sek510i

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45180120 Three people injured, no fatalities. A Ford Fiesta appears to have driven into Parliament's outer walls, causing non-life threatening injuries to three pedestrians. CCTV and full report in that link above. This attack seemed pretty half hearted, if it was deliberate.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45098391

New technology coming out in London is a bit lik ANPR for people's faces. Any related mod possibilities?

It's probably why prisoners are violent when they are allowed out of their cells. They've been stuck there for so long, they must have a lot of frustration and energy built up. Also, how are they meant to be rehabilitating people?

Low pay, poor conditions, little to no public recognition (and lots of people think you're probably taking bribes anyway). It's just sad that it's got to this stage :/

Most British response ever, but last time I checked, the Met police still had Teapot One in service. It's an old catering van, but it's still a police vehicle ;)

I suspect that it's an attempt to appear more eco-friendly. Air in London is at potentially toxic levels of pollution, so they're under a lot of pressure to do something (or to be seen to do something) about it. That's also why they're talking about charging diesel cars to come into the city.

Buzzfeed News have claimed to have found evidence of widespread corruption within UK prisons, including the high security prison HMP Pentonville. Their accusations, which they claim are based on internal reports, suggest that corrupt prison officers have smuggled guns and ammunition, as well as drugs and mobile phones into several prisons. One prison officer claimed that accusations of corruption against their colleagues were never investigated, despite some officers being accused of helping prisoners to escape. The UK government refused to provide the total number of internal corruption reports. Former prison officers claimed that whenever they raised concerns or reported colleagues, accusations of corruption were not properly investigated, or that officials tasked with investigating allegations were themselves corrupt. https://www.buzzfeed.com/richholmes/the-prison-corruption-cover-up?utm_term=.iyAYMZj2K#.xjVV145xg I doubt the low salaries are helping, but there also seems to be very limited protection for prison guards from threats. At least one of the prison officers who has been convicted claimed that they were being threatened by people outside the prison. Is this level of corruption a surprise for anybody, or is this roughly what you expected?

The accusation I've heard today is that a Hackney police officer strangled the suspect while trying to stop them swallowing drugs. The IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) seems to be backing up the idea that he had something in his throat, but don't have an official cause of death yet. As @Kallus Rourke pointed out, most evidence isn't really public at the moment, so it's too soon to make a proper judgement. It does seem like violence is unfortunately likely, but I haven't seen any signs yet that it's going to get out of hand like the London Riots did six years ago. This stuff happens, people throw stuff. It doesn't always blow up.

Legalise handguns and massively increase gun crime overnight? Or do you mean give AFO status to any officer who wanted it? As long as standards of training don't drop, I wouldn't object to an increase in armed police officers. It's just that I don't think that universal arming is needed. If they just offered an AFO to each police station, perhaps that would be an improvement. Or did what some forces are doing, and training traffic cops as AFOs (they've already got the fastest cars and most highly trained drivers, so they can cover a wide area faster than conventional cops)

One of the founding principles of UK policing is that the police should not bow to public opinion; a police force's success is measured by the absence or presence of crime, and not by the public's perception of it. Regardless of how much of the public want more guns, the police themselves are still voting against routine arming. I do think that the TSG AFO idea might work, but I still don't see what's wrong with just increasing the number of ARVs. If they're spread out and in high enough numbers, they could deal with most incidents fairly quickly. Also, some areas don't seem to have a need for more ARVs. For example, Wales has more of a problem with drugs, and their officers have never fired a shot outside training. I don't see the point in spending more money getting more AFOs in Wales when they could fund people to deal with the drugs problem instead. I'm just thinking that practically, there isn't enough money to arm these quantities of officers, and there's a lot of other stuff that they need to fund properly as a higher priority.

Tommy Robinson (or whatever his name was originally) is not representative of Britain in any way. I've lived here my entire life, worked with a wide range of rich and poor communities, from MPs and businessmen down to street level drug users, and I have yet to meet somebody who does not think that he's an idiot. There are plenty of problems in the EU. I just think that arming the police would cost a lot of money, and that money could be better spent elsewhere (like recruiting more officers and civilian support staff, or funding more training for officers). At the moment, a surprisingly large amount of London cops aren't trained to drive with lights and sirens. I think that stuff like that is probably a higher priority than giving them all guns :/

The second example showed a tactic that I've been told is deliberate. Don't surround a suspect fully, let them move and keep a constant distance between you and the suspect. Against knives, this allows officers to build up numbers and keep the suspect distracted until the officers decide to act. They had tasers on scene, and guns would not have ended the situation any better. The third video is a symptom of massive understaffing in the police. If they had had guns, they would have struggled to justify using them on any one member of that crowd, and against a large number of hostile but unarmed people, the police need numbers more than additional weapons. And they really do need the numbers, which is why I would prefer to see more officers and staff than more guns. You probably aren't aware as he's not too well known, but the last two videos came from a very disreputable source. That youtube channel and the user associated with it have a long history of stirring up racial hatred, and of misrepresenting events to suit his agenda. When he's not in prison, he's usually producing misleading videos like that last one. The final video is part of a demonstration that followed a pre-agreed route through London, and the police officers being filmed were leading the crowd through the city. They went past the place I used to work, and there were plenty of cops at the back of that crowd as well, making sure that the demonstrators kept on moving. It got violent, but only in sporadic outbursts, as many demonstrations do.

