shots will not carry it to the end of their days.

A trained police firearms officer will only shoot if there is an established threat to their life, or that of another. There is not and never has been a “shoot to kill” policy in the police service.

The only reason to shoot is to interrupt a course of action which might otherwise result in the death of a person.

In 2006, Durham Police reported 1,038 firearms-related incidents. In the Chief Inspector of Constabulary’s report last year, gun crime had risen in Durham by 29.4 per cent.

Throughout the United Kingdom there have been only 50 deaths as a result of the police use of firearms since 1990.

Each one was one too many and every one was a tragedy for all those involved.