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Strictly speaking, the only requirement a police officer need meet to be armed is to be authorised by a substantive Superintendent or higher. Hence the term 'Au
by multjoy 10y ago
Strictly speaking, the only requirement a police officer need meet to be armed is to be authorised by a substantive Superintendent or higher. Hence the term 'Authorised Firearms Officer'.
All ARVs are AFOs, but not all AFOs are ARV. The difference is about 4 weeks (9 weeks vs 5 weeks), and the majority of that is the additional tactics around search and 'call outs' which an AFO (usually being entirely reactive) would not deal with.
The training is intensive, but there's no specific psychological screening beyond the instructors (and colleagues) realising that an individual officer ought not be trusted with a pen, let alone a firearm. There's more screening to become a sexual offences/CSE investigator than there is to become an AFO.
There are more AFOs than you'd imagine, and the majority of them will be only carrying a sidearm.
>They have to follow a rigid set out protocols before they can engage a threat.
No, the protocols are far from rigid. The training means that an AFO is fluent in the 'National Decision Model', which means that they can make dynamic assessments of risk without being hamstrung by a rigid "if this, then that" set of behaviours.
>I'll exclude Charles de Menezes from that, since I still believe that he was shot by armed SAS soldiers operating in public on British streets, authorised by the home office
Then you've been reading too many conspiracy stories. The whole thing was a fuck up from start to finish, but there's nothing in it that needs the SAS to be involved. If they had been, they would have had their own tactical command and De Menzes would probably still be alive.
- junto 10y agoThe comment about the SAS came from an active AFO, who worked in London at the time. I don't want to give any more information than that. I'm probably risking too much by just saying that. The comment was quite specifically, "we aren't trained to do that (execute suspect by putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger), but they are at Hereford". It's hearsay, but far from your usual conspiracy theory.
- multjoy 10y ago>"we aren't trained to do that Most AFO's weren't. Some were, as part of Op Kratos. That was the problem - there was a massive disconnect in training between two sides of the business (the CT side and the ARV side) which meant that when commands such as "stop him", were given, the expectations of both parties were very different. Don't forget that a common-or-garden AFO on an armed OCU would have had his five weeks training, with bi-monthly top-ups, whilst the AFOs offering armed support to surveillance teams will have been massively upskilled. Had an SAS team been deployed on a surveillance job (and I literally cannot imagine the circumstances that would require that), then tactical command would have been taken by soldiers who would (generally) have been clear and explicit about the task ahead. As it's been held that De Menzes was mistakenly identified and that there was only implication that he might have been a bomber rather than any explicit statement that he was, it is unlikely that there would have been the massive cock up in communications that resulted in him being shot.