Armed with a taser? Great. With a gun? I still don't see the need. I think that increased numbers of ARVs would be more effective, without compromising standards. Alternatively, if violent crime continued to rise and it did become necessary to arm significantly higher numbers of officers, the Scandinavian system of storing guns securely in police cars would probably be better than giving handguns out to whichever officers were willing to take them. That way the option is always there, but it doesn't have such a big effect on public perception of the police, and makes situations less likely to escalate unnecessarily.

I'm obviously not suggesting that they're right, just that waiting for them to reach that stage doesn't seem like as good an idea as trying to prevent them getting there in the first place :/ My issue with this comes when there's no trial or judicial oversight. Without that, it's hard to tell if they really are terrorists. Security services still make mistakes, and I don't support any system that allows a single organisation to do something like that without at least having another organisation to check their work. Why not use the UK system? Detention without trial, but with a time limit before the case needs to be heard. Information doesn't have to be publicly released, but a judge does need to see the police and security service's evidence before they can hold somebody beyond a certain point.

People who feel neglected or persecuted by a government will usually try to find ways to oppose it. If somebody's a Muslim in an area with lots of attacks on Muslims, I can see how a small minority of their population might be radicalised. I'm not sure that all countries are doing enough to stop these problems at their source. If Muslim populations were happy, I reckon that far fewer of them would turn to extremes like this. Many countries now seem to be locked into a cycle where a terrorist attack causes persecution of the general Muslim population which feeds terrorist propaganda videos online which inspire more terrorist attacks. Currently most countries are preparing for the attacks themselves, and trying to stop them before they've happened, but they don't seem as capable of dealing with online extremist material. Some areas also seem to be struggling to deal with hate crimes against Muslims, which feed into extremism. I'm glad that these people were stopped before they caused harm to themselves or somebody else, but there will be more like them unless the government takes a more holistic approach to dealing with counter-terrorism operations and stopping radicalisation. Also, detention without trial or time limit? How the heck do they justify that one?

If Welsh police forces are anything like London's, they probably have a few police stations equipped with armouries that equip armed response officers at the start of a shift, before they head out on patrol like normal units. Could that have been what they were referring to?

The government seem keen on making the public feel safe. I don't think that the police here need to be routinely armed, and there are probably better ways that they could spend the money that it would cost, but it's hard to tell if the government's motivation is a cost benefit analysis or just making the public feel better about themselves :/

I expect that recruiting more officers to firearms units would only be possible in large numbers with some changes in the IPCC. They seem to be used to placate the public more than they are to investigate crimes (at least, that's what my view as an outsider is). Tasers would be nice, but they're up to £700 per officer, so it's unlikely that they'll be universal as soon as they need them to be (they are expensive, and money is short. Unless you're the DUP....) I doubt that it's practical to equip all police officers with guns. If they can't afford tasers, the more expensive training and firearms equipment is unlikely to come in. There's probably a better way to spend that amount of money, too. The Met does seem a bit more grounded than most of those programs. I agree that most people probably don't know what the policing situation in the UK really is (especially when it comes to officer numbers).

The UK may well need more firearms officers, but I don't think that arming all cops is the answer. I do think that more armed cops would be good, but so would more conventional cops. And specials. And community support officers..... We already have a pretty good response time for the recent terrorist attacks. I don't think that introducing guns into everyday (but still highly stressful) situations is a good idea when the people in those situations have voted several times to stick to tasers, batons and CS gas (and talking to people). I'd trust their judgement over the media or an internet forum. At the moment, most cops here seem to be calling for some more firearms officers, more taser training and more officers, but not guns for all.

I thought that we were all going to have a discussion about a far right terrorist attack in London, and somehow you ended up concluding that the US is harder than France to invade (not that I have any intention to invade either, in case you were wondering), and that guns don't stop terrorist attacks happening. These fora are full of surprises ;)

I doubt that UK style gun control coming in overnight in the US would have much of an impact, which is possibly why people in the US don't always understand how well it works here :/

Because guns are really useful tools to stop people randomly swerving out of a flow of traffic into a crowd of people? London's attacks would have been far worse if their attackers had got their hands on guns. Gun control here means that when these lunatics do attack people, they have to use cars and knives, which makes it far easier for normal people (and the police, who do have access to guns) to deal with them. There is no justification for arming civilians to deal with terrorist attacks; the police have the guns, and when they're the only ones in a given situation with guns, that gives them the advantage. The police themselves have requested that civilians do not arm themselves to deal with potential attacks, both because it's illegal and also because it would make it harder for police to judge the scale of the problem and identify attackers from civilians. So, in conclusion, gun control is working out great for us Londoners.