Terror attacks, gang wars, armed robbery — as crime involving weapons surges, Britain's armed response officers have to be ready for anything. Nick Rufford joins them for a week.
The first call of the evening comes on the radio at 8.36pm, less than 30 minutes after the armed response vehicle (ARV) rolled out on patrol from the prison-like gates of a grey police building in Lambeth, south London. We are on our way to a reported stabbing. A male youth is lying injured in a street in nearby Tooting. Those are all the details we have. He could be the victim of a gang skirmish, a targeted assault, or more chillingly, a terrorist attack.
Blue lights and siren. PC Joe Newman is at the wheel of the car as it punches through the traffic. The speed limit on these urban streets is 30mph (48km/h) but we're doing well in excess of that.
PC Si Samuels is in the front passenger street shouting directions above the noise of the engine and the bark of four radio channels. I'm in the back with the gun safe. I feel a responsibility, even though I'm not part of the team.
I'm embedded with "the Trojans", part of SCO19, the firearms wing of the Metropolitan Police, which is Britain's biggest police force and has the country's largest team of ARVs. Trojan is their radio call sign.
The ARV crews trace their roots to a mass shooting in Hungerford, Berkshire, in 1987, when Michael Ryan, an antiques dealer and gun obsessive, murdered 16 people with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun before armed police could arrive in strength. A subsequent inquiry backed calls for a fleet of vehicles that could speed to crime scenes where weapons are involved. Senior police officers argued that the price of maintaining Britain's deeply rooted culture of unarmed policing — at least nine out of ten police are still sent out on to London's streets without guns — was to have a trained firearms squad just a radio call away.
"We still send beat bobbies to deal with incidents with a short metal pole, some CS spray and their ability to de-escalate," says an ARV officer briefing me. "That's possible only if help is at hand when it's needed."
After four years of political deliberation, the first ARV appeared in London in 1991. The Trojan call sign was chosen because the plain outward appearance of the vehicles — they look like standard police cars — belies the fact that they are mobile armouries. The weapons, stored in a locked safe accessible from the rear seat next to me, include Sig MCX carbines and magazines, a baton gun and spare rounds and "stunnies" — stun grenades. The ARVs also carry a ram for forced entry, first aid kits, helmets and a large bulletproof shield.
London now has a fleet of more than 40 ARVs, with about 20 on patrol at any time of day or night. Across the country are dozens more units. The aim is that in urban areas an ARV is never more than minutes away, and in the government security zone — covering Whitehall and Westminster — the response time is even shorter. A "60-second car" that can reach anywhere inside the zone in a minute or less is on standby 24/7.
If the case for ARVs was strong in 1991, it's even more compelling now. The Trojans' first priority is to deal with the threat from terrorists and "spree shooters" such as Ryan, but ordinary criminals have also upped the ante with heavier firepower, and knifings have become dangerously mundane. In recent months a steep rise in the number of firearms incidents and an outbreak of stabbings have thrust ARVs into the front line of the war on gang violence.
Often there is no way of knowing whether a reported shooting or stabbing is a "domestic", a robbery, a gang tit-for-tat, or the start of a "marauding terror attack" (MTA). So the Trojans are being pushed to answer an ever-growing number of emergency calls.
ARVs usually carry a crew of three, each with a clearly defined role. "The driver is concerned only with getting from A to B safely, so we don't burden them with tactical considerations," my pre-mission briefing officer says. " 'Comms' assimilates all the information en route to the incident. It's quite a skill to get used to listening to sometimes four or five radio channels and picking out the information you really need to know. The navigator, or 'Maps', sits in the back. Their job is also to dish out guns."
