Tony Long - Lethal Force

Full transcript: Tony Long on London Real

4:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tony Long, the retired veteran of the London Metropolitan Police Elite Specialist Firearms Team. For 25 years, you were deployed on hundreds of dangerous operations, including the Millennium Diamond Heist in 2000, the Libyan Embassy siege and the hunt for the 7-7 bombers in 2005. I was here at that time. You were tasked to take down terrorists, hostage takers and killers, and execute your work sometimes with lethal force.

5:16 You’ve shot five people on the job, killing three, including Azel Rodney, for whom you were charged with murder and then later acquitted. You’ve written your story in a book called Lethal Force, My Life as the Met’s Most Controversial Marksman. Tony, welcome to London Real. Thank you. Thank you for being here. You spent your time around the corner in Old Street.

5:35 Yeah, literally five minute walk. For 17 years. Near 20, I think. For 20 years. What was it like, Shortage, back then?

5:44 It wasn’t as trendy as it is now. I think one of my colleagues once said if God was going to stick an enema anywhere in London, it would have probably been Shoredage. Shoredage is the enema. Yeah, it’s pretty rough. There were lots of old warehouses, lots of empty properties, bomb sites, still sites that had been bombed during the war that still hadn’t been rebuilt.

6:05 Now we’ve got new buildings. But you can still see that element of what it was like in some of the side streets. And you were there, it started in 83. I came to Old Street in 83. I joined the police in 75. So I’d done about eight years in the job before I ended up on the firearms unit.

6:23 And it just happened to be here with the firearms unit? Yeah, the magistrates caught up the road, had a police station alongside it. It long finished being a police station and it was just manned by the firearms unit. It was just our operational base. And you joined that unit 15 years after it had started, correct?

6:41 Well, it actually started in about 1967. And it was as a direct result of three police officers, unarmed detectives out in patrol in a car, stopped the vehicle. There were three guys in the car. One of them was a guy called Harry Roberts. And all three police officers were shot dead. Really brutal killing.

7:03 It was only about a year or so after hanging had been abolished. Two of the suspects were arrested quite quickly. But the guy, Harry Roberts, he disappeared, went to ground. And he’d served in the army in the jungle of Malaya and Borneo. And he was quite adept at surviving off the land. And it took quite some considerable time to find him.

7:26 And so whenever members of the public would see some guy, you know, like a vagrant or whatever in a field, they’d call up the police and say, I think I’ve seen Harry Roberts. And cops would go out with revolvers to try and find him. And as it was, they eventually caught him. But what it did is it highlighted just how ill-equipped the British police were to deal with any armed operations. I mean, I had a colleague of mine and he was just given a gun and said, right, you need to go out and search for Harry Roberts. He said, well, I’m not authorized on this gun. You know, I’m not trained on it.

8:03 And they went, you’re an ex-serviceman. And he goes, I was a stoker on the battleship. You know, I’ve never handled one of these things. You know what you’re doing. Just go out and do it. And that was pretty much how it was until my unit was formed in 67. It was called D11, D6, and then D11.

8:20 And our primary job was to train the 4,800 divisional guys, detectives, just ordinary patrol officers. But it was very much a part-time thing. So they didn’t carry those guns 24-7. They didn’t carry those guns whenever they were on duty. They would literally get called back to the police station, draw a gun, because they’d been a robbery.

8:41 So I’m from America, if you didn’t realize already. And so the concept of the police not being armed is kind of a new one for me. And so also, when I think of Britain, I’m like, you know, you were heavily involved in World War I, World War II. It’s not like the population didn’t know how to fire guns or manufacture guns. And yet, coming back from World War II, the police force isn’t armed. Is that a tradition that’s always been something British?

9:05 Well, interestingly enough, I think it was right up until the 1920s, 1930s. I mean, the Metropolitan Police was formed, I think, in 1839. And originally, they were issued with, you know, cutlasses and then wooden sticks. And then there was a period in history of the Metropolitan Police where quite a few police officers were shot and killed. Mainly on lonely foot patrols on the outskirts of the London Metropolitan Police District. And so in those days, they were allowed to take a revolver out. They used to call them comforters.

9:40 You know, but it was a personal choice. If you wanted to take it out on night duty, you could take it out. And I think the first shot fired by a Metropolitan Police officer, funnily enough, I’m told, was a police constable long. And he was on Black Heath and he saw a house on fire. And what he did is he fired the gun in the air because he couldn’t wake up the occupants of the house and he managed to save the occupants of the house.

10:00 What year was that? Probably late 1800s, I would have thought. So just traditionally? So they did carry firearms. But then, obviously, during the Second World War and the First World War, you know, they had to guard key premises and a lot of police officers would have been trained in the use of firearms.

10:19 But historically, the vast majority didn’t carry arms and that’s just continued to this day. So it’s only been a relatively small percentage of officers. So when I joined the unit in 1983, as I said, we were training 4800 shots to a pretty low standard. You know, we were doing as best we could, but they didn’t get taught any tactics, for instance, they just got literally taught how to safely handle the gun, load it and shoot it with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

10:49 And they were the guys that were going out and kicking indoors and arresting armed suspects. So by the time I came along in the 1980s, in 1983, and joined the firearms unit, as an instructor, I would spend three weeks a month on an indoor range teaching these other guys to go out and do the same thing. And I would go out and do the armed work. And then one week a month, I’d come into Old Street, I’d be given a an old pager, gas powered pager about that big.

11:18 And then I would be one of an eight man team, a SWAT team for one of the better words to use an American term for the whole of London. And we didn’t really do a great deal. You know, we get called out when, probably when one of the local cops had screwed up or, you know, something had gone, gone long. It had become a siege or something like that. The suspect wouldn’t come out of the house. And then we’d get, we’d get called in.

11:42 So for my first year, most of the stuff, the few jobs that I did were call outs to that type of situation, siege situations. This is an 83, 84, 85. Yeah. And the type of gun crime you watched it change from that mid 80s into the mid 90s. Can you tell us what was it like and what did it change into?

12:00 Well, we’ve always had terrorism since before I joined the Metropolitan Police, you know, in the, in the, in the early seventies, I joined in 1975. But in the early seventies, we had over spills from Bader mine half and black September. So we had Middle Eastern terrorism that was, that was, you know, ending up all over Europe and all over the world. So aircraft hijacks and that sort of thing. We obviously had the IRA problems that really sort of the more recent trouble starting about 1970, 1972, round about that period.

12:29 And of course that over spilled onto the mainland. So the IRA would attack targets and plant bombs and go on shooting campaigns in the capital, predominantly in other major cities. So we had that to police. So we always had terrorism. It’s always been there. You know, it’s always been something that we’ve had to deal with.

12:47 And that would be under your responsibility, not some type of. Well, you’d have, you had the anti-terror squad, but they were predominantly detectives. But yes, they would be trained in the use of firearms. And in the early days, they would be the ones that went out and did the raids and arrested the terrorist with a two inch five shot Smith and Wesson revolver. Okay. Which is ridiculous, right? Yeah. Yeah. You need a long gun when you’re dealing with terrorists. Yeah, absolutely.

13:08 And so in 1975, they decided to give the firearms instructors a formal role. They needed something. And I tell you exactly what it was. It was as a result of international terrorism and specifically it was as a result of the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games where Black September shot 72. So they shot and killed a load of Israeli Olympians. And it was a big wake up call for police forces and military units around the world.

13:41 It’s a great movie called One Day in September, I think. Yeah. So in Germany, they created GSG-9, which was made out of the border guard. And in the United Kingdom, they went right, Special Air Service Regiment 22 SAS were given the responsibility for dealing with, you know, CEGs and terrorist incidents in the UK. I remember when I watched that movie, I remember the Germans, because of World War Two, they had almost gone anti-security. Oh, yeah. And so the whole population just didn’t want to hear about we need to arm ourselves or be ready.

14:13 Was the UK suffering any kind of backlash there? Well, the UK always has, I think. And a lot of it’s because of this, you know, when the police force was first started back in the 1800s, you know, it was not long after the Napoleonic war. There was no police force. You know, the Metropolitan Police was one of the first police forces in the world, major police, major cities to have a police force.

14:38 We had a system of, you know, local watchmen that, you know, walked around with an oil lamp and a stick. You know, that’s how it was. And so when the police were first started, they were very, very mistrusted. And there’d been a couple of situations where the army had had to be called in to, you know, events of public disorder and people had died. And so, you know, as much as it doesn’t know how to police, no, of course, and in much the same way that, you know, in the United States, you know, your constitution is, is written around, you know, being able to fight a tyrannical government. You know, the British had a very similar attitude. And so when the police force was originally created, it was set up in such a way that it was made to look absolutely nothing like a military body.

15:30 I mean, the early police obviously in the UK, in London wore top hats and tail coats. So they looked like gentlemen and not like… So this whole unarming was all about making the population feel safe that, you know, the police weren’t going to attack them. And that’s just continued, you know, pretty much to this day. Interesting. It’s almost like people are tired of the war. Like you said, the Napoleonic Wars, and they don’t necessarily want to see people armed around them and see people policing them.

16:03 I don’t, you know, I’m not an expert in that area. I’m not a historian, but, you know, for whatever reason, you know, we’ve we have, you know, maintained this image of being unarmed. And one of the key things in modern history was in the mid fifties, there was a black and white film made, which was hugely supported by the Metropolitan Police. They provided assistance to the production company and it centered around a main character, a guy called George Dixon, who was an old school, local community constable.

16:42 Everybody knew him. He knew him. He’s unscrupulously fair. And at the end of it, George Dixon, the main character, gets shot and killed by a hooligan, you know, young hooligan. And that film was called The Blue Lamp. And when I joined in 1975, they were still showing that on your first day at Hendon Training College, as if to say that, you know, it was almost like a subliminal sort of Soviet era, you know, film.

17:13 It was supposed to make you go away from it thinking, yeah, you know, I’d rather die as a quietly spoken, honest British Bobby than a walk away, you know, with my revolver smoking like some New York cop. You know, it was that whole thing. Whenever you have this discussion about arming the police, it’s always about we don’t want to be like America. Well, why would we be like America? We don’t have the volume of firearms that are available. You know, we don’t have we have no right to keep and bear arms, you know.

17:40 Why would we not if we armed our police, why would our police force not be more like the Swedish police or the Dutch police or the French police? You know, it’s not it. But there’s this sort of paranoia about arming the police. And interestingly enough, the current commissioner, Sabern and Hogan, who’s just about to retire when he took up post around about I think he’s round about 2012. He was interviewed on radio and he or by newspaper news asked who he modeled himself on. And he said, George Dixon, I modeled myself on Dixon, a dot green.

18:11 Well, he was a mythical character. He never existed. You know, when I joined in the 1970s, you know, George Dixon didn’t exist then, you know, that there might have been individuals that were a little bit like him. But collectively, the police, the Metropolitan Police were rough men. You know, that expression, we sleep easy in our beds at night because rough men walk the streets prepared to do violence in our name.

18:36 And, you know, they were, you know, they were rough men and women, you know, and they took no, took no quarter, you know, they didn’t have any guns to protect themselves with. But they weren’t afraid to use their fists and get waded in, you know, and we were called a police force, you know, then around about mid 80s, they decided that we were police service. I’ve never serviced a violent drunk into the back of a prison van. You know, I’ve had to force a few in. So, you know, but there’s always been this sort of desire to maintain this, this image that we’re perhaps something that we’re not, you know, realistically.

19:12 You mentioned that word policing and then because that’s an interesting word. Like, what does policing mean? And you mentioned that when the army was traditionally brought in, people would get killed. And, you know, what the terrorism events that happened in America and, you know, in 9 11 and I was there and you saw the army come in and you can see very quickly the difference between a police force and an army. What does policing mean to you?

19:33 Policing, in simple terms to me is, you know, when I joined in 1975, the first thing you got taught, and I’m not going to make an idiot of myself by trying to quote it now, but it was basically the meaning of the word police. And it basically said that police is the word given to an organization that exists in most civilized countries to maintain the peace, protect the public. I can’t remember the exact words. But, you know, that our job in simple terms is to make sure that we’re a law abiding society and to, you know, arrest offenders if they commit an offense.

20:14 And I think that’s one of the problems is that policing in the UK now really know what it is anymore. It was very simple. You know, that your job was to uphold the law, you know, without fear or favor, arrest criminals. And hopefully the courts would lock them up. Now police officers are expected to be social workers. You know, it’s very simple to me. You know, they’re now talking about, you know, you can’t join the police service unless you got a degree in the United Kingdom.

20:42 To me, a police officer is someone that can read and write that is physically and mentally robust. You know, they can get in a fight. They can chase a suspect, you know. They have more most importantly common sense and compassion. And that is really the only requirement for police to my way, you know.

21:05 I mean, you mentioned compassion. I mean, a part of the policing job is to make relations with the community. Right. Absolutely. And make them feel safe. Yeah. To be a part of it. Yeah.

21:13 Whereas when an army comes in, they just are there to kind of go out the violence necessary for the people there. And it’s a nuance about a police force. Right. Well, you know, actually, the British military are probably better than many or thought that they were better than many because they had been fulfilling a policing role in Northern Ireland. But yeah, you’re right. I think, you know, it is difficult for the military, you know, although, you know, they’ve done policing roles in, in, you know, the Baltic states, you know, they’ve done, you know, after the, you know, the fall, the original fall of Saddam Hussein.

21:51 They tried doing a policing role and were reasonably successful for a matter of months. Yeah. Even in Afghanistan, you see them trying to police because they go out, they sit with the leaders. Yeah, of course. They try to cultivate relationships. Of course, you know, get information and, you know, hearts and minds, you know, giving medical aid to, you know, kids and, you know, people.

22:10 And of course, that is part of their job. But at the end of the day, you know, they’re also war fighters. And to an extent, you know, it’s also true. The police is difficult. It’s always been a difficult thing to win the trust of the population, particularly in inner city areas where there’s deprivation.

22:30 You know, I think that’s something that someone said it’s like 300 languages spoken in London. You know, it’s difficult for the police to have the trust of communities and try and draw information from them, you know, and, you know, arrest sons and daughters. Do you know what I mean? It’s a tough job. It always is. It will always be a tough job. Of course it will. And there will always be people on both sides saying you need to improve this and you need to improve this.

22:55 If you look at London, you know, there are, you know, especially in the outer boroughs, there’s places where, you know, 90 percent of the public give police total support. And there’ll be other areas, you know, in the city deprived areas where that will completely flip flat, you know, and it’ll be 90 percent don’t trust the police. Right. You know, it’s always like you said, it’s going to for always be a problem in policing. Yeah. And I want to get your thoughts on the future of that in a little bit, a little bit later.

23:22 Now, you now are in this special unit. What is it called? Well, when I joined it, it was called the 11. OK. And D stood for department and department was training.

23:32 So that really sort of explains why we started off trying to people. Our primary job was to teach people. But as I said, you know, eight or nine years before I joined, we were given this operational role. So we had this we were the SWAT team for the United for the Metropolitan Police Area. The defacto SWAT team. Eight guys. Right. Eight guys with with handguns and shotguns.

23:56 OK. But now you’re part of that force. You’re actually removed from policing duties. So you’re not out there making relations with the communities. I find that very difficult, actually, because I’ve you know, I had I like to think I think any of my my colleagues of that era would say that I was quite a good street duty police officer.

24:15 I went to Lewisham, which was a busy semi division with lots of the sort of issues that we’ve just been talking about. And, you know, I was considered a thief taking somebody that made arrests and I had good local knowledge. I had informants that gave me information that allowed me to make some quite reasonably quality arrests. And as a result of that, because I was deemed a reasonable police officer, I was selected for a unit called the Special Patrol Group, the SPG, which was quite controversial in its day, because it was a pan London.

