Over the first eight months of 2015, American police killed 776 people, while British police killed exactly one. American police are eight times as likely to kill a citizen, and ten times as likely to die on the job, as their essentially unarmed British counterparts.
We wanted to get an idea of just why this was, so we spoke to Charley Clark, who spent nearly a decade as a police constable and a detective constable in Hackney, one of the most deprived and dangerous boroughs in London. Naturally, as we were writing about how much safer the UK is with its lack of guns, despite having a commensurate percentage of unstable potential criminals, this happened. But the fact that the attacker is alive to face trial is a testament to the police involved and to how long it takes Trojan, the British Police armed response teams, to arrive. The suspect was armed -- the arresting officers were not. Welcome to policing, British-style.
WARNING: TONS OF BRITISH SLANG AHEAD.
6
It's A Dangerous Job No Matter Where You Do It
Terry Waller / Wiki Commons
I spent nearly a decade as a cop on the streets of one of the biggest cities in the world, dealing with violent dangerous criminals. Plot twist: I did it without carrying anything more lethal than diet mace and a metal stick. When I talk about The Job, as we all call it, the first thing people ask is whether it's dangerous. The only honest answer to that is "It depends."
I worked my whole career in Hackney, a borough of London that has something of a reputation. If you've watched Luther at any point, you know the area. Almost all the backdrops Idris Elba smolders his way through are in Hackney. Universally known as Crackney, it's less than eight square miles that are home to more than 260,000 people. That's a greater population density than in New York, L.A., or Lagos, for that matter. All these people are pissed off at somebody -- and a lot of the time, it's us po-po.
Nigel Cox
This is the England you don't see during the royal "smile and wave all proper-like" roundabouts.
So what does it mean to police this neighborhood? Well, you get gangs, first and foremost. Cops love gangs. They give us a nice, easily-defined enemy, and they wear color-coded clothes for your convenience. Good old "us versus them," right? Nonsense. I've taken part in "rowdy buses," where we go about in groups and put hands in their pockets. For the most part, it ends up good-natured.
Once, in the middle of the swine flu crisis, I was full of the cold and sneezed mid-search. The gang member whose pockets I was delving for drugs and weapons giggled to himself and made a swine flu joke. I joined in the chuckles, until one of his compatriots loudly declared he didn't get it (he didn't know that swine and pig are the same thing). That set the entire gang off, and we spent a happy few minutes ripping the piss out of him. Next time I saw them, it was all smiles and jokes.
Ronaldccwong / Wiki Commons
Getting roasted is better than getting shot.
By contrast, a mate once stopped an elderly geezer, mostly to pass the time of day. He asked what the old-timer had in his shopping bag, only to be greeted with the severed head of the old boy's wife of 60 years. That put him off his breakfast.
I hasten to add that it's not that every gang member is a jocular scamp, scrumping apples and whatever tiffin is. [Ed. note: We have no idea what any of those words mean. We assume they only make sense to British people.] I was involved in the 2011 riots, and more than one occasion in Gilpin Square, or a Friday night in Shoreditch, has seen me outnumbered 200 or 300 to one, praying that the uniform and a good, commanding voice will keep them from realizing the odds. I made it, so I guess I did something right.
Raymond Yau/Wiki Commons
Still no guns -- this being the worst possible time to see if you're any good at using one.
One colleague, who has now left the job, was intentionally driven into by a bandit car recently stolen by means of burglary. She made it, but it was one of the more serious injuries, because a car was used, so it required a significant stay in hospital. She was, as is right and proper, visited by senior staff. As it was, she was out of her gourd on morphine, and greeted the commander of the North East Cluster by pulling up her hospital gown and offering to show him her gash. The commander didn't visit Hackney so much after that.
5
Our Training Is More Philosophical Than Tactical
Elliot Moore / Wiki Commons
So how does it work? Unlike the U.S. model of law enforcement, we have a thing we call Policing By Consent, based on the principles of a chap called Sir Robert Peel, who came up with the Metropolitan Police in 1829. It states that constables are citizens in uniform "who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence." It's been the guiding principle for close to 200 years, and if I had my way, any copper over the rank of inspector would be forcibly tattooed with Peel's Nine Principles of Policing, just to remind them.
Henry William Pickersgill
However you say "Don't be a dick" in old-timey slang, this guy said it first, and best.
I appreciate that, to U.S. coppers who are issued more guns than cameras, this approach probably sounds like the kind of woolly pinko nonsense that they'd expect from us tea-sipping dandies. And to be fair, it does make a lot more sense for every officer to be armed in the U.S., since so many citizens are armed in the U.S. London, as a whole, had 114 homicides and 1,662 gun crimes last year, in a population of 8.63 million. It's not even fair to compare.
In London, constables are encouraged to live in their boroughs where possible and to see themselves as part of the community, which is a good idea philosophically, but can have its consequences. For instance, two Essex officers decided to execute a warrant on a gang of importers on Christmas Eve and tore apart every single present under the tree, just to let them know who's boss. They got followed home, and the lead detective's house was burned down.
Littal / iStock
"And what have we learned?" "Be coppers, not Krampus."
On the other hand, I was hopping the train home one day when a hand like a ham hock landed on my shoulder with a heavily-accented grunt of "DC Clark. Do you remember me?" In my line of work, this does not aid digestion, I assure you. I turned to meet the largest lump of Polish builder you have ever seen. Turned out I had investigated and charged him for assaulting his wife. He had spent three weeks in prison. Honestly thought I was going to die. He shook my hand and thanked me for getting him away from "that hateful bitch." Never have I been so glad I was decent to someone during interview. Oh yeah, we have interviews instead of interrogations. We're not even allowed to lie to the suspect about the evidence we have.
KatarzynaBialasiewicz / iStock
Truth, Justice, and the British Way.
That said, when there's power to be had, there's always going to be someone abusing it. Britain has had its issues with race and racist cops over the years. The '80s and '90s were a time of under-supervised police with a proclivity for violence, and what were known as sus laws. These meant that an officer could arrest if he had the suspicion that a person had committed an offense. A surprisingly high number of those falling under suspicion were black. In the end, the whole nick was demolished and rebuilt to try to rid the area of the stain of abuse of force. This was all long before I joined, but it was never too far from our minds.
West Indian/African Association
America has its own version of sus, sadly called "everyday life."
And when it comes to crowd control and the containment of protests, lawful and otherwise, the Met has a fairly checkered history. Kettling was a perfectly accepted practice of keeping protesters trapped in one place without food, water, toilets, etc., and was an arrow in the public order quiver until the sheer weight of legal challenges made it politically untenable. It was ruled lawful in 2012, but you'll not catch many public order commanders recommending it as a tactical option these days.