When there's a crew of two, the front passenger monitors the radio and takes care of map reading and distributing kit from the gun safe. Tonight Newman, 40, is at the wheel of the BMW X5 and Samuels, 42, is Comms and navigator while I come along for the ride. Both men in the front are wearing Glock 17 pistols and X2 Tasers — standard issue for firearms officers. Before joining the police, Newman was a headhunter for an executive recruitment firm. At weekends he's a windsurfing instructor. Samuels was a plumber before switching careers. When he's off-duty he plays golf (off a four handicap, since you ask — weapons training sharpens hand-eye co-ordination). Firearms officers are highly trained but they are ordinary men and women, including in the eyes of the law, they point out. They can be charged with assault or murder like any other citizen if they wrongly injure or kill, hence the golden rule that firearms should be used only to stop an imminent threat to life.
The Tooting victim is lying face up with blood on his stomach and a gash where his shirt was cut open, according to the dispatcher. His assailants have fled. People heading home from the Tube stop to look. Bystanders confirm that the youth was pursued before being seized in a headlock. "About 20 people were seen running away," Samuels says. It's a mob attack.
The first job is to check the victim's injuries, and not just the obvious ones. Newman looks for puncture wounds made by a screwdriver, bradawl or stiletto blade. Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death on a London street in 1993, died with deep narrow wounds that severed arteries and partially collapsed his lung.
Newman administers first aid. Because ARV crews are often first on the scene of an attack they are among the most highly trained in treating ballistic and stab injuries, including stanching blood loss and administering oxygen.
Descriptions of the attackers are vague: youths allegedly armed with homemade clubs and knives. An ambulance crew arrives. Local police begin interviewing witnesses and combing surrounding streets. The victim's injuries are serious but not life-threatening. The ARV crew pulls back and returns to the car.
You may think that a heavily armed rapid response vehicle is a sledgehammer to crack a nut in such cases, but you have to factor in the ready availability of weapons, including battery acid, which is being used by gangs to intimidate and disfigure rivals. "Attacks take place anywhere, even in a crowded place in broad daylight," Newman says. "It sends a message to rivals: 'We'll get you, wherever, whenever. You can't hide.' "
Police are sometimes the victims. A group of ten firearms officers were doused with acid in a raid on a gang address last year. "They were making a forced entry and whoever was in there had a bottle of acid and hosed them with it," Newman says. "They were wearing respirators that protected them from the worst of the burns."
"Almost my worst nightmare is someone coming at me with a bottle," Samuels adds. "A gun or a knife is an obvious threat. But if they're pointing a squeezy bottle, you have no idea what's in it."
Many of the call-outs are known as "otherwise" jobs. The strict remit under which ARV crews work is "to respond to reports of someone carrying a gun, or with immediate access to one, such as in the glovebox of a vehicle, or who can get their hands on that gun very quickly," the firearms briefing officer says. But the remainder of the tasks come under the heading of ones that are "otherwise so dangerous that the deployment of armed officers is considered necessary". That catch-all covers incidents such as a crossbow attack on a teenager in southeast London last month, as well as the use of samurai swords, machetes and — a gang favourite — zombie knives.
On the first weekend of February a spate of stabbings in London left 14 injured and 2 dead in only 24 hours. Across the country offences recorded by police involving a knife or sharp instrument rose to 44,771 in the year to September 2019, up 7 per cent on the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics. There was a 17 per cent increase in knife possession offences to 21,500, while the number of violent criminals threatening to kill with knives rose more than 20 per cent. Gun crime jumped 8 per cent. Gangs accounted for nearly half of offences where a gun was fired in London.
The surge in these kinds of attacks abated during the first lockdown last year but senior police have since warned that "fractiousness and frustrations" associated with underemployment and school closures, including taunting by gangs on social media, have led to increased numbers of stabbings and serious assaults. Killings have included the apparently random murder of Sven Badzak, an aspiring lawyer chased by a gang and stabbed to death "for daring to go to Waitrose", as his mother later said, in Kilburn, northwest London.
