Packing Irony

The Daily Mirror reported (Saturday 30 April) the death of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, whose shooting by a Metropolitan police officer in 1985 sparked riots in Brixton, south London, where Mrs Groce lived until Easter Sunday. Her death was attributed to kidney failure because of the quaint way in the United Kingdom in which you have to die of something. ‘Old age’ is usually unacceptable on death certificates, although we noticed that it slipped through on the Queen Mother’s when she died aged 101.

The police who attacked the Groce family home in 1985 were searching for Mrs Groce’s son Michael, and an armed officer purportedly mistook a retreating black middle-aged woman for an advancing young man and claimed his common law right to defend himself. His body-line shot damaged her spine and lung, and Mrs Groce was left wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. Her son Michael, an armed robbery suspect in 1985, is currently a community worker, according to the report. The officer was charged with malicious wounding, but found not guilty. A not-guilty verdict is what the police like to refer to as a “failed prosecution”.

A couple of weeks later Voice-onLine, which seems to be the internet edition of The Voice, a usually sharp and intelligent newspaper for black people in London, carried an interesting puff piece for CO19, the Met Police’s equivalent of a SWAT squad (see www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=19667). One officer was quoted as saying: “There is no doubt that this is the best police firearms training in the world. The knowledge of the people here and the quality of the officers being trained is of a very high standard.”

The officer—a former soldier—may be reflecting the truth of his own experience. But how would he know, really? The impression left by former Chief Supt Michael Waldren’s book Armed Police (Sutton 2007) is that the Met has never seriously looked over its own parapet to learn from the experience of armed police abroad. And, since the 1997 ban on sporting handguns, individual officers no longer have the opportunity to train with their own weapons on courses such as those Mas Ayoob and others used to provide in the UK.

Consequently, they’ve had to learn from their own mistakes, from which Cherry Groce escaped with her life, but others did not. No doubt the training is better than it used to be, and occurs more frequently and consistently. But that’s partly because firearms crime is so rare that specialist units like CO19 aren’t called out that often to any serious purpose, and have to fill their time and justify their massive budget somehow. The Voice-onLine reporter’s claim that “the issue of gun crime [is] an increasingly grim reality of life on the streets of the capital” just doesn’t hold up against the statistics. Armed crime is on the wane everywhere in the UK.

Instead, we have incidents like Wiltshire’s specialist firearms unit—and their helicopter—being called to deal with a rough shooter who frightened some Norwegians inspecting a crop circle (i.e. trespassing) in July 2009. More recently—on 22 May—Hampshire Constabulary’s overstaffed firearms squad spent part of their weekend evacuating a golf course and scrambling the force helicopter to apprehend (with the aid of experts from the local zoo) a stuffed toy tiger, spotted in a field off the M27 motorway near Hedge End. They couldn’t afford to take any chances; if they don’t use the budget, they’ll lose it. And there was that case a few years ago of a kid with a spud gun...