Operation ‘Real Estate’ – Nottinghamshire Police
Gun law – Guardian: Monday December 4, 2000
Britain’s police are famed for walking the streets armed with nothing more lethal than a truncheon. But now, for the first time, bobbies on the beat in two violent districts of Nottingham are carrying guns. John Kampfner asks, is this the shape of things to come?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,406343,00.html
From deep inside Sherwood forest, a revolution in British policing has begun. But its leaders deny it is any such thing. “There is nothing exceptional in what we’re doing,” says Assistant Chief Constable Sean Price. “This is not a Genghis Khan approach. We’re only doing what the police have always done – deploying the level of force appropriate to the threat.”
From his desk at Sherwood Lodge, the headquarters of Nottinghamshire police, Price is masterminding Operation Real Estate. At its heart is a strategy that, so far, every other police force in Britain has balked at – putting armed officers on the beat.
The decision was taken in February, when rival gangs shooting out a territory dispute left several people injured. Locals knew what was going on but were frightened to get involved. “I knew at the time this was the thin end of the wedge,” says Price. “If we hadn’t got a grip quickly, it would have got out of control.”
Six officers, operating in pairs and armed with Walther P990 pistols, were deployed on the Meadows estate and nearby St Ann’s, and have been there since. Supported by two “armed response vehicles” – ARVs – in which Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine guns are kept, they help unarmed officers to work the beat from dusk until the middle of the night.
Armed policing is, in itself, not new in Britain. It is a part of daily life in Northern Ireland, and people on the mainland are used to seeing armed officers at airports, City of London checkpoints and siege incidents.
But since Nottinghamshire police put armed officers on the beat, forces around the country have been watching closely. The officers and community leaders I spoke to in Nottingham admit there is no going back.
And the precedent it sets for the rest of the country is not lost on the local population. “This is a watershed,” says Delroy Brown, a community leader at the Afro-Caribbean national artistic centre in St Ann’s. The district is racially mixed, but most of the recent violence has involved black youths.
Brown does not dispute the need to do something, but wonders whether the police have thought through the race-relations implications of their actions. “This marks the paramilitarisation of the police. If they are armed, within five years you will see a disproportionate number of black youths being killed by mainly white officers.”
The police are sensitive to such fears. They insist the decision was taken only after considerable consultation with the council and residents. Price is adamant that the community is united across all ethnic groups – white, black and Asian – in supporting the move. He and his officers on the ground say there was no racial element in the violence and there is no racial element in the response.
According to Inspector David Powell, chief inspector of operations, the use of guns is only part of a broader strategy of combating criminality and drug dealing. The police and the council are targeting resources at the youngest gang members – around 12 years old – in an effort to stop a downward spiral into crime.
“We’re trying to give communities the confidence to stand up against violent behaviour,” he says during a guided tour of the locations in St Ann’s and the Meadows where the shootings occurred.
At first glance the Meadows seems an unlikely guinea pig for tough policing. There are no high-rise blocks: it is a collection of one- and two-storey houses subdivided into flats, with small paths and cul-de-sacs. But for all the people-friendly intentions, the design has only encouraged criminality. Getaways are easy along the maze of narrow, dark pedestrian lanes.
He shows me the spot in Abbotsford Road where one victim was shot in January as he was cycling home after midnight. Three youths had been trailing him in a Vauxhall Cavalier. One of them shot him in the stomach with a shotgun, causing serious injuries. It was one of nine shootings in just over a fortnight.
“We’re trying to wean residents off a culture of acceptance, from just shrugging their shoulders,” Powell says. His force is developing “information-sharing protocols” – encouraging people to snitch, sometimes through a third party if they are not comfortable approaching the police.
In both districts the trouble only begins at night. At dusk the six officers assemble at the force control room. They check their weapons and ammunition as they receive their instructions. Then they make the 20-minute drive into the city. Some nights they are armed, some not. When they are, they are under orders not to hide their weaponry as they tread the narrow alleys of the Meadows, and the wider, more exposed streets of St Ann’s.
The streets are very empty. For weeks now, there has been little for them to do. The show of force seems to have persuaded the gangs that used to roam the streets to keep out of sight – at least for the time being.
Black community leader William Stewart wonders whether, long term, it will work. “It’s heavy-handed,” he says. The strategy will not tackle the real problem: “None of us, least of all the police, is getting through to the kids. The ones involved in crime are the ones who are not being reached.” We are sitting in the local pub, The Poets’ Corner. Its owners have agreed with police that it should open only in daytime. At nights the potential for violence is too great. The evening before we met, the greengrocer’s next door had been burned down.
Nottingham is not exceptional. Its gangland problems do not rival those of Manchester or other major cities. Many locals point out that Nottingham is a vibrant city, with a resurgent cultural life and new buildings going up. According to Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South, increasing disparity in wealth in the city is one of the main causes of the problem.
The police, he says, “have been hung out to dry. They’re trying to tackle a problem that’s as much economic as anything else. Many of the regeneration and retraining schemes for areas like St Ann’s and the Meadows are short-lived. The money moves on as quickly as it arrives.”
Several community leaders I speak to, as well as the local Baptist and Anglican priests in St Ann’s, say that while the police were assiduous in consulting about Operation Real Estate in general, they were not entirely open about the specific decision to bear firearms.
The police say that some people are being selective with their memories; that everything was done to inform them, from pieces in local papers and community newsletters to public meetings. It was only when the issue came to national prominence that “certain people in Nottingham, who had been behind it, began to criticise it for their own political agendas,” says one police official.