Stephen Smith, a 22-year veteran with SCO19, says London gangs are sometimes more deadly than those in New York. "There was a time, in living memory, when local street gangs were known to the police and could be dealt with by unarmed bobbies, but not any more. Now they model themselves on New York gangs with names such as MDP [Murder Dem Pussies], Peckham Boys, Tottenham Mandem and Ghetto Boyz. They stake out territories and dare other gangs on pain of death to trespass on their turf."
For a period in 2018 the rate of gang-related murders in London overtook that in New York, according to Smith's book, London's Armed Police, a history of the firearms squad. "By the end of that year we had seen 79 gang-related murders, including 63 stabbings and 16 shootings," Smith says. "Fifty of the victims were 25 or under."
The violence has prompted the firearms squad to adopt some unusual tactics. One is a programme called "Makepeace" that entails visits to schools in the worst affected areas. A slide show of their hardware keeps the audience's attention while firearms officers remind them of the grim toll of young lives lost. A serving firearms officer, a classical pianist with a double first from Cambridge, sometimes opens the show by playing the school piano to help dispel any preconceived images of armed police culture.
We've been back in the car only six minutes when the radio crackles again. Trojan South — that's us. (London has four ARV sites — North in Wapping; East in Limehouse; West in Fulham; South in Lambeth.) Three armed attackers have been spotted, according to the dispatcher, one IC1 and two IC3 — IC stands for Identity Code. One white and two black. The IC1 is tall with a fur hood.
The tactical firearms commander comes on the radio. It's Inspector Matt Fox, whom I met the day before when he was reminiscing about his experience as a firearms officer. Now he sounds very different — clipped, to the point. He gives clearance to stop the tall IC1 male. If he's spotted, Newman and Samuels will approach and shout "armed police", tackle him to the ground if necessary and handcuff him. "Because we've got a distinct description of one suspect, we've been given one of our more aggressive tactics, which means guns pointing and an 'armed police' challenge," Newman says.
Blue lights and klaxon again as we head for the South Circular. A boy on an electric scooter wobbles dangerously in front of the ARV. He has no lights and is deaf to the siren thanks to a pair of oversized headphones. We sweep past on the other side of the road, chicaning through traffic islands and bollards. More details come over the CAD (computer aided dispatch) system. Smith says: "Three males went into the victim's property, ransacked the place looking for her son. And they had weapons."
We arrive in a cul-de-sac to find the distraught mother in the ruins of her home. The attackers had smashed their way into her house through ground-floor windows, ransacking it and threatening to shoot her. Her 18-year-old son escaped through an upstairs window and climbed over a back fence. A criminal record check reveals that he has previous form for drugs and theft. It sounds like dealers chasing an unpaid debt.
We scour the estate, nearby allotments and a children's playground. Residents peer from behind curtains and dogs bark. The attackers have fled under cover of darkness. After an hour we are stood down.
"They've gone to ground," Samuels says. A brief lull allows for a rare coffee stop. Except for the Taser and the pistol, worn in holsters, the weapons stay firmly locked in the car's gun safe. "We don't want to walk around Starbucks or Caffè Nero with a carbine over our shoulder, alarming customers," Newman says.
I'm sitting in a train carriage and there's pandemonium. Passengers are running towards me screaming. Several are clamping hands over wounds. One is lying on the floor bleeding profusely. A man is yelling and waving a knife around. He's stabbing people at random. It's an MTA, a marauding terror attack. Not a real one, thankfully. I'm at SCO19's recruitment centre in Gravesend, where officers come for 11 weeks' initial training and then annual top-up courses.
At the sprawling site alongside the Thames, close to old factories and cement works, there are replica buildings — a betting shop, a café. Trainees engage instructors posing as gun-toting villains. Vehicles with bullet holes and smashed windows used in simulated car chases are scattered about. For the simulated MTA I'm witnessing, there's an actual railway platform and a train carriage.
Officers rush on to the train, ushering passengers on to the platform and cornering the attacker with shouts of "armed police".