24:54 It was like the commissioners, the commissioners quick response force, if you like. So if it could be anything, it could be, you know, if a kid went missing and all of a sudden we need to get lots of manpower to search the woods and, you know, search public spaces for this kid, then the Special Patrol Group would go. But equally, if there was a riot, you know, if it kicked off and, you know, there were bricks and bottles being stoned, the SPG would turn up.

25:18 So unfortunately, or fortunately, we have a way you look at it, we sort of had a reputation of being the heavy mob. You know, the Special Patrol Group were extremely unpopular, you know, 1970s and 80s. There was a lot of unrest. We had big CND demonstrations. CND stand for?

25:34 So it was for a civil nuclear disarmament. Okay. You know, we were right in the tail end of the Cold War at that stage. So we had Reagan and Maggie Thatcher up against Russia and cruise missiles, American cruise missiles and British soil. There was a lot of stuff going on that, you know, particularly the left, you know, weren’t happy with.

25:54 There’s a lot of trade union issues. And the Special Patrol Group would always be there policing, you know, the worst and the most violent of those demonstrations, including Brixton riots. So you remember from that it was 81, right? Well, I’d literally joined the Special Patrol Group a week or so before that I’ve not even done my initial training with them. So I wasn’t trained to work behind the right shields. We had no proper right gear then we had no we just had a Bobby’s helmet with extra straps on it.

26:26 There was no body armor. There was no fire retardant clothing, you know, and police officers got wounded. Oh, yeah. And really badly. So I mean, I’ve got some photographs of a good friend of mine that I worked with on day one of the riots.

26:39 I wasn’t actually their day when I’d taken the day off. And we were we had married quarters at the time. So I was living in a block of flats that was entirely inhabited by police officers. And one of the one of the families decided to have a party. So I’d taken the day off to go to this party and lots of officers that were in the flats who were, you know, we were expecting to be attending just weren’t there and we couldn’t what was going on.

27:05 And a couple came back saying, wow, it’s kicked off in Brixton. It’s been a horrendous riots. And we turned on the TV and we couldn’t believe what we were watching. You know, it was just I don’t think I mean, we’d had serious public disorder before. But this was I think probably the first time petrol bombs have been thrown.

27:20 OK. And I went into work the following day to find that my unit, which was based it was a special patrol group unit that was based closest to Brixton. Literally, you know, a mile away from the heart, the seat of the of the riots had been particularly badly hit. And, you know, the officers that were there, that had been there the day before, clearly, you know, a lot of them quite traumatized by what they’d been through. There were officers missing. Like I said, one of one of my friends to this day, you know, when he gets a suntan, you can still see the the weather straps melted into his into his flesh.

27:58 But so that we went out that day, you know, to patrol Brixton and there was still seats of trouble. There’s more petrol bombs that night and bricks and it went on for a few days. And the people in Brixton had thought that the officers had not given medical attention to a local boy. Yeah, exactly. What happened? Well, I understand it. And there’s this day, I think there’s some dispute about what happened.

28:17 But basically, a young black guy was stabbed by another black guy and was running. And all of the police officers didn’t realize there was some confusion about who was the knife man or whatever. So they grabbed the guy that was wounded, immediately realized that he was seriously injured, started administering first aid, called for an ambulance. But it was taking the ambulance a while to get there. So a police vehicle pulled up and they said, we can’t wait for an ambulance.

28:44 Just put him in the police car and get him to a hospital. So this bloodied, you know, black kid was seen being put into the back of a car and driving off. And it just spread like wildfire, the rumor that the police had killed this kid. OK. And did the police have a bad reputation anyways in Brixton?

29:02 Well, you know, there was probably, it’s probably fair to say there was some heavy handed policing going on. And like I tried to say earlier, it was kind of the way that it was. You know, we weren’t a social, we weren’t social services. We were a police force. And, you know, we saw it quite simplistically.

29:17 I think that our job was to uphold the law, you know, and I think certainly in the there was a one particular street in in in Brixton called Railton Road that was known by the locals as the front line. And there was a lot of criminality that was going on there, quite overt criminality, and they saw it as their territory. And so there was open drug dealing. There was illegal gamers. There was illegal alcohol being sold in illegal clubs.

29:42 And the police in quite simplistic terms saw it as our job not to allow that. And so you were aggressive, projected force. Yeah, but there was, you know, there’s two sides to every story. And I think, you know, that it was predominantly I think we were confused because, you know, the Metropolitan Police had been around since the 1800s. And this was this was we were just starting to see this wave of problems from the second generation of young West Indian kids that had been brought up in this country and just felt totally isolated.

30:15 You know, the first generation that came over came over to work. And, you know, undoubtedly, you know, undoubtedly, there was racism in society. And, you know, certainly the second generation, you know, thought, you know, with some degree of, you know, probably quite rightly that, you know, that they were getting picked on or whatever. But equally, and they were pissed off, but equally, they wanted to sort of continue with a culture that was acceptable in Jamaica, for instance, where smoking cannabis was seen as something that everybody did.

30:49 But of course, in over here, it was illegal. And to us, we was like, well, if it’s illegal, we should stamp on it. And on top of that, I think unemployment was probably 50 percent. It’s huge. Young black males probably.

31:00 We just, you know, we’d not long come out of the 70s and we were in the early 80s and, you know, they’ve been bad times. You know, it’s a bad economy. Bad economy. I mean, I remember I remember our marriage quarters when I was a young cop. Basically, we had one of many, many power cuts and we bought a load of candles.

31:20 But what we didn’t realize is we bought outdoor candles. And when the lights all came back on again, the whole house was black with soot. We covered in soot. My baby was covered in soot. Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, there was, you know, pay was poor.

31:30 Right. And on top of that, Thatcher apologized to nobody for any of that stuff. No, absolutely not. She said, criminals should go to jail. Do you think she was harsh? You probably agree with her.

31:41 Yeah, I think so. I think we actually saw her as a breath of fresh air because we’d had, you know, labor governments that seemed, you know, in our opinion, you know, they were held up by the trade unions. The trade unions, you know, we saw it, you know, the people that were bringing the country to. There weren’t many labor support in police officers. Right.

31:58 You know, most of us were conservative. Just like there’s not many Democratic four-star generals in America. They want to do their jobs. Right. They want to put the trigger and get in there.

32:09 Yeah. OK. Have you ever seen that movie Colors? It’s got Robert Duvall and Sean Hens. Yeah. Yeah.

32:16 It’s about the two cops. Yeah. I think they’re LAPD. The old guy, the gang. Yeah.

32:20 They’re kind of going to the gang gangs probably in the late 80s, maybe early 90s. Yeah. And Sean Hens the young cop. Yeah. Right. And he’s full of beans.

32:28 And like he goes to be a police officer probably because he wants to go out there and kick some ass. Right. And I’m guessing that’s how most people want to go into the police or the military. Right. Well, you know, it’s interesting because that’s kind of how I was rightly or wrongly.

32:43 You know, I’ve been brought up on a diet of TV cop shows and swenies. And well, yeah, the swine head came out actually after I’d applied for the police. But yeah, certainly the swine had a big influence. I thought I want to be a detective because all the coolest cops. I don’t necessarily want to walk around with a Victorian helmet on my head.

33:00 You know, I wanted a bubble perm, you know, a moustache, flared jeans and a two inch revolver. And I wanted to be chasing bad guys over rooftops and getting in car chases. And for Americans don’t know the Sweeney, he was kind of this irreverent kind of badass police detective. They were there with the Sweeney still exists. The Sweeney Todd is Cockney rhyming slang, Sweeney Todd flying squad.

33:23 And it’s what the criminals used to call the flying squad. The flying squad in much the same way as the special patrol group was feared by, you know, street hooligans and yobs. The flying squad was feared by armed criminals because their job was to stop bank robberies, robberies on security vans. And they, you know, that was their war. Their war was stopping armed crime.

33:48 And, you know, they had a good reputation, you know, or a bad reputation, depending on how you looked at it. So, you know, that’s the reason I joined. And I thought, yeah, great, you know, car chases, you know, arresting bad guys. That’s what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until I probably had about 15 years in the job and, you know, I’ve gotten there, I’ve got wiser shoulders.

34:13 And I went back to doing regular police duty in the mid 90s for 14 months that I realized that that isn’t why people join the police. It’s why some people join the police. But a lot of people join the police simply because, you know, they think they’re going to be made redundant in their job or, you know, their job has just become boring, you know, or they just want to change. They want to challenge in life. And the vast majority, you know, are just quite content having got into the police to do what they have to.

34:45 They don’t want to set the world alight. They don’t want to be, you know, they don’t want to be causing problems. They want to be avoiding problems. They don’t want too much paperwork. They’re just human beings.

34:53 I find that hard to believe. I feel like they want to go in there and crack heads, don’t they? No, and I think this is the problem. You know, it’s like if you were to accuse a section of the public, you know, a particular, you know, racial group of all being criminals, you know, you would be racist. But people do exactly the same to the police.

35:13 Oh, the police are all racist. Or the police are all bullies. Or the police is like 31,000, you know, individuals, you know. And some people join because, you know, they might want to, you know, they might want to be social workers. You know, they might want to genuinely help people and not arrest people and keep kids out of trouble and, you know, help off duty down the local social club, you know, the youth club or whatever, you know.

35:40 There’s some people that, you know, join because they love horses when they want to get in the mountain branch. There are people that join who are big in the motorbikes, who want to be a traffic cop, you know. There’s a whole range. And a lot of police officers do their whole 30 years just as regular patrol officers because having left their job as a plumber or a butcher or baker or a candlestick maker and get into the police, you know, it’s a steady job, you know, depending on where they are, they get their respect to the public or not.

36:14 And they do the whole 30 years as a regular street duty police officer. I don’t know if I want to work with those people, though. I mean, are they really into the job? I mean, don’t you want people to… You know, like I said, you know, they’re just human beings. You know, some are lazy and some are very professional.

36:30 But when you got in, you were kind of on the swinging tip. You were like, all right, I want to do this. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. But actually what I discovered was that detectives in real life in the 70s didn’t do what detectives did in the movies. They went dirty Harry, you know, going out patrolling the streets and looking…

36:46 Playing close officers that patrolled the streets were actually uniformed officers who were taking a sabbatical and working in plain clothes. Detectives wore suits, drank too much, smoked too much and sat behind a typewriter in a Smokey CID office just writing reports, you know. So I thought, I don’t want to do that. And then I discovered actually, you know, while originally I didn’t want to wear what we call a jelly mold, you know, a policeman’s helmet and walk around the street saying, you know, morning, you know.

37:18 Actually, I found I was quite good at it and I actually quite enjoyed it. I enjoyed interacting with the public. And I found I had… I was quite good at talking to them and drawing information out, you know, and, you know, just going into… We had what we call tea holes. Every cop has tea holes. Tea holes are somewhere you can go when it starts to rain.

37:37 You go, oh, I’m in such and such a strange way. I can go in there and get myself a cup of tea, take the helmet off, sit down, have a chat. And it might be, you know, a shop, you know, where you go in the back of the shop and they make you a cup of tea. It might be, you know, an office block or something like that. Or it might just be a private member of the public who you’ve met because they reported a burglary one day.

37:57 Community relations. Exactly. And I found out, you know, despite my desire to get in car chases, which I still had, and cars were so easy to steal them, you know, you literally got in car chases every day of the week, really. You know, you generally had to look at a Ford Cortina and the doors fell off, you know. So if you enjoyed policing and you were good at it, why leave it?

38:18 Because I went on the special patrol group, which is something I’d always wanted to do. When I realised I didn’t want to be a detective, I’d heard about this unit, the special patrol group. And I thought that’s something I want to be a part of. I was very much a team player. And while I was quite good at going out and walking the streets on my own, you know, I’ve always sort of been a team player.

38:38 And I was into shooting, you know, as a sport. You know, I’d been brought up not in London, but on the south coast in Sussex. And, you know, I had air guns as a kid. And then I got a shotgun when I was entitled to home one. And then I got a firearm certificate and I had handguns when they were still legal.

38:55 And I started shooting for a local shooting club and I started winning competitions and I found I was quite good at it. So when I was on the special patrol group, I was offered a firearms course, as pretty much everyone on the special patrol group was. And I did my course, it was one week. Well, it wasn’t even one week. It was. Yeah, it was. It was one week.

39:11 It was four days of shooting and one day of tactics. Really bare minimum training. And I’d go out on armed operations with the special patrol group and we’d do drugs raids, you know, where there was some information that the bad guy in the address had a gun. And we’d all go crashing in and it was all pretty amateur when I think back on it. But I enjoyed that. And then they introduced a time limit that you could be on the special patrol group.

39:37 They said you could only be on it for four years. And I was nearly in my third year. And I thought, well, I need to I need to find somewhere else to go. You know, when when I leave the special patrol group and we did an exercise, a place called Lipitz Hill, which still exists. It’s an old Second World War prisoner war camp. It’s still got the original wooden huts and listed buildings now.

39:59 And in the Second World War, they kept German and Italian prisoners out there and there were firing ranges up there. And it was where D11 did their did their training where you went to do your firearms training. And we got called up there for what turned out to be an anti-terrorist exercise. And the SAS were there all dressed up in a black kit with MP5 submachine guns and all the rest of it. And they didn’t have that stuff. Well, we did because there was certainly we didn’t know the special patrol group.

40:26 We just had revolvers. But there was D11, the firearms trainers with the berets at a jointly angle and, you know, nine millimeter pistols and stun grenades hanging them off. And I thought, and one of the guys there, I used to know from when I was at Lewisham and he came up to me, you know, what are you doing up here? And we were we were searching for dirty bombs was what we were doing. That’s our part of the exercise was to go out with these little Geiger counter things and find these dirty bombs that these notional terrorists had planted.

40:52 And there was I with a set of old green coveralls on a pair of Wellington boots and a flat police cap on my head, feeling and looking like a bit of an idiot. And there was these guys, you know, loaded for bear and looking pretty Gucci. And I thought, I could do that, you know, I could do some of that. And my mate said to me, why don’t you put in for it? It’s great. You know, we have a great time. So that was it. I did it.

41:15 And I passed the selection. The selection was six weeks. It was predominantly about training. It was about how to be a firearms instructor. There was no real input on the operational role whatsoever.

41:25 And I passed it. And very shortly thereafter, I got transferred in. And I asked myself, what the hell have I done? Because I really did miss police work because we weren’t being deployed very often. Most of my time, like I said, three weeks in four was spent teaching other guys to shoot.

41:45 And they were the ones that were going out and kicking indoors and doing all that sort of stuff. But slowly, slowly but surely, because of mistakes made by those lesser trained officers, there’s always a consequence. You know, the police only move on when mistakes are made. Well, I’m just the police. I think society generally, you know, wait until there’s a big problem. And then we sort it out, you know.

42:08 And so that one week initial firearms course that I did became two weeks. And then divisional commanders became reluctant to use their lesser trained guys and started using us more. And then we couldn’t cope with the amount of extra work. So we had to bring in extra guys who were not interested. And slowly and surely it grew. And you saw the gun crime change from white guys holding up banks to now drug crime.

42:35 Yeah. So we saw no longer the white guys. Well, white guys and black guys. But what we did have is we had we started to have a big cocaine problem and crack cocaine. Right. Of course, that comes from South America and it comes through the Caribbean.

42:49 And what we were finding was that Jamaican known as yardi gangster had had a lot to do with that importation. The white guys that had been doing a lot of armed robberies that we had been interdicting now, once we started getting used more, we started being at the coalface of the fight against those predominantly white professional criminals that were doing it. They were sort of what’s the I’m trying to think of the heist movie. I don’t know what you mean. Do you remember Heat? Yeah, Heat. Yeah.

