Hundreds of London police officers began refusing to patrol with firearms on Sunday after an officer was charged with murder in the fatal shooting of a 24-year-old Black man. The unusual shooting – and subsequent charge – are exacerbating a public crisis of confidence in London’s police force.
Up to 300 specialist firearms officers handed in their permits allowing them to carry guns on duty over the weekend, according to the BBC.
The protest comes as an officer, named only as NX121, was charged with murder last week over the death of 24-year-old Chris Kaba in September 2022.
Kaba was killed with a single shot to the head while driving a vehicle on a residential street in Streatham, south London.
The unarmed father-to-be was not a suspect in police investigations, but was driving a car “believed to be linked to a firearms incident which took place the previous day”, lead investigator Dean Brown, of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, told an inquest into Kaba’s death in October 2022.
Officer NX121 was suspended from duty after the incident. But it was his sentencing last week on a murder charge that has sparked indignation among other officers.
"Many are worried about how the decision impacts on them, on their colleagues and on their families," said a spokesman for the London Metropolitan Police (the Met).
"They are concerned that it signals a shift in the way the decisions they make in the most challenging circumstances will be judged," he added.
Trust in police ‘hangs by a thread’
Kaba’s family welcomed the decision to charge the officer, saying they and the wider community needed to "see justice for Chris".
His death, which sparked protests outside the Metropolitan Police's headquarters, comes amid a public crisis of confidence in London’s police force.
High-profile scandals have come thick and fast since a serving Met officer kidnapped, raped and murdered a young woman, Sarah Everard, in 2021. Heavy-handed policing of a public vigil in Everard’s honour added fuel to the fire.
Reports of two officers taking and sharing photos of a crime scene they were supposed to be guarding in a London park where two Black sisters had been stabbed to death provoked a new round of outrage.
An independent report commissioned by the Met in 2022 concluded that the London force was institutionally sexist, racist, homophobic and “unable to police itself”.
A 2023 report from the chief police inspector, Andy Cooke, found that the “atrocious” crimes committed by officers had left public confidence in the police hanging by a thread.
A ‘show trial’?
Police in Britain do not routinely carry firearms. The 2,500 Met officers who are authorised to carry guns are normally deployed for specialist missions such as counter-terrorism operations and to protect sites such as parliament, diplomatic missions and airports.
Of those who do carry guns while on duty, only a fraction are likely to fire them.
Government figures for the year ending March 2023 show that during 18,395 firearms operations (20% of which were in London) firearms were intentionally discharged in just 10 incidents.
If a death by police shooting is exceptional, a resulting murder charge for an officer is even rarer.
Since 1990 there have been 1,871 deaths linked to police custody, but only one successful prosecution of a police officer for manslaughter (in 2021) and none for murder, the investigative charity Inquest found.
The murder charges over Kaba’s death have clearly rattled some officers.
“If you look at the online comments of officers, they’re all about this being a show trial,” said Lee Jasper, chair of the national Alliance for Police Accountability and former director of policing for the London mayor’s office.
Officers have been emboldened in their protest by support from right-wing members of the government including Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who Jasper said is “seeking to caricature the charging of an officer as some sort of political ‘wokery’”.
Braverman has launched a review of the legal protections for officers on firearms duties in response to the charge, with the backing of Met Chief Sir Mark Rowley.
She said firearms officers have to make "split-second decisions" and "mustn't fear ending up in the dock for carrying out their duties".
‘Sabre rattling’
Nor should the depth of discontent among officers be underestimated. The Met's crisis comes amid funding issues that have pushed other British public sectors into turmoil.
Under the Conservative government, the Met has faced hundreds of millions of pounds of budget cuts and record numbers of national police are quitting the force.
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“It's unusual for a police protest to be done in public like this,” said Ben Bradford, professor in the department of security and crime science at University College London.
He said the protests could also be seen as “out of proportion”, given that many police would be renouncing guns they had carried on duty for years but never come close to firing.
It seems some officers agree. At the height of the protest, the ministry of defence – at the request of Braverman’s Home Office – said soldiers were on standby to make up the numbers of officers who had relinquished firearms duties.
By Monday lunchtime, the Met confirmed that enough officers had returned to firearms duty for the army to be stood down.
While the Met’s internal drama appears to be dying down, a wider culture war rumbles on.
The prospect of bringing in the army was a dramatic move, and another form of “sabre rattling” from the government, said Lee. “It creates moral panic and popular support for ensuring that cases [such as Kaba’s] are hugely difficult to bring to justice.”