The knifeman is brought down and immediately given first aid, as are the "injured" passengers. "If an artery has been hit you may get only a minute before someone dies from blood loss," says Will Johnson, an SCO19 expert in treating gun and knife wounds. "There's a perception that our job is to shoot people, but actually we save many more lives than we take, at a ratio of at least a hundred to one. Almost invariably we turn up to an incident where there's been an exchange of shots or a gang fight and we're dealing with the people who were involved. You get quite used to delivering first aid to people who you know are up to no good."
Johnson was among the first on the scene of the 2017 Westminster attack in which PC Keith Palmer was stabbed to death by Khalid Masood, a Muslim convert. When Masood was shot by an armed protection officer, Johnson endeavoured to save him, although his injuries proved fatal.
"He had a right to life, in spite of his actions. We're not there to make judgments. We're there to do what we need to do to save that person's life and in due course put them before a judge and jury. In the meantime our job is just to patch them up."
The training is designed to be so convincing that the armed officers taking part feel their heart rates elevated almost to the level they experience in a real attack. It's part of a process that includes personality evaluation to check how they will behave in harm's way. A split-second decision could decide whether someone lives or dies.
On the Judgement Range, an indoor simulator, would-be recruits face a series of scenarios played out on a video screen. I take my turn, not because I'm going to be carrying a firearm but so I get an insight into what it's like. I'm issued with a pistol that fires a laser. It's a video gamer's dream: a first-person shooter with life-sized opponents and a lifelike gun — except the objective is not to shoot, unless it's absolutely the least-worst option.
The camera follows a pair of armed robbers as they drop a sawn-off shotgun on the pavement and race into an alley, apparently unarmed. As I approach, one reaches into his donkey jacket. Shoot too soon and you risk killing a man about to surrender and offer you his handgun. Or worse, an undercover police officer. Leave it too late and you die.
Split-second timing and dead-centre accuracy are required to pass. "Remember, the laser doesn't lie," says Dave Davies, a former SCO19 officer, now an instructor. I shoot just as the man levels a revolver at me. It's enough to leave me shaking.
The next scenario is even more nerve-racking. The video opens as you enter a school and walk along a corridor that's eerily quiet. As you turn a corner there is a body on the floor, then another. Then a pupil, flattening themselves against a wall in terror. Through a crack in the door is someone holding a gun. Is he an "active shooter"? An innocent pupil who has picked a gun off the floor? A teacher who has just disarmed an attacker?
The story is in the faces of the hostages lined against the wall and the movement of the gunman, who is in the middle of a grim "eeny, meeny, miny, moe" that will decide who dies next. The scene is complicated. I'm still taking it all in when he fires and a hostage falls to the floor. I've failed. But hesitation is common. "People think that if you give someone a gun they can't wait to pull the trigger," Davies says. "But most people instinctively hold back."
The Metropolitan Police were forced to take stock after the fatal shooting on the London Underground in 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian. Firearms officers believed he was a suspected suicide bomber but he had been mistakenly identified. De Menezes had no connection with terrorism and was innocently on his way to work as an electrician. An inquest jury returned an open verdict and the Metropolitan Police made an unreserved apology to the de Menezes family and paid compensation.
Night after night ARV crews deal with emergencies involving rival groups of youths at odds over territory and spoils, but fear of an MTA lurks in every call-out. Attacks can come out of nowhere. The soldier Lee Rigby was murdered by two Islamist extremists who rammed him with their car in 2013. An ARV driven by a female officer arrived within ten minutes of being dispatched. She tasered one of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, immobilising him. One of her crew shot the other, Michael Adebowale, in the leg, stomach and hand, stopping him in his tracks. The pair were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The 2017 Westminster attack began with reports of a traffic incident — a Hyundai car had mounted the pavement on Westminster Bridge, ploughing into pedestrians. But it turned out to be a terror attack in which five people died and more than 50 were injured. An ARV was on the scene in under a minute.