43:23 You know, they you know, there wasn’t huge firefights, but, you know, they were they planned these operations like white collar. Yeah, they’re very much so. You know, these were these were guys who who came predominantly from criminal families in the East End of London and Southeast London. And when they did a robbery, they planned it, you know, they probably five or six getaway cars planted around. So which if it if it didn’t go right, whichever way they ran, they had backup cars.

43:48 Were they dangerous? Would they shoot police? Yeah, absolutely. OK. Be careful with them. Yeah.

43:52 Yeah. But what happened is because we were acting on intelligence led operations, we weren’t playing catch up. We were there waiting for them. And so we found ourselves in situations, as I did in 1987, where, you know, we ended up confronting them. They had guns in their hands. We had guns in their hands. And, you know, they got shot.

44:13 And so those same white criminals started going, this is starting to get a bit dangerous now. We didn’t mind it when we were sticking shotguns in the faces of unarmed security guards and unarmed bank tellers. And now we’re getting shot. So they started diversify into drugs as well. So this was the 90s, early 90s. So, you know, we had the rave parties and ease and all that sort of stuff going on.

44:36 So they started investing the money from the the robberies that they did into drugs. So they would bring in cocaine. You know, then, of course, you had to say that. And you had the rival situation where you had the yardie gangs and the predominantly white gangs clashing over cocaine and all the rest of it. And you had Turkish gangs, you know, not exclusively, but Turkish gangs in North London started getting involved in the heroin trade again.

45:03 And heroin, because obviously, heroin was coming in through Afghanistan and, you know, via Turkey. And so with that, the type of weaponry that we started to confront, you know, instead of being some old war relic that some guy had smuggled back from the Second World War, we were now starting to confront more serious weaponry. Because they had financing. So they buy. And I think generally speaking, you know, there was in the old days with the sort of predominantly white robbers in the sort of 70s and 80s, there was a bit of an unwritten law.

45:34 You know, it’s like we won’t shoot you if you don’t shoot us type stuff. And I think, you know, the detectives flying squad guys, you know, they weren’t shooters. They were detectives first and foremost that also carried a gun. So I think it was for some of them a lack of confidence in their ability to shoot. And, you know, I think it’s probably fair to say that they were because of that probably more hesitant to shoot than perhaps we were.

45:59 But that changed with you because now it was it was people. It was big business, right? Well, it was big business. But also, you know, we as firearms officers were professional firearms officers. You know, that was our job. Our job was to deal with armed criminality.

46:14 And I think because we spent much more time training and training to a higher standard, we were less reluctant to actually open fire if we had to. That said, the vast majority of operations that we would go on, we made arrests safely. And, you know, without anybody being hurt, you know, the criminals were were arrested without them being harmed. But nobody talks about those, do they? No, of course not. No, absolutely.

46:45 You get talked about like I mentioned the hundreds of jobs you’ve been on the Millennium Highs, the Libyan embassy. But people talk about the five people you shot. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, last year is a classic example. The commissioner spoke in his final speech the other day and said that in 2016, the Metropolitan Police deployed armed officers on 3000.

47:05 Operations or an excessive 3000 operations and no shots were fired at all. You know, that’s not untypical. You know, if shots are fired, then they might be shot fired in one or two situations during a whole year because, you know, we used to plan jobs to the death. You know, we would anything that we could do to be as cunning as the criminals, you know, the criminals were gonna I mean, the one job that we did where we had some yardies that were dealing drugs.

47:34 From a flat. They’d been raided by unarmed officers before. And every time they were raided, they built up their defenses until it got to the point where they just couldn’t the unarmed regular cops and it was normally the units like the special patrol group just couldn’t get in anymore. Well, we’d started to specialize in what we call MOE, which was method of entry. So we had, you know, thermic lances for cutting through bars, we could abseil, we could do all sorts of things.

48:02 So we did got information that these yardies have now put back drills, not only on the windows and on the front door, but halfway down the hallway as well. So they’d split this apartment, two bedroom apartment in two, so they could safely deal drugs and it would take a long time for the police to get in. So we rented the apartment upstairs and we went in as builders together with some civilian guys from the Met Police Engineering Branch. And we built a great big scaffolding frame in the living room and in the back bedroom. And we took up the floorboards until and we saw through the joists and we actually apologized to the drug dealers for the noise that we were making knocked on a door dressed as builders.

48:42 And then on a given day, we turned up with boxes as if we were the new guys moving in and we played the music loud to cover all the final bit of soaring we had to do. And at a given time when we had information from an undercover guy that had gone in and made a buy, that the drugs were there and all the rest of it, we just fast-stroked through their ceiling and the bad guys just didn’t know what the hell had hit them, you know. And we loved that. Anything that we could do, all the tactics that we’d train for, for the big job like a hostage rescue or an anti-terrorist job, if we had the opportunity to do that against drug dealers, even if it was just a method of getting in covertly, then we would do it and we would plan it and plan it and plan it like a military operation.

49:31 And every one of those drugs raids was great practice for the big event. Right. Let’s talk about this book. This book wouldn’t have been written if it wasn’t for Azel Rodney. No.

49:44 And what happened on that day in 2005? You start the book off by talking about that. You’re in that car. I watched a documentary on Channel 4. I highly recommend everyone to watch it. There’s the videotape from that day.

49:57 But we wouldn’t be here talking to you because you would have stayed anonymous because that would have been safer for you. Absolutely. You would have retired. So in a very strange and twisted way, and I’m sure you’ve thought about this a lot, this book was written because of this traumatic incident. You’re absolutely right. I had actually retired. I should have retired in 2005. I got involved in the incident with Azel Rodney on the last day of April 2005.

50:25 So, you know, 100 days, almost to the day, from the date that I was due to retire. And then, of course, there was an investigation that followed that. In the meantime, I’d been recruited for a job with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which involved armed protection and would have involved me traveling to some of the more dangerous parts of the world in a protection role, which I was thoroughly looking forward to. I saw it as the perfect exit strategy for after, you know, 33 years of…

50:54 Sorry, 30 years, doing very exciting police work. And… But then, because of the length of the period of time that the investigation took, and because the paperwork then had to go to the Crown Prosecution Service, which is like the DA’s office, I suppose, in the US, that job offer disappeared. And so I ended up staying on for a further three years. I actually retired in 2008. A completely different job. I went to work in the commercial world as a door opener to the police and military to sell equipment.

51:31 And I was doing that. And then in 2012, there was a judge-led public inquiry into the shooting. And the reason for that was, in the United Kingdom, if somebody gets killed or somebody dies, there will be… If there’s any circumstances or anything other than natural death, you know, someone under the doctor, for instance, who dies in hospital or whatever, there will be an inquest and a coroner’s inquest. And more often than not, there will be a jury and they will listen to all the facts and they will make a decision about whether it was a lawful killing or a death by misadventure or suicide or whatever it might be.

52:12 Now, with the Azela Rodney incident, like many, many operations that we went out on, it was intelligence-led. And that intelligence was coming from a source which in the United Kingdom is covered by something called the Regulation or Regulatory Investigative Powers Act or RIPA. And that covers things like phone taps. So I’m not saying that the intelligence we were getting in the Azela Rodney case necessarily came from phone taps. It might have been, I have no idea where it came from. But we were getting fed intelligence that turned out to be very accurate intelligence about what they were up to.

52:48 But that intelligence in the United Kingdom isn’t admissible in a court of law. You can use it to formulate a plan to make an arrest, but you have to obtain the evidence by another means, by filming them, doing it, by catching them with the drugs on them, whatever it might be. So when I shot Azela Rodney… It’s kind of like an unauthorized wiretap in the States. You couldn’t use that to do something.

53:13 Yeah, but it is authorized. In the United Kingdom, the difference is it’s highly restricted. It’s not my forte, so I don’t know the actual legal thing. But somebody high up will have to authorize that phone tap if that’s what it is. Or a car being bugged or a building being bugged or whatever it might be.

53:35 But you can’t use it for evidence. You can use it for intelligence that will lead you, hopefully, to the evidence to get a conviction. So a jury or a coroner wouldn’t be allowed to listen to, say, for instance, a tape recording of the bad guys talking to each other. So consequently, when I confronted Azela Rodney and the other guys that were in a car, we knew that they were on their way to rob Colombian drug dealers, rival Colombian drug dealers, who they dealt with in the past and who they bought drugs from in the past. But we knew that they were going to go and kill or rob and kill these Colombians and take all of their cocaine.

54:14 And we knew that they had guns in the car. And the intelligence tended to suggest that the weapons were two Mach 10 submachine guns, which is a very crude, very dangerous weapon. It’s got a cyclic rate of fire of about 1200 rounds a minute. So we’re in excess of 1000 rounds a minute. So if you work that down, that means a 30 round magazine is going to go in what, you know, I think you’re talking about two seconds.

54:43 Yeah, you reckon that 18 rounds is like a second night. So in a half a second, they’re going to find nine rounds before you can pull your trigger finger. Quite possibly, because that might that half second might be the same as hand time. It takes me to realize he could have pulled the trigger and release nine rounds. But they’re horribly inaccurate.

55:02 Yeah. And ironically, they’re more dangerous in the hands of someone that’s untrained. If you put one in my hands on a range and I knew I wanted to hit a target, I would lock it out and fire short bursts. But it climbs hideously because the cyclic rate of fire. So it shoots from the hip and they don’t know what they’re doing and it strikes glasses everywhere.

55:21 No, we do. I describe it as a lead super soaker. It’s just going to and the rounds go, you know, it’s popular in the L.A. gangs in like the 80s. Yes. And the reason it was popular, it was popular in London in that period of time.

55:33 And the reason that it was popular, we were having a real problem with it, particularly in what we called Trident shootings, which were there’s a thing called Operation Trident that was set up in the 90s and still exists as far as I’m aware to deal with black on black gun crime. And so, you know, we talked about the white criminals in the 70s and 80s that would use a sawn off shotgun or a pistol or whatever it might be, go and rob a bank. You know, they would take guns out as a means to an end. What we’ve started to find when we started to get problems with the yardies coming over from Jamaica, they would import the same level of violence that they were used to doing in Jamaica.

56:15 And it’s a horrendous violent culture. It can be. And this sort of thing where people were getting killed because they disrespected someone, you know, because they in one occasion we dealt with a guy who had been in a legal drinking club. He’s a yardie, someone had trod on his new shoes at the bar. He even his mates threw this guy out of the upstairs window, went downstairs and shot him in the head for treading on his shoes.

56:44 And we had to go around and arrest these guys. So his new level of violence, but as I was Colombian, no, this were these were these were Jamaicans. But in this particular case, so going back to Zell Rodney, there was we had just saying that you were dealing with new or higher levels of violence. Much much. There seemed to be, you know, far less respect for life. You know, people would get killed, as I said, simply for looking at someone else’s girlfriend.

57:07 And not what all the old cops say, though, the kids these days don’t respect life. I think that I think it was definitely a case that when I joined, you know, if there were someone had a dispute with someone, you know, it would normally be dealt with by fists or a bottle might get smashed across someone’s face or something. It’s a totally different ballgame to deliberately go out, perhaps days after the event and shoot someone specifically, you know, because of disrespect or whatever.

57:33 What does that mean for you? Just violence levels are higher. Violence levels were higher. There was more of a willingness to shoot. And also the type of weaponry, you know, they weren’t going to be satisfied with a with a saw and eye shotgun.

57:43 They wanted things like Mac 10s. And but it’s very difficult to get hold of that type of weaponry in the UK. You know, actually, you know, this is something I think is probably quite unique in in the UK, as opposed to other parts of Europe, where guns are more readily available. Quite often, the criminals don’t own their own guns. They will be a local criminal armourer who will rent you a gun, you know, and if you don’t fire it, you get your you get your deposit back, literally.

58:09 But if you fire it, particularly if you shoot someone, well, you know, get your deposit back, you know, and actually, ammunition is is more difficult to get hold of in many cases than the guns themselves. So, you know, you might go go go go out with a Mac 10 sub machine. I mean, you might only have like five rounds in it because that’s all he can get his hands on. So you have this intelligence that could be Mac 10s in the car. You know, you’re going to approach this car.

58:29 Yeah. And my job, I was in what we call the Bravo car. So basically, we go out and normally go out in a four car configuration. So you have Alpha car, which is the lead vehicle, Bravo car and Charlie car. And then behind that, we would have a control vehicle, which was quite often the people carrier of that type of vehicle.

58:46 And in that vehicle, you’d have your tactical commander, the detective inspector who’s in charge of the operation, who we’d call the silver commander, he’s like the ground commander. And they would in that vehicle, they would be getting the intelligence feed in to tell us, all right, we now know that they’re going to go towards and they’re going to meet in a cafe and they’re going to pick up another gun or whatever. Well, now, yeah, they’ve got the gun and they’re on their way to to rob the Colombians. And so we have a we have a system that’s I’m not giving any trade secrets away because it’s all come out in open court now.

59:20 But when we’re following the surveillance team, so the survey, we’re not surveillance trained guys, you know, with with a firearms team. So we’re there to initiate the arrest phase and safely arrest the suspects, hopefully without any danger to the public ourselves. So when the surveillance team are doing their magic, you know, what they’re good at, they’ll be what they say we can call wrapped around the suspects and we’ll just let them get on and do with their thing.

59:42 And that’s called state green. So when state greens in place, we’ll just hang back, we’ll listen to the communications and the intelligence feed and just stay back. And when the commander decides that he’s got sufficient evidence and he wants to make an arrest, we then go to state amber. And what state amber means is the surveillance team now need to start looking in their mirrors because we’re going to be start working our way through the surveillance train to get up to the front so that we’re in a position to put strike in.

1:00:11 And then when we get into a position where we are right at the front, now all our three vehicles are all lined up, all our all our ducks are in a line and we’re behind the bandit car or close to the bandit car. State red will be declared. And what that tells everybody on the operation is that the arrest phase is or the, you know, the interception is now not necessarily imminent, but it’s we’re ready to go. So it may well be we get state red and then find that we’re in a really busy shopping area or, you know, in a near a school or something.

1:00:39 And we’ll just we’ll just continue in state red for another mile or so, perhaps. But at some point, once state red has been declared, we will put the intervention in. And the way that works is the alpha car doesn’t overtake. And it does it in a way. Certainly the way we used to do it then was that it would try and do it in in such a way that it’s the sort of overtake that if someone did it to you, you’d be like, what the hell?

1:01:01 You know, your attention would be a focus. But you probably probably took the horn bit of road rage. And then what happens is that lead vehicle starts to break sharply so that now all the occupants of the vehicle, particularly the driver, are concentrating on, you know, what’s ahead of them. At which point the Bravo car, which I was in, will come alongside the Charlie car will come up behind. So we’ve now got it blocked in.

1:01:27 The front seat passenger in the Bravo car, which was me, you were in the front seat. We’ll cover the bandit car just long enough for my colleagues to deploy. And it’s quite aggressive. You know, it’s a it’s a we will smash glass if we think that the bad guy is going to try and reverse out or try and run his way out. We’ll use shotgun breaching rounds, which is normally used for shooting locks and hinges to deflate the tires.

1:01:52 And the idea is it’s a shock and awe type thing. It’s we want to hit them so fast and so hard that they just, you know, sensory overload and they just don’t shoot. Right. So they don’t shoot you. And 999 times out of 1000. That’s exactly what happens. You know, how many of those have you done?

1:02:10 Hundreds. Hundreds. OK. Blast the windows out. Yeah. Most of the times they just freak out. They get down. Yeah.

