I’m just gobsmacked by the latest revelation about the complete incompetence of some British police officers. According to news reports, a Metropolitan Police Armed Response Unit (ARU)was involved in an incident that not only calls into question the idea that members of ARU’s are the cream of the policing crop, but which also caused a major level of disruption.

Sky News is reporting that one of the main roads into London from the East, the A13, was shut for eleven hours whilst police searched for ammunition and unnamed ‘ancillary items’ that had fallen from the roof of the vehicle belonging to an ARU, when they drove away. According to the Sky report, the officers rushed off to a firearms operation, leaving the ammunition and other items on the roof of the car. As the car drove off the ammunition etc. was scattered over the A13 near to Prince Regent Lane in the increasingly violent and indeed Islam dominated London Borough of Newham. I’m absolutely horrified that this mistake happened in the first place, but for it to happen in an area where my sources are telling me that there is a fair amount of support for ISIS and similar Islamic terror groups and where there is a lot of gang related gun crime (94 gun crimes in 2016) is absolutely inexcusable.

In a nation where the police are routinely unarmed it is both right and proper that those officers who do have to use firearms in the course of their work, such as members of ARU’s and those tasked with diplomatic and VIP protection, should be those officers who are at the top of their game. They should be the most intelligent, mature, emotionally stable and sensible officers that can be found in a particular police force. Gone are the days when any officer could check out a firearm from a police station armoury in order to deal with a firearms incident and quite right too. The last thing that is needed is some normally unarmed officer, poorly trained or even untrained in the use of firearms or firearms safety, being handed a gun.

The creation of Armed Response Units was supposed to create an elite squad of officers who were trained in firearms use and who could be deployed when needed, thus removing the potential for misfires and even unnecessary deaths that could be caused by lesser officers being handed firearms. The officers who left ammunition on the roof of their car before driving off seem to me to be far from elite, they seem to be as thick as mince. Now we’ve all, myself included, probably left stuff on the roof of a car at some point (I accidentally left my son’s school-bag on the roof when he had a tantrum about going somewhere he didn’t want to go to), but then we are not highly trained and supposedly responsible firearms officers, we are just ordinary plebs. We should expect better from police officers, especially those officers who have been entrusted with firearms.

At a time when Britain and in particular London, is facing increased problems with knife and gun crime, this incident in East London calls into question the competence of Britain’s firearms trained police officers. Leaving ammunition and ‘other items’ on the roof of a car before driving off, doesn’t strike me as being the sort of action that should be expected from officers who are allegedly far more highly trained than other more general unarmed officers. The big question that I have about this incident is this: If the training that officer’s get to handle, use and store firearms safely is so piss poor as to allow such a basic mistake, how on earth can we the public trust these officers to protect us against rising firearms crime? I must admit that I may not be alone in having less confidence in the ARU’s after this incident than I had before.

What’s also galling about this incident is that the officer involved is not being removed from the ARU’s. He’s just being subjected to a police ‘internal learning process’. In other words little is going to happen to him despite the massive problems that he has caused for those using the A13 trunk road and the potential danger that he may have put others in had the ammunition been found by nefarious characters. My own view is that it would have been a better punishment and something that may have had more of an effect on other armed officers conduct, if this officer’s firearms permission had been taken away, either permanently or temporarily until he could prove to both his senior officers and the rest of us that he was to be trusted with firearms.

We the public have a right to expect that those officers who are entrusted with firearms are the cream of the crop, those officers who are the very embodiment of good and trustworthy police officers. Unfortunately this incident has shown that this is not the case and that firearms officers can be just as stupid, careless and cavalier as too many other unarmed officers can be.