The same year ARV crews from City of London and Metropolitan Police shot and killed three attackers who fatally stabbed eight people in Borough Market. They were armed with 12-inch ceramic knives strapped to their wrists. The first ARV arrived less than eight minutes after the initial call.
In 2019 Usman Khan was shot dead by armed police after murdering two people at a prisoner rehabilitation conference at Fishmongers' Hall in London. The ARV was on the scene within five minutes.
Britain's policy of unarmed policing results in fewer deaths at the hands of police than most comparable countries, according to Prison Policy Initiative, an independent monitoring group. In 2019 police killed three people in England and Wales, including Usman Khan. In the same year police shot dead four people in the Netherlands — and more than 1,000 in the US. British armed police fatally shot 26 people in the decade to 2020, according to Inquest, another group. The most killed in a single year during that period was six in 2017, the year of the Westminster and Borough Market attacks.
Escalating terror threats and rising crime — much of it gang driven — have nevertheless led to substantial increases in the size of the ARV force in the past two decades. After more than 140 people died in terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 the UK Home Office authorised a recruitment drive. The aim was to double the number of CTSFOs — counter terrorist specialist firearms officers — including female recruits. After its early resistance to armed policing the Home Office had recognised the threat — and the timing was fortunate. As one senior firearms officer observed: "We'd seen the threat creeping closer and we were ready. Just about. In the nick of time."
The surnames of frontline officers have been changed.
'I recently had to taser a man who'd killed his neighbour'
Five years ago the Met Police had a handful of women armed response officers. Now it has 50. One of the most experienced is Donna, 38. She lives in the home counties with her husband, a police officer, and two stepchildren.
I applied to join the police on my 18th birthday. I got my GCSEs and A-levels but I didn't want to go to university and wait; I wanted to join as soon as I could.
My father was a bookmaker and then he turned taxi driver. My mum worked in a factory, putting spools in VCRs.
I applied to join SCO19 in 2010 and got posted at the start of 2011. My mum wasn't happy about me joining the armed police. My argument then, even before this massive terrorist threat looming over us, was I'd rather have a firearm and not need it than to need one and not have access to one. I want to be able to protect my colleagues and the public, rather than feeling I can't do anything about it.
Thankfully we're an island and our borders do a very good job of keeping terrorism out, I think, especially firearms. But knives are so easy to come by, vehicles are easy to come by, and acid. I think it's a matter of time before [another terrorist incident] happens.
ARVs [armed response vehicles] are the pinnacle of uniform policing. You want to be the best, the best you can achieve. The training is hard. On our course we started with 12, then dropped four on the weapons course and the same again on tactics. I think that's probably common.
They play mind games with you to see how you respond. Anybody who has a bad attitude is weeded out. From one day to the next you're never sure what's going to happen or what dangers you're going to face. I recently had to force the door of a London flat and use my Taser on a man who'd killed his neighbour. There has been a 20-year dispute between the two and he just got up one day and used a meat cleaver to kill the man next door.
I'm married to another officer, a dog trainer. Police marry police, like doctors marry doctors. I have two stepchildren, boys aged 16 and 14.
I remember going to Laser Quest once and my husband said: "Donna, try to remember this is meant to be fun." Because I'd warned the boys: "You can get shot here, here and here, but if you stand like this, back to back, you've immediately halved where you can hit." Nerf wars are very interesting in our house.
I'm proud of my first aid. One night we were patrolling around Harlesden and we got a call out to a gang fight. There was a man slumped against a car and stabbed in the chest. It was quite eerie because normally you get there and there are loads of members of the public or other police cars but there was just this man. I stopped the bleeding and we got him to St Mary's Hospital. Then later the registrar came to find me and said: "Are you the medic?" I said yeah. He said I had undoubtedly given lifesaving first aid and he shook my hand. I thought that's a nice thing. You've saved a life.
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London