1:02:16 We just smash the windows. So yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, the day this operation actually got on for two days and on day one, I was the driver of the Bravo car. But the guy I work with, guy called Smudge, we both like driving.

1:02:32 So as well, OK, you drive the day I’ll drive tomorrow sort of thing. So that’s just happened to be if you like driving. You like shooting. I like driving. I like driving. So, you know, I did my I was never a particularly good driver.

1:02:47 I didn’t I didn’t I couldn’t drive until I had about three years in the police. Well, then towards the middle of my service, I was sent on an advanced driving course. So I like to be busy. I don’t like to just sit in the car in the backseat and be chauffeured around. I want to play tricks with your brain anyway.

1:03:04 I just find if I’m driving, I feel like I’m more part of the operation. So anyway, day one, I’m driving day two. Pure chance. I just happened to be the guy that’s in the in the seat. You’re in the seat.

1:03:14 You’re watching this guy in the backseat. He’s panicking. He’s looking around. You think you’re made. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was convinced as soon as we went to state red or as soon as we started to do the the the overtaking or even prior to that, you can see if you listen to the video on YouTube, you’ll hear someone quite early on in the Delta car because on this day, one Delta had the camera.

1:03:37 Yeah, the camera. Right. So we normally go out for Bravo Charlie. But because of the intelligence build up on day one, my team leader decided to have an extra car with us. So we had an extra car with three guys in it. And you can actually hear, I think it’s the driver of the Delta car going, you either go in the back is looking round.

1:03:51 And that was 30 seconds, perhaps before we actually put in the intervention and I ended up firing. So you’re hearing that you’re you’re in the back of your brain. Mac 10s are a possibility. You’re also hearing drug dealer on drug dealer crime. So they’re going maybe to kill people.

1:04:08 Yeah. And so all that’s going on in your brain along with judging all the situational things as well. Yeah. OK. So my recollection of it when I wrote my statement, sort of 48 hours after the incident, right? Which we’ll talk about recollections later. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

1:04:24 My recollection was that it was just like any other job. It was just a conventional thing. The Alpha done its overtake. We came along smoothly. I saw the bad guy looking to his left, looking to his right, ducking down across the back seat, which was just completely out of comfort zone in terms of what I would expect someone to do in that situation.

1:04:43 And then suddenly sprang back up again. Shoulders were hunched. And I was convinced at that moment that he picked up a weapon, almost certainly a Mac 10. And but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see his hands because they were below the level of the door.

1:04:59 My recollection that when I wrote my statement was that, as I said, it was just one smooth thing. And I must have seen it all through the side window. And certainly there came a point where I decided I couldn’t give the guy any more time whatsoever. I was convinced he’d pick up the gun. I was convinced my colleagues who were deploying were now vulnerable.

1:05:18 And I made the decision to open fire. So I preempted, which in law I’m quite entitled to do. You know, the law on the use of force states quite clearly that it would be ludicrous to expect to you to have to wait for the first punch, for you to be punched before you can punch back. It allows, you know, if circumstances prevail to have a preemptive strike. And clearly it’d be ludicrous to think, well, I’ve got to wait until he opens fire with a submachine gun and kill some of my mates before I can open fire.

1:05:48 So I made the decision to shoot and I continued to shoot until I perceived that he was no longer a threat. He slumped across the back seat. Eight rounds in two seconds. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:59 Semi-automatic. So your bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Yeah. And of course, as soon as you open fire on that type of window, that safety glass, it frosts. OK.

1:06:10 So I probably fired two or three rounds really quite quickly before the hole expanded to about that big. And I could see. But it was the way I described it in court was it was a bit like looking at, you know, looking through a hole in the ice into a pond, you know. So I didn’t have a particularly good vision, but I could see he was still there. And as long as he was still there, I perceived he was a threat.

1:06:28 So I continued to shoot until I thought he wasn’t. I fired it. Effectively, I did. I fired six shots. Then I lost sight of him. And my perception was it was because we’d moved forward.

1:06:39 It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that actually once our vehicle came to rest, it stayed at rest. Because all our cars have what we call IDT. Then I asked me what it stands for. But it’s effective. It’s like a black box in an aircraft cockpit.

1:06:51 So it tells you when you break, what speed you were doing. Did you sound your horns? All this sort of stuff. And so when they what they did is they combined the black what they got from the black box together with the video and came up with a computer reconstruction. So, yes, I thought it was because my vehicle moved forward. Well, if my vehicle didn’t move forward, then what must have happened, you know, logically is as El Rodney must have slumped forward so that I could no longer see him behind the frosted glass.

1:07:19 And I remember pushing myself back in my seat, seeing he was still there and find the last two shots. And then he then he disappeared below the level of the window. And that was it. But these things happen really, really quickly. And how do you feel after something like that happens?

1:07:39 You know, it’s it’s it’s I’ve been I’ve been involved in three shootings where I’ve had to shoot people, you know, whether they survived or whether they died. And the aftermath that there are huge parallels. I wouldn’t I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t would describe it as guilt or or what it is. But I’ve always felt an urgent need to carry on doing something and not dwell on it, get on with something, whatever it might be.

1:08:08 You know, can I can I cuff the suspects up? You know, can I do some first aid? Can I move a vehicle? What can I do to keep myself busy? Because I don’t know whether I don’t know whether it’s guilt because I’ve just had to do what I’ve been trained to do.

1:08:23 It’s very difficult to put my finger on it. But it’s an adrenaline dump. Yeah, possibly. Yeah. You don’t feel guilty because you said before there are suspect, there are suspect, there are suspect when I pull the trigger, there are cardboard target.

1:08:34 Yeah. But then once that once that cardboard targets down, it’s not a cardboard target anymore, is it? You know, when if you’ve seen, as I saw with the Zell Rodney, the effect of my rounds and I saw, you know, I saw, you know, gaping what I thought were exit gunshot wounds to his head. I saw a skull, you saw a grey matter in his brain. Yeah. You know, he’s not a cardboard target then. OK. And you don’t see that that often.

1:08:58 So it’s only you’re in the coroner’s office getting things. So that’s probably a little repulsive to you. Yeah, I think, you know, you never really get I mean, some some guys do get used to it and girls get used to it. You know, if you’re a traffic cop and you spend a lot of your time dealing with fatal accidents, you know, and you’ve seen people that have, you know, been run over by a lorry when they’re on a bicycle and the head’s been flattened, you know, or.

1:09:18 You know, you’ve seen internal organs all over the place when a motorcycle rider has come off his motorbike at 100 mile an hour. You know, you know, you do get accustomed to it. I’m sure you do just like, you know, like a coroner, you know. Yeah. But guilt seems strange.

1:09:33 Well, perhaps it isn’t the right word. I don’t know what it is, but it’s just like you’ve done. You’re not supposed to kill other people, you know, as a human. You’re not supposed to do it. It’s not in our genes to do that. Yes, I’ve trained to do it. And yes, I was prepared to do it. But still, when you find yourself having done it, I said, guilt’s probably not the right word.

1:09:55 I don’t I really don’t know how to describe it. But like I said, there’s always been this overwhelming desire to do something. So my first incident was in 1985. And I shot a guy who was in the process of stabbing a little girl. Yeah, that’s why I’m worried.

1:10:11 You can’t do you feel guilty about that? No, I don’t feel guilty about that at all. But but there was that overwhelming desire to get away from what I’d done. OK. I thought I’d killed him. Right.

1:10:20 And so my overwhelming desire was to find the girl to grab the girl and run down the stairs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so that was your way of just kind of getting through that moment. Yeah.

1:10:29 Yeah. Get away from it. And I mentioned it in detail in the book is we hadn’t as a unit, we hadn’t fired any shots in 1985. And there was a sort of an unwritten rule that we all thought existed that if we did shoot someone, we’d be straight back to regular police duty and would never carry a gun again. Really? Because the unit had a sort of proud boast that we had never had to fire a shot. And we genuinely thought there were individuals who genuinely thought that was because our tactics were so good and our slowly, slowly catchy monkey negotiate, you know, was always going to work.

1:11:07 OK. Or is it back to that movie from 1950 where part of you subconsciously thinks you don’t want to be that guy? And so, yeah, but, you know, it was almost as if like, you know, the person that fires a shot will have broken that perfect run. But I saw the footage on YouTube. You’re like the first one in that window. Like you toss the grenade and you’re diving through the window to shoot that guy.

1:11:29 Well, that yeah, but that wasn’t that again. That was just right. Right place, right time or wrong place, right. Wrong time. Our actual plan. We had we had we had a deliberate action plan. And that was to breach the front door and go through the door. If that failed, if that door didn’t open, then we’re going to go through the window.

1:11:49 And so I threw the stun grenade and that plan involved chucking stun grenades through the kitchen window, stun grenade through the bathroom window, go through the door. Right. But as soon as I threw the grenade in through the window and it detonated, I looked and my mate Rick was still trying to bash the door. But what happened was, you know, you get that wired glass where you’ve got that sort of basically what happened is his sledgehammer. I mean, we don’t have proper method of entry kit then. So he’s put the sledgehammer through and it’s a bit like a monkey and a handful of nuts. You can get his hand out. You know, the sledgehammer got stuck on the wrong side of the wire.

1:12:22 And I realized almost immediately it was going to take too long. And I just happened to be the person nearest the biggest window and therefore managed to get in. And you dove in, shot him in the head. You couldn’t really see much. Right. And you. Well, yeah, I mean, he was. Do you remember that? Yeah. Yeah. Vividly.

1:12:41 Yeah. I remember because we had been relegated to a containment role because the negotiators, the negotiators had a bad year in 1985. They’d had at least two operations that we’d gone on that became quite protracted sieges where the guy that they were trying to negotiate with killed himself. And they saw that as failure. And the negotiators were all senior officers. They were all above the rank of inspector.

1:13:07 And so the problem that we had is we would turn up with our blue berets on and they’re sort of slightly paramilitary uniform by its day, you know, with our guns and all the rest of it. And the on scene commander would go, I don’t really want to unleash them. Yeah. And then you’d have a group of guys turning up in suits and tires going, don’t worry about it. We’ll talk to we can negotiate this thing.

1:13:30 So they were the only people that had hostage negotiators, you know, the word hostage in their title. And so naturally, you know, if you’re the on scene commander, you don’t want anybody shot or none of us wanted to shoot anyone. But you certainly don’t want all the political fallout from shooting someone. So you’re naturally going to go with the negotiators. But what should happen is the on scene commander should be taking a pace backwards and listening to the tactical guys and listening to the negotiators.

1:13:59 And sitting in judgment really and saying, well, negotiate, you’ve been telling me for, you know, two days now that this guy is going to come out and he still has shown no sign of coming out. And my concern is the hostages, little girl being tortured. But it seemed to me and it seemed to my colleagues and it still does to this day that they were so obsessed with getting Errol Walker to go out there bearing in mind he’d already killed someone. He killed the child’s mother in front of her. She was in the flat still or the body was thrown over. The body was thrown out the window, but he stabbed her 14 times in front of her daughter. And that was like a 24 hours earlier.

1:14:31 Yeah. And then during that next 24 hour period, unbeknownst to us, he’d actually been torturing the child in order to get to, you know, the negotiators to see to his demands. So you went in, you took care of that. I’m sorry, but you were the first one in, right? You do that window. And so I’m reading the book and an 85. I see you dive through that window.

1:14:52 Abba twi 87. You’re in that van. You’re watching through a tiny hole, six millimeter hole. Yeah, something goes by. You think it’s on. It was a tumbleweed. You jump out and there’s guys with guns on people and you start firing on those guys.

1:15:07 And of course it’s 18 years later, but now you’re shooting as El Rodney and you’re always the guy that’s on the front line. Well, jumping in. No, because that’s the way it does. It kind of it kind of does. But again, in the book, I made it quite clear at one particular point that, you know, I was suspended after the abattoir job. I was not suspended for the investigation, but I came off of operations of my own.

1:15:32 And I think that there was an attempt by senior management to get me out of there because at that point I was the first person to have been involved in shooting. And I was the second person to be involved in shooting. And this time three people have died. And I think that in the words of one chief superintendent, he actually told me you must realize you’ll never go on operations again. You’re a political embarrassment to the Metropolitan Police. And I think I’m sure what he meant by that was that, you know, we’ve our proudest boast as a police force is that we’re unarmed and you’re screwing with that reputation.

1:16:08 So I was made to feel very uncomfortable. I was sort of marginalized and giving crap jobs and they tried. They had several attempts to unjustifiably. I think so. Because the abattoir was three guys. You shot three of them. Two died. Two died. These were white guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the record. Yeah, absolutely.

1:16:26 So and but again, you’re kind of the blemish. But by the point I’m making is that by the time I came around, I think I said in the book, I can’t remember the exact number now. I did do the maths. But about 14 other guys had now opened fire and other suspects had been killed by my colleagues. So, you know, yes, I’ve been involved in three situations where I’ve opened fire. But there are other colleagues that have been involved in similar number of one of my colleagues during that same period, sort of late eighties, early nineties, chased some suspects, came around a blind Ben was shot in the leg, went down, returned fire, killed two suspects and wounded the third.

1:17:08 So effectively did exactly what I did, but had the common sense to get himself shot. So, you know, he looked upon in a slightly different light. In fact, he got awarded quite rightly a bravery award. Would smudge have taken that shot in oh five? You know, five. Oh, yes, I’m sure he would have done. I’m sure if he’d happened to be the guy that was in that seat at that moment, if he saw what I saw, I know smudge, I’m pretty certain that he would have come to the same conclusion I did.

1:17:37 And so the force, the force to kind of tried to throw you under the bus a little bit after that year or two. And, you know, they I think it was a personality thing. I think it was just a case of I’m guessing you have it can have an abrasive personality or you do your things your own way, right? I’m I like to think I’m very honest. And if something’s not right, I think if I if you know, and I made it clear in the book, you know, that I didn’t think that the tactics that we were attempting to pull off the trick that we were attempting to pull off that day was ever going to work.

1:18:13 You know, I saw I happened by luck to see that streak as as the rock as one of the robbers ran past that hole. Right. But if I’d have missed it, like my colleagues missed it, we wouldn’t have even known the robbery was taking place. But the plan was that the the observation post, the guy camouflaged in the bushes, the detective was going to go, yeah, they’re doing the robbery now. And we would have sprung out and caught them before they reached the security guard. But I kind of knew that that was never going to happen. And I voiced my concerns about it. And those concerns were ignored. And because I was the only person that realized the robbery was happening, happening, and I was first out of the van, I just happened to be the first person there. But I think, yeah, you know, if I didn’t think things were right, if I thought we were teaching a wrong tactic, or that our training could be improved, and, you know, then I would have to do that.

1:19:06 I would I would be quite, you know, forceful in making my point. But also, I think I’m, you know, I’d like to think I’m a likable character, you know, certainly got more friends and I’ve got enemies. But I think there was a few older senior guys who saw me as, as being a bit of a whippersnapper and a bit of a, you know, the guy that screwed up their unblemished record. And I think it was like, we’ll put him back in his box sort of thing. And they just made life uncomfortable for me. And I think they were looking for me to just go, you know what, screw it, I’m gonna, you know, leave.

1:19:41 And I didn’t stay around, right? But what happened was, I think then what happens is, is there was a change of management. Some of those older guys were due to retire and left. And some of the newer management came in saw me for what I like to think I am, which is is someone that’s motivated, that had the best interests of the heart and the unit at heart and the best interest of the Metropolitan Police and wanted to make firearms a more professional, you know, the way we dealt with firearm situations more professional.

