The Metropolitan Police has, for now, staved off a crisis. The force says that enough armed officers have returned to work that they don’t need to draft in the army. Officers walked out following the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to charge a serving officer with the murder of Chris Kaba, a black Londoner who was shot and fatally injured during a planned police operation in September 2023. But while Londoners won’t be seeing soldiers on the streets today, this row is far from over.
It’s been a over a year since Kaba, a 24-year-old, was hit and killed by a gunshot fired by an officer into a vehicle in Streatham, south London. That incident on 5 September 2022 lasted just a few minutes. During the twelve months since, the circumstances of what unfolded that night have been investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) who referred their evidence to the CPS in March.
Mr Kaba’s family deserve justice. NX121 deserves a fair trial
There are two interpretations of this protracted delay. On the one hand, supporters of greater police accountability will say that this shows a painstaking procedure with all the right checks and balances in place, which is appropriate in situations of such magnitude. On the other, critics point to the debilitating impact of a split second’s decision making, then pored over for months by people with no operational understanding of the dynamics of lethal force on those given the awesome responsibility to carry and use it.
Who is right? Regardless of your standpoint on the ethics and efficacy of the process, the decision to charge officer NX121 has had a sudden and severe impact on the capacity of the Met to deploy armed response capability in the capital. We can see this in the very rare application through the Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) process which was activated yesterday by the Met to bolster its faltering armed response ranks using the military.
Soldiers are trained in war fighting and they have no powers of arrest so it is likely that they could only be used in very limited circumstances, for example during a raid on suspected terrorists. It is plainly a necessary but insufficient stop gap to ensure that we are still able to respond to an attack by violent extremists, still judged by our security services to be ‘highly likely.’
The public expect that the police provide a proportionate response to lethal threats and they acknowledge that this sometimes requires the elimination of that threat. Those who regulate this responsibility often talk at great length about the need to ensure armed police are accountable. But there is appreciably less focus on two other important ingredients for public confidence to be maintained. That is that officers feel that the process of regulation and investigation is fair and proportionate to them too. What’s more, the regulators need to be accountable as well for their decisions and behaviour. Both the CPS and the IOPC have been criticised for poor communication, over zealous pursuit of officers and impenetrable governance.
Last year in the United States there were 1,176 people killed by armed law enforcement. The comparable number in England and Wales was three, including Mr Kaba. While these statistics will be of little use to grieving families who want answers, even controlling for size, it is extraordinary how restrained UK firearms officers are in even drawing, let alone discharging their weapons.
So the decision by so many of these officers to surrender their accreditation to carry weapons ought to be taken very seriously. While we must have the strictest possible control and restraint over the deployment of lethal force, if this crosses the line to a point where officers fear the subsequent investigatory process more than an armed individual that they have seconds to work out the intent of, we are in trouble.
It’s no coincidence that both the Met Commissioner Mark Rowley and Home Secretary Suella Braverman have both made strong public statements in support of armed police officers. This is right, despite the controversy it has attracted. Rowley has expended huge energy in pursuing and getting rid of police officers who should never have been employed in the first place. Now he’s been forced to act to speak out to keep some of the best trained and most courageous officers he has – the people who stand in the way of marauding Islamists terrorists or who routinely confront people who want to kill them, or others, hundreds of times a year. The people who are now saying that the price of carrying a weapon to protect the public is too high.
Some commentators, notably of the armchair persuasion, have dismissed the protest as mere theatricality; there has been talk of officers throwing tantrums and their dollies out of prams because one of their colleagues now stands accused of murder. But what if the shooting of Chris Kaba was the catalyst for a much deeper organisational malaise? Institutional distrust of the Met is not simply a matter of public opinion. Many officers within this force and others have decreasing confidence that their organisation will protect them for doing the right thing. And this malaise has legs. In Northern Ireland, often piously lauded as the most human rights compliant police service in western Europe, morale is falling apart at the seams because of the treatment of junior officers acting in good faith and then thrown under a bus by senior management in the thrall of politicians. It is not much good having an exquisitely ‘accountable’ police force full of people who can’t protect and serve because they fear the consequences of using legitimate violence.
Those of us who have participated in, managed or investigated the use of force know how important it is that there is trust in a system where the state has the monopoly on power. But that trust extends both ways. Mr Kaba’s family deserve justice. NX121 deserves a fair trial. Armed police officers need to know that the balance of investigation for their actions is fair, expeditious, impartial and proportionate. In a liberal democracy, it is hard to reconcile these competing needs. But we must and can do better than this.
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