The problem for the police now is that they could be locked into a strategy from which there is little escape. Each Friday, Price and his team carry out a progress report, partly on the basis of intelligence gleaned from the community. For the past few weeks he has concluded that the threat of violence has receded, and ordered his men to leave their weapons in the ARVs. But this, he makes clear, can change week by week.
So far, so good. Crime rates are down, criticism is muted. The figures are impressive. Since the operation began there have been only a handful of shooting incidents. More than 150 arrests have been made; a number of trials are about to begin. About 15 guns have been recovered.
But as with any deterrent, it only works if the other side knows that you are prepared to use it. And what if the unthinkable happens – someone is shot by the police during the operation? “The first time anything goes wrong it’ll be the last time the strategy has any credibility,” says Simpson.
Dr Karim Murji, a criminologist at the Open University, believes British policing is at a crossroads. “This debate about guns is part of the mythology of British policing,” he says. “We are in fact much further down the line than most people realise. The experience of the last two decades shows that it’s impossible to roll back on arming levels once they have been established.”
The main worry seems to be that we will go the way of the US, where easy access to weapons produces a more trigger-happy police culture. But what about Europe? It is perfectly normal in, say, France or Germany, to see a couple of armed officers, pistols in holsters, walk into a café or bar. If this were to become the norm in Britain, would it really be as bad as we imagine?
Intriguingly, there are now fewer police in Britain being given firearms training than there were in the 1980s. The number of officers authorised to carry guns has declined from 13,000 in 1983 to 6,300 in 1998. However, the number of armed operations has grown steadily, mirroring the growth in the criminal use of guns. Forces are specialising, providing more intensive training for what is, in effect, a new elite type of officer.
Two centuries of tradition have left Britain almost unique in the way it polices its communities. Police organisations, from the Association of Chief Police Officers to the Police Federation, are officially sceptical about a move towards the regular use of weapons. The last survey conducted by the federation showed a wide of range of views among officers about who should be trained to use arms and who, if anyone, should carry them. The majority remained doubtful about the effectiveness of regular armed policing, and wary of its social consequences.
But this latest incremental step is one of the most significant yet. “Whether they admit it or not, they are making a statement here in St Ann’s,” says Brown. “We are being used as a laboratory for a bigger experiment.”
It is easy to see what would constitute failure here: a breakdown in community relations, perhaps following a fatal shooting by police. But what if the Nottingham experiment is deemed a success? What if crime rates stay low and most members of the community say that – for all their initial fears – they now feel safer with armed police and want them to stay?
Then, for all the attempts by Nottinghamshire police to play down what they have done, they will have set an example that other forces will inevitably follow.
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Police take guns on routine street patrol Nottingham:
In a break with the famed British tradition that police are unarmed, officers carrying handguns in clearly visible holsters have been used on foot patrols in parts of a city. The operation marks a significant extension of the arming of British officers.
The armed patrols have been introduced in Nottingham to tackle a feared escalation of gun crime, much of it thought to be drugs related.
None of the officers involved has fired a shot during the six months of the operation. Nottinghamshire Police said the principal aim is to reassure people worried about criminals using guns on their estates.
The chief police officers’ association said it did not mean that Britain was moving towards arming officers. But the leader of rank-and-file officers suggested it was another step on the road to an armed force.
Guns have often been issued to officers at courts, sieges and armed robberies, and a number of city forces have made increasing use of armed response vehicles carrying trained firearms officers.
However, the Nottingham operation appears to be the first time outside Northern Ireland that armed officers have been used in routine patrolling on British streets.
The armed officers in Nottinghamshire Police’s D Division – covering the St Ann’s and Meadows areas – have been used as part of Operation Real Estate, launched in the spring when a spate of shootings, in which no one died, threatened to escalate gun crime in Nottingham.
Around 20 extra officers were drafted into the division, most of whom are qualified to carry firearms.
Nottinghamshire Police stressed that it was not a case of “bobbies on the beat” being given guns, but the use of specialist officers as one part of an operation to crack down on those carrying weapons. Unarmed community officers are still patrolling in the area and senior officers are assessing the operation week by week.
A force spokesman said: “It is about reassuring law-abiding citizens. Officers have firearms which are highly visible. This was a specific operation to target violence which was escalating and to prevent that escalation.”
She said that, so far, 150 arrests had been made and at least 15 firearms recovered.
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: “I can’t say categorically this is a first, because forces makes their own decisions. “But I’d be hard pushed to think of an exact parallel to the Nottingham case, where officers have been deployed on foot patrol in this way.”
Fred Broughton, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: “None of us wants to go to an armed service, but we all see we are moving gradually towards it. But it has to be based on the risk, rather than a general decision to arm.”
The city has seen 14 shootings this year, including a 23-year-old shot at point-blank range at his front door by masked gunmen. In another incident, shots were fired into a house where an 8-year-old girl and her family were sleeping.
Many residents welcome the presence of armed police on the streets, but others were wary.
“It didn’t help in America, and there has got to be a better solution,” said Marian Webster, 43. “It is true that more and more youths are going to get arms, but I don’t think it is going to be the answer.”
Nick Marshall, 26, said he thought the police had no option. “The criminals are carrying guns,” he said. “I think police should be able to defend themselves.”
Des Wilson, the Nottingham City councillor for St Ann’s, said most people in his ward shared this opinion. “It’s a pity the police can’t extend it to other parts of the city,” he said.
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