1:20:09 And I thought, I kind of, I think I reinvented myself, but I think I was, that the new, the new management realized that I was actually an asset rather than a, you know. Let me finish up with this all, because I want to talk to you about the future of the Met Police. I want to talk to you about what you see America doing right and doing wrong. There was a video camera that day and in the book you said, okay, we found out Cardi was filming. And you said something like a video camera, it’s not always a good thing, because it remembers things different than you remember things.

1:20:41 And they can play it frame by frame by frame, but they’re not you with limited intelligence trying to make a call on the fly. But most of the public would think, well, video camera always tells the truth. What I’m saying, I am not against body worn videos. I’m not against videos in cars. In fact, if we’re going to have videos, let us, everyone have a video.

1:21:04 Because I’ve seen in situations, there’s one classic one in America where two patrol cars come in at like an L, you know, one’s facing that way and one’s coming that way. And you, they’re dealing with a young guy and you see him walk across the front of the video camera in this car, you see him walk across the front and then he goes out of shot and comes back into shot just as the two cops shoot him in the back. And you think, I just witnessed a murder there. That guy wasn’t pointing a gun at them. They just shot him deliberately in the back.

1:21:35 And then when you watch the video from this car, when he’s out of shot in the first car, you see him get a gun and point it at the two cops. So the only thing that saved those two cops was that there was more than one camera there. Okay. So I’ve also seen some cameras of cops just shooting guys as well. Well, you know, so if they’ve done wrong, you know, I don’t have an issue with that. You know, I, you know, I am absolutely 100% satisfied that the occasions where I’ve had to open fire, I’ve had to open fire.

1:22:09 There wasn’t any conventional thing that I could have done that would have resolved the situation and that I had to shoot when I shot to save life. You know, I have no problem with that and I have no problem standing up and justifying it. Does the current unit have videotape plans or plans to tape them? Yeah, well, no, they do. Every armed officer, uniformed armed officer, has a carried-to-body worn camera.

1:22:30 There are technical issues at the present time insofar as they haven’t come up with a solution for officers that are involved in covert operations that are working in plain clothes, where they’ve come up, they just simply haven’t come up with a camera that’s small enough so that it won’t compromise the operation. But, you know, accurate enough to record it. So that’s one of the problems and that’s an ongoing project. My biggest concern, though, with cameras, and you’ve already alluded to it, is the fact that, you know, how many times does the jury get to see it?

1:23:04 How many times does the investigating judge get to go over it, freeze frame it, you know, get the video enhanced in a laboratory, you know? Because the more you look at things, the more you will pick stuff up. If you pick your favourite, I don’t know, scene from a movie and watch it over and over again, you know, on the 20th time you’ll notice stuff that you didn’t notice on the first one. And that’s exactly what happened to me. You know, why didn’t you notice that? Well, because I didn’t, you know. The reality is, as you quite rightly said, and I touched upon it in the book, the human brain and the human eye does not work like a video camera.

1:23:46 Video camera has, generally speaking, a far more limited field of vision. So, for instance, I’m looking at you, but actually, if I move my hand, I can see my hand now, even though I’m looking at you. Video camera wouldn’t see that, it wouldn’t detect that movement. It’s only going to see a very limited arc. But everything it does see, it’s going to record absolutely perfectly on a memory card.

1:24:10 Well, the human brain doesn’t do that. The human brain, and I’m not an expert, but if you drive to work and we’ve all done it, and you get to work and you go, I actually remember going through that major junction. I kind of know that I did, but I don’t remember it. You know, or, you know, you forget where you put your keys down or whatever it is. It’s because your brain has gone, your brain is constantly wiping that hard disk.

1:24:37 Because it hasn’t got enough memory. And it’s selective too. Yeah, absolutely. And so sometimes, people, especially when they’re in high stress situations, won’t remember really important stuff, but they’ll remember my new shine. So I remember there was one thing when the bombs went off in 77. And it was a documentary and a fireman has been interviewed. And he was one of the first guys that went down, down into the tunnel and started, you know, saving people.

1:25:04 And as he’s running down the escalator, there’s a guy coming towards him in a suit. And the guy’s got a red shirt on. This guy just remembers seeing his red shirt and thinking, who the hell wears a red shirt? You know, so there he is. He’s going down to the scene of a bombing. And all of a sudden, he’s a fashion cop. He’s like, that guy’s red shirt doesn’t go with that blue suit.

1:25:27 And it wasn’t until afterwards he realized that the reason the guy’s shirt was red, of course, was because it was covered in blood. But his brain didn’t function that. It wasn’t until later that he realized that. And so, you know, I described the way the brain tends to work, your recollection of, I don’t know, your own house. If you close your eyes now and imagine your own house or your own front door, what you’ll have is you’ll have an impressionist painting of your door.

1:25:54 And I guarantee if you do that now and you think about, you know, where the doorbell is, you know, what the lock is like, you know, all this sort of stuff. When you actually get back and look at it, your recollection of your own front door isn’t entirely accurate. And I’ve done that trick on myself and it isn’t, you know, I thought the number three six on my door was because it’s on a ceramic thing and it’s in a Spanish style that my door was black writing on a white background.

1:26:24 But then the pattern around it was typical Spanish. So it was a little bit of terracotta, a little bit yellow, a little bit blue. Yeah, we can’t trust our own memories. When I got back to my house, bear in mind, I look at this thing every day, it’s actually completely black and white, you know, but my brain has said, oh, it’s Spanish. So it’s kind of made it fit, you know what I mean? And that’s the way your brain works.

1:26:45 So for you, when you hear there’s the videotape, you know, OK, I didn’t do anything wrong. You start hearing from your guys, there were guns in the back of the car. So you’re thinking, thank God, at least there’s a gun there. I thought there was. Then you find out, OK, maybe he hadn’t been holding it or something, but you’re still thinking, OK, that videotape…

1:27:00 Well, I’m convinced to this day that he was holding it. You know, he was in a VW Golf, you know, it’s not a stretch limo. And when I first saw him after I’d fired, I’d got out of the vehicle, I’d come round, I’d smash the back window. I tried to look in, but I couldn’t see anything. And I thought it was because the interior of the vehicle was dark and I couldn’t see. And I got hauled over the coals by a barrister at the inquiry and tell you’re lying, you know, it’s daylight. Of course, you could see inside the car.

1:27:32 It wasn’t until, you know, years afterwards, I actually looked at the back of a Volkswagen Golf on an O2 plate and realized that the rear parcel shelf is about that deep and it’s matte black. So what I thought was a dark interior of the vehicle was actually just I was just looking at the rear parcel shelf. But when I first saw as El Rodney, he was lying across the backseat and he was lying on top of that gun and the gun was probably round about where his shoulder would have been.

1:28:00 And point of fact, it’s probably exactly where the gun would have fallen had it been in his hands when the rounds started hitting him. Now, the judge at the public inquiry described that the gun was found underneath him. But then in another paragraph said that the gun was substantially out of reach of him. OK, so after the shooting, did your own people kind of not back you? And like who was someone in the Metropolitan Police Department coined that term, you know, our very own serial killer. Was that someone inside the department?

1:28:35 Right. OK, so how it works is if in any situation like this, if there’s any alligator, if a police officer shoots someone, it’s called a death in contact with police and it will always be investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which in 2005 was relatively new. It rebranded itself from the thing called the police complaints authority, the PCA. And so they investigated it from the 30th of April 2005 right the way around to November 2005.

1:29:09 And in November, they said that I’d acted lawfully. And the wording of the final page of their report couldn’t make it clearer. The Echo 7, which was my anonymity code, had acted entirely in accordance with his training, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he fired no more shots than were necessary in the circumstances. And it was totally satisfied that he acted lawfully. Now, they were duty bound to then send their submissions or their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service, who then looked at it for a further six months.

1:29:44 And in the end of that six months, they said, yes, we agree that the Echo 7 acted lawfully. And I got told I wasn’t going to be prosecuted. But at this stage, we still haven’t had a coroner’s inquest, which in British law there must be. So in 2006, the coroner decided that he couldn’t hold the coroner’s inquest because because of Ripper, all of the intelligence about the Columbians, about the type of weapons that they were able to use, and that was the case in the contemporary. We thought they had pretty much everything. They’d been a black felt pen put through it. So our statements were just a mass of black ink.

1:30:24 And we were told that we and that was because we couldn’t mention any of that stuff under pain of prosecution, because if we were to mention it, we would be in breach of the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act. So that left a real problem because the government didn’t know what to do, because we had a situation where someone had died in contact with police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Independent Police Complaints Authority decided that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but it still hadn’t been put before a jury in a coroner’s court and couldn’t be. So what happened was it just went into the bottom of the in-tray, and there was a change of government. So we changed from a Labour government to the Coalition government. Neither of them seemed to be able to come up with a solution. They looked at changing the law.

1:31:09 And finally, they used a new bit of legislation which allowed a high court judge on his own without a jury to have a public inquiry. Look at all the evidence, listen to all the evidence, and then formulate a decision himself. And the guy that they chose to use was a 73-year-old, I think, retired high court judge by the name of Sir Christopher Holland. And he looked at it for two years before eventually in 2012, he listened to my evidence and the evidence of all the other people there.

1:31:44 They’d done reconstructions, they’d made video reconstructions of it. And my personal feeling is that Sir Christopher Holland and the barrister that was working with him and the solicitor that was working with him had just basically been playing Miss Marbles for two years. They’d been playing amateur detective, and they’d watched the video so often. And they’d read every single person’s statement, the private witnesses, the police officers, they’d compared it with the video.

1:32:14 And so they had a far better idea of what happened than I did. Because there were some things that I’d clearly got wrong in what was a sudden high stress situation, the conclusion was that I was lying or that I’d acted under the floor. Well, it would appear, and I’m quite happy to admit that it might be the case, that everything I described as having seen through the side window when I pulled alongside, I may well have seen, on some of it at least, through the rear window.

1:32:43 So I might have seen him look left and look right and then duck down. And then when my car came alongside, I saw him spring back up again. But when I saw the video for the first time, I saw the video for the first time five years after I’d written my statement, I was like, I have no recollection of that. Pausing or, you know, my recollection was that we’d simply pulled up along exactly as we trained. Yeah, because the car goes and then the car moves forward a little bit, right?

1:33:07 Yeah, it’s nothing like our recollection at all. And I equate it a little bit, a lot actually, a lot of what we do with sports. Now, when I got told that I was, that the judge had found that I’d acted unlawfully, that was on a Friday. And I think on a Sunday, they had the Wimbledon final and, um, a mental blockage year, what’s the name of the Scottish? I’ll worry. Andy Murray won Wimbledon for the first time.

1:33:40 It was a marathon game, wasn’t it? It was him and Djokovic and Djokovic lost. And Djokovic come off and Sue Barker sticks a microphone in his face and Djokovic says all the right things, you know, best man won. Andy had a fantastic game today, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they called Andy Murray over and she said, talk us through those last points.

1:34:03 And he just looked completely drained and he went. Now, if you’d have done to Andy Murray what the system did to me and you go, okay, well, Andy, I tell you what, go home for 48 hours, sleep on it. Watch the video and then come back 48 hours later and what we went to do right is a detailed statement of what happened in those last points. Was it a backhand or was it, you know, four hands? And then what you do, but we’re not going to let you see the video.

1:34:32 And then, you know, five years after the event, we let you watch the video and then we go right and you watch the video. Now write another statement. And then a couple of years later than that, we’re going to have a public inquiry and we’re going to say to you, well, you’re lying. Because your first statement is inaccurate. You’ve changed your story. Right.

1:34:50 And you feel let down by the state. You feel like they’re not looking after the police. They’re lives to protect us. I think the issue is, is that, you know, we don’t live in a particularly violent society, you know, compared with other parts of the world. England, London is a very peaceful place to live.

1:35:07 You know, yes, we have a we have a gun problem in certain parts of our major cities, you know, with certain criminals. But when we say gun crime problem and you compare it with, I don’t know, Baltimore, it’s just ludicrous. You know, the average American cop listened to, well, you know, there were 22 gun related murders in London last year. We had that on a bad weekend. You know, so London and the UK generally is a pretty safe place.

1:35:37 So we don’t live in a gun society. And we think, you know, we’re educated by the movies. And we think that, you know, when you shoot someone, they fall down. Well, they don’t. You know, there was a thing on television yesterday where one of the cops that confronted the Boston bombers shot a suspect nine times.

1:35:56 The suspect ran off. He jumped to rugby, tackled the guy down to the ground. Then the guy was fighting with him, having been shot nine times. You know, the judge in my case thought that because one of my first rounds struck as El Rodney in the arm, as El Rodney was no longer a threat that I, you know, and I should therefore realize that all my subsequent shots, you know, I was shooting a guy who was already dying. Well, he only knew that because he’s read the Post-Morton report.

1:36:26 That Post-Morton probably took four hours. Post-Morton report probably took 24 hours. Have you seen that movie A Few Good Men? Remind me, which one is it? It’s got Jack Nicholson. He’s on trial for the Code Red. And he goes the whole time and the whole time.

1:36:38 And finally, he’s like, you’re goddamn right I ordered the Code Red. And because you want me on that wall, you must feel just as frustrated when some judge is going through meticulously all these things and playing the videotape. And at some point you’re like, you train me to do this job. You trust me to do this job. Let me do this job and give me some trust.

1:36:56 I believe absolutely that if a police officer causes the death of another human being, whether it be by shooting him or choking him out in the street, you know, because he’s fighting with a guy, whatever it might be, there must clearly be an investigation. You know, and that must be scrupulous and it should be absolutely unbiased. However, when a police officer shoots someone, the difference between saying that and accidentally killing him, killing someone in a vehicle pursuit is that you are actually trained to shoot people.

1:37:31 You know, they’ve actually taught you to do that and they spent thousands of pounds, you know, millions of pounds probably over the years, teaching me to do just that. Now, if you’re saying that simply because a police officer has fired a gun, he must therefore automatically have done something wrong, that just simply isn’t fair, you know, because we go out on thousands of operations and very, very rarely fire our guns. Ironically, because it’s such a rare event in the UK, it becomes this huge event, you know, and, you know, I talk to colleagues in the United States and elsewhere in France and they just can’t believe, you know, how badly treated British police officers are. You know, the fact that you’re suspended, you know, not suspended at home on no pay, but, you know, you’re taken out of your team and you’re given some menial job to do for six months.

1:38:19 You know, I mean, a good friend of mine has shot a suspect and killed him in the Christmas, just before Christmas 2015. He’s on bail for murder and his bail has been extended to June or July of this year while the IPCC and the Crown Prosecution Service, you know, visit his case. No police officer makes the decision to shoot someone until immediately before he actually pulls the trigger. And I’m talking fractions of a second. So as I was following Azel Rodney, as soon as that alpha car did its overtake, I had probably 10 seconds of unobstructed view of Azel Rodney through the back window of that vehicle until eventually I pulled alongside and opened fire.

1:39:03 I didn’t make the decision to shoot him 10 seconds before I fired or five seconds or three seconds or two seconds. I made that decision to pull the trigger literally half a second before I fired, because I made the decision at a point where I felt I couldn’t wait any longer. How do you feel about Azel now?

1:39:26 I have no sympathy for him at all. You know, it’s not his fault that I was, you know, sent sent to trial 15 years later or sorry, 10 years later. It was his mom’s fault. Yeah, to an extent. Yeah. You know, don’t get me wrong. You know, I’m a father, you know, I’m a grand, I’m a grandfather, you know, I have two children and I have two, two grandchildren.

1:39:50 And, you know, I have to say in the early stages, I had a huge amount of sympathy for Suzanne Alexander, which is Azel Rodney’s mother, because I can only imagine how I would have felt if my son had been shot by the police. But I couldn’t find out why he was shot, because all the police statements were so heavily redacted. She didn’t know what the intelligence was. She didn’t know what we knew. All she knew that was that her son had been killed. And the other two guys in the car hadn’t been killed.

