MORALE among police firearms officers is at its lowest ever level with a resulting shortfall in current numbers of gun cops, a Met chief warns today.
Assistant commissioner Matt Twist says firearms officers believe the law is loaded against them with potential recruits deterred by a punitive accountability system.
He is calling for fairer scrutiny rules for cops involved in shootings, with officers currently facing investigations lasting years.
Mr Twist, head of Met Operations, which includes the MO19 specialist firearms command, told The Sun: “We need officers to volunteer to do this difficult and dangerous job to keep the rest of us safe.
“If they stop volunteering to do it then the gangsters and terrorists with guns effectively can win and that’s an unacceptable outcome.
“So we need to give officers the confidence to volunteer for this role.”
The Home Office is carrying out a review of the police accountability process to assess whether the system is fair to frontline officers using force.
It was ordered when around 300 firearms officers handed in their weapons in September after a colleague was charged with murder over a fatal shooting.
Mr Twist, a former armed cop himself, says: “The Home Office police accountability review is hugely important.
“Officers’ confidence in their ability to discharge their firearms on behalf of the public is at an all-time low.
“I’ve been around firearms for the best part of 20 years and I have been an ARV (Armed Response Vehicle) officer myself.
“I would say at the moment officers do not have confidence that the system that holds them to account is either fair, objective or timely.”
Mr Twists points out that in rare cases when police use guns, officers make split-second decisions with partial information under enormous pressure.
He went on: “If somebody dies there will always be a coronial investigation or inquiry and quite rightly so.
“That will always be the case.
“But in some cases officers are dealing with that, then a criminal investigation and after that a misconduct process.”
One current disciplinary case involving an officer, W80, who shot dead a gangster about to hijack a prison van in 2015, has lasted eight years – though he was exonerated by a public inquiry and the CPS.
Mr Twist said: “Eight years is an incredible amount of time to be investigating something when broadly speaking what happened was very clear from very early on.
“It’s really hard to explain why even in cases where there are fewer processes that it still regularly takes three to five years.
“That can’t be right.
“It serves neither the families of those involved, nor the officers or justice, in terms of finding out what happened.”
Police want time restraints for the Independent Office for Police Conduct CPS to complete investigations into officers’ actions.
Mr Twist says: “What officers want is for that process to be timely, objective and fair.
“That’s in everybody’s interest.
“It’s not in the public’s interest to have these things dragging on for years on end, which is what is literally happening now.”
Mr Twist also says the current standard of proof for ‘unlawful killing’ verdicts at inquests needs to be raised in order to be in line with criminal cases.
He adds recent Supreme Court rulings – including the W80 case – mean verdicts of unlawful killing are now more likely.
Mr Twist said he is concerned the risk of a legal backlash is affecting the judgement of cops – who are more worried about the law than facing an armed gunman.
He added: “At the moment I worry that officers are so concerned about what they see as an imbalance in the accountability process that they might hesitate.
“They might make a wrong decision because they are more worried about the accountability than they are about the gangster or terrorist who has got a gun pointing at them.”
Mr Twist declined to specify the Met’s shortfall of armed cops but The Sun understands it is more than 10 per cent below its strength of around 3,000 Authorised Firearms Officers.
The Met chief said a key reason for the shortage is that potential recruits “are concerned that at the moment the accountability and scrutiny process is no longer a level playing field.”
He continued: “They worry it takes too long, they worry that there’s no account for their training.
“They worry it won’t be objective.”
Mr Twist stressed an unarmed police service in mainland Britain is only possible “if there are a small number of volunteers prepared to be trained to a very high level to put themselves in harm’s way…”
But he warned: “There is a risk that unless people have greater confidence in the accountability structures, that they won’t volunteer for this.”
He points out that many hundreds of guns, knives, machetes and crossbows are recovered every year by gun cops – and asks: “If this small group of volunteers isn’t going to do it, then who is?”
He echoed Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s assertion that armed officers say they would rather confront a terrorist than a gangster because they will be treated more fairly.
Mr Twist went on: “What is very clear is that when you are dealing with terrorists, things are much simpler than if you are dealing with gangsters.
“It’s also fair to say there are campaign groups who will get involved in these things and that can influence the accountability process.
“A case needs to be judged on its facts, a case needs to be judged objectively…”
Police want the evidential threshold to be raised for the IOPC to launch investigations.
Mr Twist said “If somebody is killed as a result of police contact it is absolutely right that the IOPC independently investigates.
“But at the moment the threshold for investigations in some cases is too low.
“It’s lower than the threshold the police would need to start an investigation if someone reported a crime.
“There needs to be some evidence of wrong-doing to start an investigation.”
Mr Twist concluded: “We’ve ended up in a deteriorating position over the last decade in terms of balance and accountability.”
He said the system needs to be simplified for “the purpose of holding people to account for a split second decision with partial information and under enormous pressure.”
Decisions, he adds, which are then “poured over by people sitting in conference rooms and courts years later.”
