According to the Guardian, a survey earlier this year of British police officers found that a quarter of them said they should regularly carry guns. The public and the police themselves remain largely opposed to the routine transport of firearms.
British detectives do not carry guns because law enforcement in Britain is generally disarmed. This is because of public fears that arose during the 1800s about the militarization of the police force and efforts taken in order to prevent them from becoming tyrannical.
Taking guns away from police officers is not a radical idea: law enforcement in the UK and New Zealand, for example, do not carry firearms on regular patrols. Allowing only a few officers to be armed, such as the firearms unit in every police force in the UK, and policemen patrolling sensitive areas such as airports, is because the risk of armed violence tends to be reduced.
Restrictions Also Apply to the Police
Firearms restrictions also apply to the police, where only the dog team, the airport, and the diplomatic protection team regularly carry guns as part of their uniforms. While investigators and specialized units regularly receive firearms, the rest of his force patrols unarmed. The rest of the police are trained in the use of firearms, and patrol officers often carry AR-15 rifles stored in locked boxes in their vehicles, preferring to patrol by car or on foot unarmed.
As for the British, I believe that at least some of the police are armed; their tactical units are probably armed. It is unlikely that the British police will ever be fully armed. While today in the UK a growing percentage of the police force is armed (in the name of fighting terrorism), it is hard to imagine a British Bobby armed to the same extent as, for example, the police in the United States.
An unarmed bobby on the beat is a quintessentially British image, like Big Ben or the Beatles, and, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where the police have been armed regularly for years, the vast majority of officers, including Scotland Yard, continue to deal with non-lethal weapons. such as batons, pepper spray and rude warnings.
Additional Rules Apply in London
For Londoners, additional details about the armed police underlined the seriousness of the incident; unlike many other countries, most of the police in England are not always armed. In the London Metropolitan Police, out of 33,000 men, about 2,700 officers are authorized to bear arms, although, unlike American police officers, the vast majority of the approximately 2 men are not regularly armed. At the same time, more than 90 percent of the capital’s police officers carry out their daily duties without weapons.
According to a 2004 poll, 82 percent of police officers said they did not want to carry a gun while on duty, and while they may fear for their own life on patrol, they still oppose carrying a gun. The UK has a tradition of “consensus control” where some officers are discouraged from carrying weapons as they could cause backlash in case they harm bystanders (4 out of 14,000 armed incidents a year). Some officers have complained that officers are reluctant to take gun classes because they fear they will have to go through years of lengthy investigations if they have to use a weapon.
Instead, they rely on specially trained Firearms Officers (AFOs) to assist in cases where firearms are required. If police officers do not have weapons, they cannot use firearms against citizens.
Most Countries Arm Their Police
Norway is one of 19 countries in the world where police are generally unarmed and can only use weapons in exceptional circumstances. In many countries where police are unarmed, police must obey stricter laws. Police forces in European countries such as Norway, Ireland, Iceland and most of the UK, Norway, Ireland and the UK are largely unarmed and have significantly lower gun homicide rates than comparable countries where the police hold firearms.
While having an unarmed police force may seem counterintuitive to citizens of many countries, there are actually 18 countries and one US territory (the US Virgin Islands) that have a police force composed of patrol officers who do not carry firearms.
Although the 19 countries around the world that do not arm officers vary greatly in their approach to policing, they do have one thing in common. [this study] has been used by the police to justify the transport of firearms, which is not the case in other countries. The police carry weapons, but use them very rarely and rely on them only in cases of extreme and unavoidable necessity.
Many Police Require Firearms to be Effective
Tracey Mears seems like we don’t, but it also raises an important issue, which, again, is that police officers are allowed to enforce certain laws, and there are many relatively low-level ordinances, offenses, and the like that police officers are entitled to. apply force. “I would say that the police are right to admit that there are too many guns in the United States.” competent that some people trained to perform certain tasks should not be armed with weapons, this is one way to do it.
The police will say they need to be armed to fight gun violence in the places where I worked. We can object that the officers of the general police patrolling Australia need weapons. Forced may be the reason why some countries choose not to arm the police on regular patrols.
The few times the police fired their weapons were not without controversy. Codes of Conduct are also issued by the Department of the Interior, which provide comprehensive guidance on the policy and use of firearms and less lethal weapons by the police. All UK Armed Forces also receive the Police Firearms Manual, a comprehensive document detailing the legal regulation of firearms in the United Kingdom and covering a wide range of national legislation and international guidelines on the use of firearms.