1:40:19 You know, she clearly resented and quite understandably so that the two guys that were arrested, the driver and the front seat passenger went to court. They were given eight years imprisonment. They both pleaded guilty to possession of firearms with intent to endanger life and other offenses. And within four years, they were out. They gave evidence at the public inquiry as free men. Now, that must have been hugely frustrating. And I can quite understand her anger.

1:40:52 And on top of that, institutionalized racism from the government or from the belief of that in the police department. It’s perceived as institutionalized racism. And of course, you know, it’s like, you know, if your son’s been killed, you know, you’re gonna, you don’t know why he was killed, you know, and activists and people that are supporting you are shouting, you know, it must be racism because your son’s black and the cops that shot him are white.

1:41:17 You know, emotion, you know, is the enemy of logic, isn’t it? You know, so people will conclude all sorts of things they don’t know. But police forces all around the world do have a history of institutionalized racism. Well, you know, I think that is a massive oversimplification. It’s like, you know, I said this to someone, you know, so, Errol Walker. I shot Errol Walker, a black man, because he’d murdered a black woman and was in the process of stabbing a black girl.

1:41:46 A four year old black girl. The next time I got involved in a shooting, it was three white guys, you know, and at that time in history, as I’ve mentioned earlier, gun crime was predominantly a white collar crime, you know, that by organized teams of white criminals, robbing security vans and banks, not always, there were some black guys doing robberies, but by far and away, it was a white crime problem. Then we had a shift in history where all of a sudden gun crime wasn’t that was nothing to do with robbing banks and security vans. It was about black on black shootings. It was about, you know, one gang, you know, turf wars between, you know, postcodes.

1:42:24 And so naturally, when police get to interact with those people and try to arrest them, we’re now dealing with suspects who are predominantly black. So that’s why, you know, it’s but it made it to me, you know, in the documentary, Lee Jasper, black activist was trying to make out that it was a racist thing, you know, there’s nothing racist about it. I shot as El Rodney, because at that moment in time, in that split second, when I made the decision to fire, I felt that he posed a threat to my colleagues.

1:42:55 If it had been a team of white guys going to rob some black guys or going to rob some Colombian guys, then I would have still come to that same conclusion, you know. You understand why they say it. And he said, I understand why they say it, but but also there’s, you know, I think the problem is it’s just become a, it’s just become, you know, a call. But these incidents lately do happen to black people, not white people, whether it’s Mark Duggan, or if you look at, you know, black lives matter in the States, it’s just, it’s just almost hard to ignore it at this point.

1:43:27 Well, it is. But then also, if you if you look at the statistics, you know, a young black man in the United States is massively more likely to be shot by another young black man than he is by a police officer. You know, it’s like, well, if black lives matter, you know, and I understand the concern, and I mean, you look at, you know, I’m like you, I look at some videos and you go, but I always know there’s another side to that story, you know, it’s never quite as simple as it looks.

1:43:55 But yes, you look at some stuff on YouTube and you go, hey, how can you justify that? But if there is, you know, if there is a if there’s a gun crime, you know, and a big crime problem within certain communities, and the police are trying to deal with it, you know, of course, black lives matter, all lives matter. But, you know, if they matter that much, why is it that young black men are killing young black men on an industrial scale, you know, over a bit of turf, you know, or a bit of disrespect?

1:44:23 Do you ever take a bird’s eye look on the whole thing and just say, this is some kind of an economic prison where people are just brought up in these situations? You know, you know, you’re absolutely right. You know, and the thing the reality is, is that the cops are just the guys that are at the coal face, you know, the reason why, you know, so many young black males kill other black males in, you know, in a city areas with deprivation, everything else has got a whole thing, you know, stuff to do with, you know, economy, education, it’s just the cops are the guys that, you know, they’re dealing with it, you know, with it with the aftermath of it or whatever, you know, right. So we sleep in our beds at night, we pay you to do the dirty work, and that you must feel that way sometimes.

1:45:09 Yeah, I think that I think there’s some some truth in that, you know, it’s like, you know, well, we want you to do the job, but we don’t really want to know how you do it. And, you know, it, it’s always been a bit of a no win situation, police work, really, you know. I had never heard of the term hard stop until today. And I was educated on what a hard stop is by a member of our team here. And it’s a strange coincidence that he’s the only team member that’s not white.

1:45:36 And he’s had been the victim of a hard stop in London. And I had a hard time believing that was even legal. Hard stop is actually a… But you know, that’s not a coincidence. Well, it’s a slang term anyway. The actual in the manual, it’s described as an enforced vehicle stop, an EVS. That’s the actual terminology. Hard stop is jargon, basically.

1:45:57 But it’s, you know, trust me, you know, it’s used, you know, if someone’s found themselves in that situation, you know, and I do know situations where people have found themselves in a car and a hard stop has been done on them. And I think that’s the only thing that I can imagine. I can only imagine how scary that must be. But, you know, if you look at the controversial shootings, then… Apologise and move on.

1:46:22 Yeah, you know, that’s not going to help them, is it? You know, even a payout is not going to help if you’re a totally innocent person and that’s happened to you. And I honestly can’t think of any situations where I personally have been involved in a situation where the intelligence has been that wrong, that we stopped the wrong vehicle. But I do know situations where it has happened. Does your team also tag people as well on those hard stops? Do you have your own intelligence system that monitors people separately than the police?

1:46:50 We are purely and simply the tool that is used by the detectives because any pre-planned, intelligence-led operation against armed criminality is going to be a CID-based, you know, detective-based operation. OK. So you’ll have detectives, perhaps from the flying squad or perhaps from Operation Trident or from, you know, drug squad or whatever, that have intelligence that a crime is going to take place, whether it be drug dealing or weapons buys or a kidnap, whatever it might be.

1:47:25 And they will pull in specialist resources. So the surveillance teams that come in, you know, that is their sole job. You know, they’re not detectives that put on another hat and carry a gun and go out and do surveillance. They are professional surveillance teams and they’re very, very good at it. Likewise, the specialist firearms teams that are used for the arrest phase, you know, we have no… The only input we have in intelligence is what they tell us or what they choose to tell us.

1:47:54 So we have no axe to grind. It’s not like, you know, we’ve been after this guy for months and, you know, you know, they’ve got some personal, you know, he’s got away ten times, so we want him. It’s not like the movies in that sense. No, because we’re not investigators. We don’t get passionately involved. And I can honestly say that when you know, we take down, you know, take down a team of guys in a car and we might have to go and give evidence at court.

1:48:18 If they get away with it, I don’t get wound up. It doesn’t worry me that they get away with it, you know, but the detectives will because they’ve thrown their heart and soul into it. You know, they were there on day one where they interviewed the victim and took a statement from the victim who was terrified by the robbery that happened, you know, and they followed them around and they, you know, they’ve had to put this case together and they think the case is water type and then a jury find them not guilty.

1:48:44 I know what that was like because I did, you know, I was a proper cop for like eight years. So I know how frustrating it is when you know someone’s guilty and they walk away from it. But for us on the firearms team, you know, if we did what we did properly and we arrested people and nobody was hurt, you know, and if we happen to terrify some bad guys in the process, well, that’s just a bit of a plus really, you know, but our job is to hand them over to the detectives handcuffed, unharmed.

1:49:11 Now, very, very rarely that doesn’t happen. And actually, you know, you mentioned that Mark Duggan and there’s another guy Jerome. Terrible. I should remember his name. His name is Baker, I think. But the three controversial shootings and the only thing that makes them controversial is the fact that all three suspects that died were black.

1:49:35 So as a Rodney, Mark Duggan, I think it’s Jermaine Baker. Do you know the Jermaine Baker? It sounds familiar. I remember. I remember.

1:49:47 Right. Now, as as my old team approached the vehicle, one of the guys perceives that Jermaine Baker is a threat and makes a decision to find Jermaine Baker dies at the scene. The other people in the vehicle and guys that were acting as lookouts, they’ve all been arrested, they’ve all been to court and they’ve either pleaded guilty or been found guilty of the offense of conspiring to free these other criminals and having a replica firearm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:50:49 OK, I don’t know the case, but I’ll trust you now. What about Duggan? That one wasn’t as clean. Well, yeah, it was because essentially we got a situation here where Duggan was an intelligence led operation. By the way, that car was stolen and it was bugged in the Jermaine Baker thing. So we know what they were saying inside the car immediately before and so does the courts.

1:51:06 But if you look at all three of those situations, yes, they were young black men, but they were all intelligence led operations where guns were recovered. Yeah. If they hadn’t been out. Where was the Duggan gun? Right. Well, you know, there’s also this is this is swathed in mystery, but not mystery. This is it. This is there’s a lot of stuff that goes on about the Duggan incident.

1:51:32 The reality is we know that Duggan had taken delivery of that gun from another suspect who was found guilty of giving the gun to Duggan. Is this based on intel you can’t share with the public or is that? No, it’s been a court case. I don’t actually know the full details because I wasn’t involved in it. But the other guy, and I can’t remember his name, but he gave the gun to Duggan and Duggan was on his way to commit some criminality with his gun. That was the intelligence.

1:51:56 Now the gun was found over a fence. Right. And that was all, you know, so it must be a conspiracy. Because he was shot in the car, right? Well, no, he was shot in the pavement outside of the car. So he got out of the car. He was confronted by a colleague and the colleague says in his evidence that he saw Duggan reach down to what was obviously a gun, but it was wrapped in a sock.

1:52:16 And he brought the gun out and he felt that at that point he had to fire and he fired. He didn’t see the gun from that point on because he was concentrating on shooting Duggan. Now that gun was found X amount of feet away on the other side of the fence. Right. And that has, you know, created a wave, you know, on the internet. It must be in a conspiracy.

1:52:36 Well, if it was 15 feet, that’s quite a distance. Okay. Well, I’ll come back to that in a minute. But the reality is if we were going to plant a gun on him, why would we have put it that distance away? Okay. It’s not the best defense.

1:52:49 Here’s a situation for you. One of the officers that shot John Charles de Menezes, which was, you know, a few months after I shot Azel Rodney, the three of us, the two guys from John Charles de Menezes and myself were suspended for a similar period of time. And then we were all reinstated at a similar period of time. And sometime later, probably about six months later, I think I’m right in saying I was on an armed operation together with one of the guys that was involved in the John Charles de Menezes thing.

1:53:19 And we were out in the wilds of Kent in a town where we have information that a team of white robbers are going to rob a security van when at night it was going to be delivering cassettes of money to an ATM machine. In a small one horse town in Kent. Stolen car arrives in the back car park. The back car park’s pretty badly lit. Such an extent that we don’t see the main man get out.

1:53:46 But eventually he’s secreted himself in the shadows. And when the security van does its delivery on about the third run through with a cassette, the guy comes out of the shadows, holds the security guard up with a shotgun, grabs a cassette full of money and runs down an alleyway to this car park at the back. My colleagues, about four or five of them, one of whom is one of the shooters from John Charles de Menezes, comes out and confronts this guy. The guy shoots at him, fires a shotgun at him, and my colleague from John Charles de Menezes’ incident returns fire. And the suspect eventually dies.

1:54:21 But he, the moment he went down, we immediately grabbed first aid med kits out of the vehicles and we started administering first aid and he was conscious and talking to us. I arrived late on the scene because we were one of the cut off vehicles. And we came nose to nose with a learner driver. Because that’s what happens in the real world. She panicked and stalled it.

1:54:44 And so we arrived on scene 20, 30 seconds after the incident had taken place. We’re in a dark car park. There’s no very little street lighting. And I deploy and I can see some light shining around, flashing around in the back garden. And it turns out to me, my colleague, the guy that’s fired the shots.

1:55:04 And he’s doing a bit like I did. He’s making himself busy because he knows he shot someone. The other guys are doing the medics. I’ve got to find something to do. So he’s searching.

1:55:12 Because there was still some confusion about whether they were… Is there a point here coming back to Duggan? Yes, let me come to that. So I say to my team leader says, Tony, stick with, we’re calling Bob, stick with Bob, you know, because you’ve been there, you know, the situation. So Bob says to me after a couple of minutes, I want to go back into our, into our OP, our observation point and get my bag because I’ve got my iPod in it.

1:55:35 And I’ve got the book that I was reading and my sandwiches and went, yeah, go on, crack on. So he goes back. So I’m standing in the car park on my own in the corner. There’s loads of lights. There’s five or six guys working on this guy. They’ve got oxygen on him. They’re, you know, they’ve got a chest seal on him.

1:55:49 And the ambulance arrives in the far corner of the car park, car parks in darkness. So I start waving and pointing the ambulance to the guys that are working on him. And the ambulance comes across the car park and its headlights sweep across the car park. And thereby my feet is the shotgun. Yeah. Now we couldn’t find the shotgun initially. And my colleague was like, I know he had a gun. I know he shot at me.

1:56:16 And I found the wadding from the shotgun lying on the floor. So I’m thinking, yeah, he shot at you. But he’s going, where’s the gun? I said, well, there’s probably one of the guys who’s kneeling on it. Perhaps they put a med bag on top of it or something like that. But that gun was at my feet was five parking bays and probably in real terms another two parking bays.

1:56:34 So probably that’s five, eight parking bays away from where he fell. So how did that gun get there? How did that gun get? How far does it park? Why does it park in bay?

1:56:44 That’s why. So how did it get there? Who knows? Someone kicked it. Who knows? No, I don’t think anybody kicked it. You know what I think? I think he’s turned, he’s fired at the police and someone shot back.

1:56:53 Right. And hit it. And he’s gone. This thing is killing me. This thing is a bullet magnet.

1:57:00 So get rid of it. Get rid of that thing. Then he’s flung it. And he’s flung it all that distance. And then he’s collapsed in a heap.

1:57:07 So you’re saying with Duggan, it’s not unreasonable. This is only my hypothesis. And I’m not saying it’s right. But it seems to me probably the most logical conclusion. If you look at my colleague’s story and how that gun got there.

1:57:17 See, we know that Duggan knew that the police were following him. We know because he was talking to his girlfriend on the phone and saying, you know, the five are all over me. The police are following me. So when suddenly his minicab gets intercepted and he gets out and you know, I’m going to get rid of this thing now. How different would it be from getting the gun out of his waistband and throwing it to you as my colleague thinking he’s bringing the gun to bear on me.

1:57:43 Now, if he’s already started that momentum when he gets shot and the gun goes. Yeah. This daylight. Yeah. But people don’t. But that’s what the point. We’ve had this conversation earlier on.

1:57:54 All right. So you’ve seen so many things that there’s all these possibilities that the public just doesn’t consider. So when they see something like that, they jump at pieces. So OK. And then you also get, you know, witnesses at the scene who and it was certainly the case in mind. There was one witness at my murder trial.

1:58:10 It was a guy called Mr. Gittins. I remember his first name. But he was right next to the vehicle when it came to rest and witnessed the shooting. And the vast majority of what he said fitted almost, you know, like a jigsaw into exactly what I saw. But then he said that he saw the window shatter and he saw Rodney slump.

1:58:35 Not to the offside, which is what I said, but to the near side. And his head came out of the window and he saw the gunshot wounds to his head. Now, he didn’t see that. You couldn’t have seen that because all of the evidence, including the forensic evidence, was that he was falling towards me as I was shooting. OK. So he looks right.

1:58:53 But what he what he saw is I went around to the side of the car. My colleague reached in lifted as El Rodney into an upright position. His head lulled. And I saw the gunshot wounds to his head. Now, I then went round to the other side of the vehicle to make myself busy and had made an assumption because the next time I saw as El Rodney was on the pavement that my colleague had taken him out of the vehicle and put him on the ground.

