The claim
“There are more armed police officers, there are more armed response units.”
David Cameron, 19 September 2012
The background
The Prime Minister moved quickly to reassure the public over the deaths of two policewomen in Manchester yesterday.
Mr Cameron praised the bravery of Britain’s police officers,the vast majority of whom are unarmed, and called the double murder a “despicable act of pure evil” – sentiments impossible to disagree with.
But he also made a factual claim about the number of armed officers in Britain.
We’ve been tracking the progress of funding cuts to frontline police units closely. Have armed response teams really been spared?
The analysis
Figures released by the government in response to a parliamentary question show the number of authorised firearms officers in England and Wales fell last year.
They went down from 6,979 in 2009/10 to 6,653 in 2010/11. That’s a fall of 4.7 per cent, bringing numbers down to their lowest since 2004/05.
So – a potential black mark for the Prime Minister, but is this slight decline in armed officer strength anything to worry about?
While the number of firearms-trained officers has dropped, the number of incidents in which the use of armed police was authorised also fell over the same period, from 18,556 to 17,209, or by just over 7 per cent.
We also have figures for incidents involving Armed Response Vehicles. These are cars, usually modified BMWs, crewed by firearms specialists who are placed on permanent patrol in urban trouble spots. Operations fell from 14,089 in 2009/10 to 13,346 in 2010/11, a 5 per cent drop.
So it could be that forces are simply responding appropriately to fluctuating levels of demand. Equally, it could be that none of these changes is statistically significant.
The fall in strength from 2009/10 to 2010/11 is the first in a decade, and we don’t know whether that’s a blip or whether the trend has continued in the latest financial year.
There is a caveat to make here in that these figures relate to all police officers who have been trained and authorised to use firearms, not necessarily officers who are actually deployed in armed response units at a given time.
Flying Squad and Special Branch cops are permitted to use sidearms, for example, but are unlikely to be immediately available to answer emergency calls.
Rightly or wrongly, a number of police forces regarded armed officer strength as sensitive and refuse to make the figures public. They are routinely excluded from responses to Freedom of Information requests, for example.
So it’s almost possible to track the number of officers who are specifically assigned to armed response duties nationally. Could budget cuts have forced chief constables to reduce the size of these teams?
We think it’s unlikely. Although statistics for the whole country are unavailable, we’ve found numbers for nine forces – Avon and Somerset, Bedford, Devon and Cornwall, Durham, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Northumbria, Surrey and South Wales.
That’s nine out of 43 constabularies in England and Wales, so it’s just a small snapshot. Across those forces, there were 506 officers assigned to firearms units in March 2010, and 499 in March 2011. So hardly any change at all.
And we know that forces appear to be making an honest effort to protect key frontline resources while managing budgets.
Anecdotally, it’s hard to imagine chief constables singling out the small but vital firearms teams for serious staffing cuts.
The verdict
On the government’s own figures, Mr Cameron is wrong to say that there are more armed police on patrol, although we need to see the 2011/12 figures to know whether the dip between the previous two years is just a blip.
Even if numbers are going down, that may not be cause for panic.
Incidents that require an armed response have also dropped, and the bigger picture is that serious crime involving firearms has fallen fairly sharply over the last decade, as this graph from the House of Commons library illustrates.
You are less likely to be shot dead in England and Wales than almost anywhere in the world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
These figures show that there were 0.07 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2011, the 15th lowest rate out of 116 countries. The only safer large countries were Algeria, France, Norway, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
And while the death of every police officer in the line of duty is a tragedy, fatal shootings are mercifully rare here: there have been six in the last ten years, compared to more than 500 in the US.
By Patrick Worrall