1:59:14 And then we started doing first aid on him. What actually happened was that my colleague was left with a rod Rodney who was looking at who was floppy. He was, you know, and basically closed the door on him, ran back to his car to get the medic pack. And that’s the point at which Mr. Gittins would have seen his head going out the window. So he’s seen all of these things and he’s got them right.

1:59:38 But when he’s tried to make sense of what’s probably the scariest and most confusing thing he’s seen in his life, he’s got the sequence of events wrong. OK. That’s to make him a liar. Yeah. What he told was his honest belief about what happened, but he was wrong. And so were 14 other witnesses at the scene. Everybody got something wrong.

1:59:59 When you compared it with a video and you compared their statements. Those statements were honest statements, but they just weren’t perfect because they’re not a video camera. Let me finish with the cell. How does it feel to be charged with murder after you’ve been a police officer for 30 years and then how does it feel to be acquitted? Well, we’ll start with the easiest one. Being acquitted is good. Yeah. I think probably the most difficult thing for me was that I knew I acted correctly. I knew I acted in accordance with the law and my training.

2:00:34 And I felt all along, certainly as soon as I knew I was going to be charged, that I was being charged because people in positions of power and who should have made the right decisions were too cowardly to do so. Throwing you under the bus. Yeah, I think the Crown Prosecution Service were probably saying to themselves, well, we looked at this in 2016. We’ve seen no new evidence. You know, we don’t think there’s any chance of conviction here, but I tell you what, rather than us make the decision and then be criticized, you know, because a young black man, another young black man has been killed because it’s now post-Duggam.

2:01:13 Although he was shot before Duggan, we’re now in a post-Duggam era. I tell you what, when he’s charging and let 12 members of the public off the street do our job for us, that’s how I felt about it. And if you found guilty, well, you were met police’s favorite serial killer. You shot guys before. Let’s give them up.

2:01:33 Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much was my take on it. And to me, I think life is just too short. To bear grudges or think like that. And I just was the senior people that did that. Your fellow officers didn’t do that, right? No, not at all. Not at all. I was hugely supported by my colleagues and many senior officers as well.

2:01:55 I think they might actually was I’ve been given a shit sandwich and I had to take a bite of it and just get on with it. And I never once for one minute thought that that jury either naively or stupidly, did I think that the jury would find me not guilty or sorry, would find me guilty because I felt certain that, you know, one 73 year old, probably liberally minded, probably slightly left have sent a judge. That’s his one opinion, because he was, you know, some of the stuff that he was saying in his report and some of the questions that he was putting to me, I’m thinking, you don’t get this, do you? This is completely outside your comfort zone. The very fact, I mean, he actually wrote in his report, one of his early reports.

2:02:36 It’s the job of the police service in the United Kingdom to protect the public, not kill them. I can’t. I can’t. I knew then I was screwed. Okay. That was that if that was his attitude, you know, before we’ve even gone down this route.

2:02:49 So, yeah, if one person’s opinion is one thing, but if you get 12 individuals from all walks of life, you like to think that there’s enough common sense amongst them. And I’ve done jury service by this time. I probably knew enough about the jury system to not be as confident as I was. But, you know, I think that was the strange thing for me after 30 years of protecting the public now having to throw myself onto the mercy of, you know, 12 members of the public and hope that they had the common sense to realize that, you know, I was doing my job.

2:03:24 And it caused you to write this book and get the story out and become public. So that’s a bit of a silver lining. Not really. You know, if you ask me, you know, would I would I rather have just not been charged with murder and retired anonymously, then I would I would rather do that. I don’t.

2:03:41 Well, you know, the reason I wrote that book is because as soon as I got charged, my face was all over the Internet because I wasn’t allowed, you know, through the back door anymore into the court. I wasn’t allowed my anonymity code. So my name was published. One of the things you find when you’re, you know, it is an eye opener to me. I’ve never really thought about it before.

2:04:00 But when you’re the defendant on day one of trial at the Old Bailey or any court, the press will be there in hordes to listen to the opening speech because that will that will say what the prosecution’s case in. It will outline their case and then of course, the prosecution is saying you’re guilty. So when the when the you read the papers that evening, a pretty well done deal. Yeah, he shot and murdered this, you know, poor kid, you know, and then they go away.

2:04:27 And all the valuable evidence that came from the intelligence, you know, about what you know, how this was built up and it wasn’t even reported in the paper. And then at the end of it, when you found not guilty, it’s like, oh, that would have been a huge story if you found guilty. We could have sent a parade spread that but no. So you find yourself on page five. Yeah.

2:04:47 That cop got off with that shooting. Move on. Welcome to mainstream media. Well, exactly. And so this was my opportunity. First of all, it was like, right. Will you screw with my anonymity? My face is all over the paper.

2:04:59 You know, there’s no hiding anymore. What that book gave me was the opportunity to actually punch holes in some of the myths and tell what the true story was. You know, for instance, when I was called a serial killer by a senior police officer, she was taken to task over that, you know, and you know, I got the opportunity to sit down in front of her and tell her what I thought, you know. But the press had reported that all along as if this was something that she’d said to me over a beer at some social event, which absolutely wasn’t. You know, she’d said it to me while she was in our headquarters investigating a shooting. And she was the head, probably one of that third most senior police woman in the Metropolitan Police, an organization of 31,000. And she is heading up the directorate of professional standards. It’s her job to investigate wrongdoing by police officers.

2:05:52 And she thinks it’s acceptable to call me a serial killer to my face. Now, I’m sure she was just trying to be one of the lads. But, you know, when I said to her, you know, I don’t think you should call me that. No, I’m not worried about that. It’s just a nickname we’ve got for you in the office. And then when we put it to her in a statement, she went, I’d never, I would never have condoned that. You know, I feel outrageous that it’s been suggested that I would allow anybody to use that sort of derogatory language. You know, so now you’re calling me a liar.

2:06:19 But in the papers, I’ve been painted as the baddie in this, you know, I drag down, drag the, you know, the good name of this fantastic, you know, patron saint of police women through the through the through the mile. Yeah. So you got to clear that. Do you worry about your safety? Do you get death threats? Did you used to? Well, I did. I certainly got death threats after the the abattoir shooting. And, you know, I was told that, you know, price had been put on my head. And I’ve I’ve kind of lived with that. You know, I’ve always had alarms and cameras.

2:06:49 And I’ve always had a lot of people who’ve been in my property, you know, and I am not paranoid, but I’m certainly cautious, you know, when I answer the door or, you know, or all that sort of stuff. But, you know, I think if somebody was going to do something, they’d have done it by now. And like I said, you know, life’s too short to be walking down the street, spinning around like a spinning top, making sure you’re not being followed. Do you carry a gun? No, I’m not allowed to. No, I guess you have to have a license in this country.

2:07:17 You can’t even have a handgun with a license. Right. They’re completely illegal. What’s the future of the Met Police? You know, you were on a morning talk show and there’s obviously a lot of people sign up for the police department in this country who don’t want to carry a gun, which is, of course, not the case in the states. And I want to talk about the states after this. And you think that that should be their right. They want a police without a firearm. No, I actually, from a purely moral standpoint, think that police officers are there to protect themselves.

2:07:46 Police officers are there to protect the public. And I don’t see how they can do that if they can’t even protect themselves. And it’s summed up to me by an American colleague of mine way back in the 80s. And he said, Tony, so what do you teach your, sorry about my American accent? He was born in Germany and his mother was Irish. So he’s a trainer. What do you teach your unarmed Barbies to do when they respond to an armed robbery? And I went, well, we teach him to get behind a brick wall or a tree, get on the radio and call for some backup.

2:08:16 He goes, so you pretty well train the cops to do what the civilians do naturally without any training. And it’s like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense when you put it like that. Which is what happened with Lee Rigby. Well, yeah. And I said this to the commissioner. I went and spoke to the commissioner about a month later. And he was talking about the Lee Rigby incident. And I said, well, of course, the other thing with the three I.R.V. officers that turned up.

2:08:41 So for people in America, they don’t know the details. Can you give us like a minute, somewhere? Okay, Lee Rigby was an off duty soldier based at barracks in Woolwich. He’d served in Afghanistan and he was making his way along the street. He was clearly a soldier, an off duty soldier by virtue of what he was wearing. He wasn’t in uniform.

2:08:58 And two homegrown jihadists deliberately ran him over and then brutalized his body and murdered him in the street with a machete and a large knife. Effectively tried to behead him in the street. Now, there are 31,000 officers in the Met, but only 2,000 of them at the time were trained in the use of firearms. About four, four, 500 of those will be on the armed response vehicles. So they spread across a city. I think it’s about 800 square miles or something stupid. You know, three million or sorry, eight million people, whatever it is, 300 square miles, eight million people.

2:09:37 It took them 15 minutes to get there. But the local officers, the unarmed officers were on scene relatively quickly within five minutes. So for about 10 minutes, the unarmed officers, because they don’t have guns and because if they’d approached by virtue of the fact that police officers, they would have been targets, had to stand back behind the incident tape and watch the public that they’re sworn to protect do their job for them. Because about 20 or so members of the public outraged by what had happened, were trying to remonstrate with these two jihadists and tell them to put their knives down and had to put up with these jihadists waving their, you know, covered in blood, you know, preaching their hate.

2:10:20 With the body in front of them? With the body in the middle of the road. And when members of the public tried to protect the body, they were chased off by these guys. Now, what happened is the armed response vehicles arrived. They actually got told the suspects were on a bus and approached the bus. And as they’re just getting out of the vehicle, one of the jihadists with a knife runs directly at them.

2:10:40 And the guy getting half in and half out of his vehicle just goes back, back, back, shoots them. And the guy goes down with literally a foot to spare before he was on top of him. The other guy walks across them or runs across the front with a handgun, which was the reason that the police didn’t approach. It turns out this handgun didn’t work. It was an antique.

2:11:00 They had really taken it because they wanted the armed police to martyr them. Okay. But having a gun, they knew that the unarmed bobbies wouldn’t approach and would just have to stand back. So, you know, if our job is to protect the public, but actually the public end up doing our job for us, I don’t think that’s right. The other thing is from a purely moral standpoint, it’s like when the attacker in Nice, you know, drove his lorry through all those people.

2:11:31 Yeah, all down the beach and killed. They weren’t, he wasn’t stopped by some specialist unit or an armed response vehicle unit. He was just stopped by regular cops that were there policing a firework display that would have been there in any event. If that happened in London, that lorry would have traveled a lot longer and killed a lot more people before it found a policeman with a gun that was able to stop it. Likewise, the lorry attack on the Christmas market in Berlin.

2:11:59 If that suspect, instead of heading south on the train and going to Italy, where acting suspiciously, he was approached by two street duty cops who just went at something wrong with that guy. Hey, buddy, got some ID. He produced a gun on them, shot one of them, they returned fire and killed him. If instead of traveling south to Italy, he got on a Eurostar or got on a ferry and two unarmed cops had stopped him for the same reason, because he looked suspicious outside King’s Cross railway station, we’d have two dead cops on our hand.

2:12:32 So for me, if there are cops in the system, police officers in the system in the Met, they really don’t want to carry a gun. That’s fine, because no one in the police currently joined with any expectation that they’d be required to carry a firearm. But people go, oh, we’re unarmed in the UK. No, we’re not. You know, there are police officers on bicycles or in a little patrol car patrolling a small town like Port Rush in Northern Ireland, where even during the troubles, there was no real terrorist activity who are still to this day allowed to carry a gun on duty and off duty because of, you know, it’s a historical thing.

2:13:14 So there is a police force, the police service in Northern Ireland, that are routinely armed. You know, if you go across to Sweden or Belgium or Holland, you know, there’s always whenever we talk about arming the police, because we share a similar language or we don’t want to be like America. Well, why would we be like America? Like I said earlier, why wouldn’t we be like Belgium? Because you’ve got Belgian police officers patrolling little quiet villages in the country who have the opportunity and the ability to protect themselves if they just did a routine stop on a car traveling through their ground.

2:13:46 So armed police don’t create crime, is what you’re saying. But Britain has this idea that they will. Well, armed crime has gone, you know, we banned the private ownership of handguns after a particularly nasty incident where a pedophile went into Andy Murray’s own school. When Andy Murray was a child, this guy walked into a class and killed, I think it was something in the region, 14 children and their school teacher with a handgun. So, you know, there is no right to keeping bear arms in the United Kingdom. It was a privilege that you were given if you met certain criteria and you provided security for your weapon and you had a gun club to shoot it in and all the rest of it.

2:14:24 That was taken away and they went, right, OK, that’s not happening again. And so everybody handed their guns in. And yet all the gun crime that we’ve been talking about, all the, you know, the operation tried and black on, you know, people getting guns out in the middle of a nightclub and shooting them into the ceiling, you know, to show support for the DJ or walking up to some guy that’s standing at the bar and shooting him because of some outstanding drugs thing.

2:14:50 That’s all happened since private gun ownership has gone out the window. That’s got nothing to do with, you know, there’s no correlation. But the point I’m making is, you know, there are less guns in theory out there now than there was, you know, in the mid 90s. So, crime has got worse and yet we have less shots now than we did in when I joined the unit in 1983. So Britain needs to wake up. The police force needs to get their identity from the start.

2:15:18 I think what they need to be thinking about, they need to think about future proofing and they need to say, look, OK, you know, even if we have no plans to arm everybody, if you join as of the 3rd of April, 2018, when you sign on dotted line, it is signing an acceptance that you may at some point be required to carry it far on the course of your duty. You know, I think that officers who, I mean, you know, there’s an increase in amount of officers carrying Taser. Well, Taser is OK, you know, but it is basically a muzzle loading single shot electric musket.

2:15:50 You know, somebody’s running at you with a machete and both barbs don’t connect, which quite often is the case. It hasn’t worked. You’re kind of screwed because you’re within 21 foot of some guy that’s got a great machete and you’ve fired your one deal and it’s over. Right. Look, you convinced me. I think our officers need to be armed.

2:16:07 I don’t want to be going in King’s Cross with my family and know that, you know, someone with a gun can’t be handled. And do you think London’s going to have a Brussels? Do you think London’s going to have a Paris? You know, I think the current commissioner, home secretaries have all said, you know, it is a matter of time. You know, we are probably just under the high security threat we can be at the British intelligence services combined with the police have done a tremendous job of nipping some homegrown terrorist acts in the in the bud.

2:16:43 Yes, there is a there is an argument that because we’re an island and access to the UK, you know, you have to come across water and that it has seemed to have proved more difficult for ISIS or, you know, Al Qaeda or whoever. We’re talking about any given time to bring the sort of weaponry into the UK that they’ve they’ve used in Paris, you know, so AK 47s, grenades, military grade explosives. Do you believe that? I think I think there’s a degree, a degree of truth in it. But the reality is, is that criminals get tons and tons and tons of heroin in the country every year and cocaine.

2:17:19 And if you can bring in a shipping container full of cocaine or better still, you know, a shipping container, you know, with a hidden compartment and loads of heroin from Afghanistan where Kalashnikovs grow on trees, it doesn’t take the brains of an archbishop to realise that it wouldn’t actually be that difficult to smuggle in guns and grenades. So I think it is more difficult. And therefore, the attacks that we have had have tended to be, you know, more imaginative, because they haven’t got access to things like the shoe bomber, you know, the aircraft thing where they were going to mix the chemicals on the aircraft, all that sort of stuff, you know, the, you know, the bomb attacks down the tube with homemade explosives.

2:17:59 Yeah, sometimes those can be a dangerous, equally devastating in terms of, you know, the victims and their families. Okay, so we need to move on from the anachronism of the Bobby that’s unarmed, and we need to get sidearms and nine millimetres on the hips of most police officers in this city. Let me just sort of make a couple of things clear. I think from a moral standpoint, a police officer working a high crime in a city area, you know, where there is a gun crime by English standards should have the right to carry a firearm to protect themselves.

2:18:30 You know, if, like I said, some of our colleagues in Europe have got that right, even though they’re not really in a policing of, you know, particularly violent, you know, area. But I also accept that, you know, there are certainly at the moment, officers that wouldn’t be prepared to carry firearms, wouldn’t want to carry firearms, and I get it, you know. But when you hear people, well, we wouldn’t be able to, you know, they’re what could you the other thing you used to get, you get it canteen talk, they go, cool, amongst coppers, like, cool.

2:18:59 Can you imagine giving, oh, Brian a gun, I’m barely trusting with a pen. And you go, well, why is he in the police then? You know, we’re saying that our recruitment into the British police is worse than the Spanish police or the German police. You know, if they can find people of the right material and entrust them to carry a gun, then, you know, that must say something about our recruiters. Yeah, it does. It’s not good.

2:19:26 I mean, if you don’t if you don’t feel that way about your fellow officers, you know, there’s just been a survey with the police Federation, which is like the police is equivalent of a union. And I’ve got what the percentage was that replied to the actual survey, you know, a fairly large amounts of, well, you know, I wouldn’t carry a gun and I’d leave the gun leave if I had to carry a gun. Now, what they didn’t do, I don’t think was break it down by division, because I suspect if you spoke to officers that patrolled some of these inner city areas where there, you know, there is a gun crime problem, you would probably find that those officers were far more willing to carry a firearm than say someone that’s been posted to, you know, predominantly suburban, white, middle class, borough in London, because they probably never found themselves in a situation where they felt the need.

2:20:15 Sure. Okay. Understood. Let me finish by asking you about America. I grew up in the state, Southern California, which wasn’t far from LA, where the LAPD was, you know, infamous for the rampart division in the 80s and the 90s.

2:20:29 And that movie colors that I talked about. When I came to London, I found the police officers very strange, because in America, they’re quite honestly intimidating, you know, they project force. Most of them have come from the military. They encourage army, Marines force before they go in there. These are big guys. I went out to LA a couple years ago and I was on Venice Beach and these guys parked their police cars on the beach.

2:20:53 They wear their sunglasses. You know what I’m talking about. This is the standard American police officer. Pretty much true. NYPD, Baltimore PD, probably, Chicago PD. And this is, it’s just a different way of policing that America always has.

2:21:07 When I came to London, I saw some of the cops and I was just like, man, these people, they don’t scare me. And maybe that’s a good thing. But I also don’t trust this, you know, overweight woman that looks like my auntie to protect me, you know. And so there’s a yin and yang. And I understand you do a police force like that judge you didn’t like. Police force should be there to protect the people, but also should be there to protect the people.

2:21:32 And so I don’t know which way of the fence I am. Sometimes protecting the people means, you know, and it’s not, you know, of course, everyone that everyone that’s dangerous that we confront should in an ideal world be captured and taken through the due legal process. Absolutely. You know, but there are occasions where that just isn’t possible, you know. Now in the United States, you know, there’s always this sort of thing, oh, we don’t want to be like states. And yeah, I get that. I used to run SWAT training in the states, bizarrely. It’s a bit like taking Coles to Newcastle.

2:21:58 But after my 1987 shooting, I wrote about it in the book, my family got sent out to the states on vacation, a massive overreaction by the welfare branch. But, you know, we were hugely looked after. Yeah. I mean, they needed to move us out of the house while they did extra security. And I think knowing what I know now, I think that there was a specific there was intelligence that was a specific threat against myself and my family.

2:22:22 And they had to manage that and explore it and examine it and find out how much truth there was in it. So it was seen as an opportunity to get me away from it and all the rest of it. Now, I was hosted by police in the United States in Los Angeles and in Utah, bizarrely, of all places. And, you know, from my point of view, having done what I just had to do, it was a great place to go because they absolutely got it. You know, it was like, hey, buddy, you know, like I said in the book, you know, they send you on vacation when you get in a shooting.

2:22:50 Awesome. You know, you’ve got any vacancies in the Met Police, you know. So after that, I would then go back and run SWAT training in the states. And, you know, there is a generalization. There are police departments and you’re absolutely right.

2:23:02 I think with Los Angeles, I’ve visited LAPD on several occasions and I visited the police academy, you know, and they run around, you know, in their gray tracksuits with a flag with flat tops, you know, chanting, you know, I want to be an LAPD officer or whatever. And they are very much set along military lines, you know, they split down into platoons, you know, and that sort of thing. And the terminology and the rank structure is very like the military.

2:23:30 And, you know, I can see the danger in that. I can also see the advantages in having a force that’s more disciplined. But then I’ve equally I’ve been to other police departments where, you know, they come in all shapes and sizes. You know, I remember going to run some SWAT training in Florida and we took a break and it took a bit of getting used to because, you know, we if you’re not on duty, you know, you’re in civilian clothes in the UK, you travel to and from work in civilian clothes.

2:23:55 Well, we took a break from SWAT training and we went into this diner place and it was, you know, you queued up to get food on a tray. And we were in a part of Florida where there was quite a big Jewish community, a lot of elderly people. And they were like, gee, they looked at our uniform and they went, you know, who are you guys? Well, I’m all the way from Scotland Yard just to look after you sort of thing, you know, a bit of joke with them. And they looked at these these guys, you know, the local guys on the SWAT team.

2:24:22 And they, yeah, I don’t care about Scotland Yard. We’re very proud of our officers. Look at the size of them. These guys were just monsters, you know, and they got paid extra money to go in the gym. But equally, they were on the SWAT team. If you look to the regular patrol guys, they came in all different shapes and sizes. They were fat ones and thin ones and, you know, everything else that you’ve said.

2:24:39 And I’ve been to parts of the United States where, particularly in Utah, where, you know, you say, oh, you know, you’ve done that. You know, we hadn’t had a shooting in our county in 20 years. You know, I’ve been to parts of the United States where, you know, people don’t lock their houses, you know, and they leave their engines running on their pickup truck when they go in the shop to, who’s going to steal it? Where are they going to go? You know, so we do lump everything, you know, we lump the big cities with all their problems in with everyone else. And what, you know, I, you know, I try to say to people is, have you any idea how many thousands of police departments are in the United States?

2:25:16 So you’ve got sheriff’s departments, then you’ve got city police departments, then you’ve got state police, and then you’ve got federal police. But if you just look at the city PDs, the average police department in the United States to this day is something like four officers. So in England, in order to be in order to be a city, you have to have a cathedral. Yeah, pretty much not totally true, but it used to be the case. In America to be a city, you’ve got to have a drive through McDonald’s, you know, so the police department might consist of chief of police, who perhaps was just a regular patrol officer.

2:25:51 And a big city police department before he moved back to where he came from, whatever his brother in law, you know, there’s a lot of small forces, a lot of small forces. There’s a huge difference in training. There’s a huge difference in resources. I guess I’ve seen the big cities as well. Of course, I mean, New York is like 41,000 officers because they amalgamated transit police.

2:26:12 Now, that being said, when you look at the US, now look, the US was born in the wild west. They were born like right to bear arms. They were born. We don’t trust our government. We want to have, I mean, there’s what is there a gun in the US for every person there? There’s got to be more.

2:26:27 There’s probably 400, 500 million guns in America. That’s crazy. When you look at America and you look at the shootings, the violence, what’s the solution? Not even to mention the crimes against, you know, races and things like that. That’s a whole other topic. What about just the general level of violence?

2:26:49 Right. Well, I, you know, I like guns. You know, if it was still legal, if they said tomorrow, like, you can now hand guns and I could reapply. I’d own a couple of handguns and I’d shoot competition because I enjoy doing it and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of it. But in the United Kingdom, it was never a right. You know, if you said you went to the police department, I want a gun to protect myself, you wouldn’t get a license. You were only allowed to have a gun for sporting purposes.

2:27:17 And you had to prove that you remember the gun club, that you could look after the gun, you had no criminal record, there’d be checks on you and all that sort of stuff. And the police can turn up at your house any day of the week and say, we want to see your guns, make sure they’re in the safe. So it’s a totally different ball game to the United States. I must admit, you know, I go in my old job, I used to go over to a thing called the shot show every year. The last, for the last few years, it’s been in Las Vegas.

2:27:42 And even to me, who likes gun, who’s interested in guns, I actually find it quite intimidating almost, you know, there is a huge amount of guns. And of course, I think a lot of especially what’s been going on in recent times, because of, you know, post 9-11, there is a paranoia, you know, not everyone prepared to admit it. Some are some of my friends that are cops out in the States will quite happily admit. Yeah, you know, but they have even if you were to ban guns tomorrow, there are just so many guns in the United States and so many people who would never give up their guns.

2:28:19 But it would just be impossible, you know, and to me, it’s like, it’s almost a religion, you know, I remember going to Texas and being asked by a girl if I wanted to go to the cowboy church on Sunday. And I went the cowboy church, so what’s the cowboy church? It was just like a regular church, but everybody carries a gun. And the pastor carries a gun. You know, like I said, I mean, I’m into guns, but I don’t get it, you know, but it’s a cultural thing. And I’m, you know, if if you were to turn around, you know, going back to the racing again and pour cold water and laugh at an African state for whatever reason, you know, that would be seen as, you know, you can’t laugh at someone else’s culture, you know, you can’t.

2:29:03 But we do it all the time in America, if they’re big enough and ugly enough to take it on the chair. You just take potshots at the yanks. You know what I mean? So, you know, I’m not the sort of person who’s going to turn around and go, well, you know, there’s just all gun freaks, aren’t there, you know, because they’re not, you know, there’s lots of people that don’t own guns, you know, and I know perfectly sane people that have got a lot of guns, you know, there’s a lot of the problem is with that many guns in circulation, you know, and with a God given right to carry it, carry a gun, whether you are, you know, a gang banger, you know, living in a shit area or whether you know, you know, you live on a ranch in Texas, you know, it doesn’t matter.

2:29:41 But the reality is, is that when, when people’s blood are up, you know, when there’s a domestic dispute in the United Kingdom, yeah, they can go to the kitchen drawer and get out a knife. But actually, you know, when there’s guns about, they’re going to get used. And I think, I think in defense of American law enforcement, you’ve also got to say that these things go bad really quickly. When I’m out, I’m doing an intelligence led operation, when the armed response vehicles are out in London, they’re going to get a call to an armed incident. That’s why they’ve been deployed to it.

2:30:14 When you’re an American cop, even in a small town, when you stop that pickup, or that car, you have to work on the premise that there’s a gun in it, because there probably is. And somebody and you know, for all the bad videos, and you go, how can you justify that? There are an equal amount where you just suddenly see a cop shot with no warning, he’s just gone up, and someone appears from the other side of the pickup truck and shoots him. So this is a real problem, you know, guys do get shot with no warning. And so, you know, you would be foolish as an American police officer, if you didn’t approach a vehicle tactically.

2:30:51 Over here, you can see cops like you said, with their hands in their pockets, acting not very professionally, you know, getting in the face of a driver and it turns into a bit of a slanging match. At least in the United States, you get a sir, can you stay in the car? Can you stay, keep your hands where I can see them? Because of the amount of firearms, they have to try and deal with it in a more intelligent, more tactical and more professional way.

2:31:14 And a lot of the times, you know, some of these so called controversial shootings that you’ve seen, I think the process, that’s my problem, I think, with the Black Lives Matter thing is that what it’s what they’ve done now is clearly there are some cases which, you know, are extremely hard to justify and somewhat police officers have been charged. But now it’s become a case that literally every time there’s a shooting involving a young black male, it’s now international news, you see on or certainly not so much now, but certainly when it was in the news, like last summer, or, you know, a few months back, you know, it’s international news, the fact that the kids been shot. And actually, when you look at delve a little bit deeper, you find that, you know, there might someone’s shout, shout, no, he’s only got a book officer, but it wasn’t a book. It was a stolen gun, you know, he had it in an ankle holster.

2:32:00 And this doesn’t come out. So sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Yeah, but yeah, there’s a lot of things. Look, I think for me, I’m happy if the UK London police officers are carrying more guns.

2:32:12 And so I’d like to see it kind of go that way for America. I don’t know. I think America has an aggression problem. There’s some very aggressive people in America. They also don’t want to be told what to do, especially give up.

2:32:24 If you speak to people in in Europe about British football supporters, they’d say we had an aggression problem. True. True. Maybe. Maybe it’s perspective. And look, the US was born on the Wild West. You know, that’s the way a lot of it was. And you went out, you had to go get yours. You had to go. I mean, like I was in the United States driving in a rental car from one place to another when I when the news broke about the Oklahoma bombing.

2:32:50 And I’m a Brit. I know nothing on a very little about American politics or about American security issues, although I trained a lot of American police officers and so I knew a little bit about going what I was on. And they had some expert come on, you know, literally with an hour or so of the half an hour of the bomb going off in Oklahoma City. And he’s going, yeah, this is this is jihadist. This is definitely Muslim terrorism. And I’m like, seriously, in Oklahoma? No, it’s not.

2:33:16 I know exactly what that will be. And I couldn’t have given you the guy’s name, but I could have probably had a guess at his background, you know, and I knew you saw those guys. The gun shows probably. I knew that that was going to be some right wing extremist with it with it because they said straight away it was a federal building. And I’m thinking to myself, I know exactly how this has gone down because I was training officers in Utah when Ruby Ridge kicked off.

2:33:40 And for the FBI guys that were on the training course I was running had to rush off to deal with it. So, you know, I knew all about these sort of people that didn’t have a driving license because it doesn’t say anything in the Constitution about me having to have a driving license, you know, and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, I mean, the U.S. is the own country. So like the whole West was kind of, you know, taken over in the last hundred years and it’s in the blood of a lot of people. Maybe this is going to take a couple hundred years to play out as far as this aggressiveness or the need to carry guns. I don’t know. It’s still got an institutional racism problem as well.

2:34:17 I think since 9-11 it has got worse. This whole, you know, concealed carry permits and all the rest of it. And you know, you just look, you know, I read American gun magazines, you know, and I get on YouTube and look at stuff and it’s totally different now than it was, say, 10 years ago. You know, there is more, I think, of a paranoia. You know, people think it’s a bit like, you know, I kind of equate it a little bit with the 60s and Kennedy and Khrushchev, you know, when people were building bomb bunkers in Utah and Omaha, you know, you’re like, really dangerous kind of face. We’re going through. Yeah, I think so.

2:34:55 Well, yeah, I’m a little worried about where it’s going to go. We’re going to have to watch it. It’s also hard to see like what happens in Baltimore. And you hear X cops in Baltimore just to come out and say, you know, yeah, we pick on a car. And people, yeah, there’s this whole, you know, institutional piece in the South in America is still trying to get over things that happened 100 years ago. I think I think the shame of it is, you know, and you’re starting to get you had the black lives matter. And then all of a sudden you had this thing where you’ve got the thin blue line, you know, we get badges and bumper stickers with an American flag and a thick, you know, one of the red lines has been replaced by a blue line, you know, because I think it’s easy to forget that actually the vast majority of police officers in the United States.

2:35:35 Do a very dangerous job and some unbelievable acts of bravery. You know, just looking at the guys that confronted, you know, because his films just come out and they were interviewing one of the cops that confronted the two brothers from the Boston bombing. Boston, yeah. You know, and it was hugely, hugely brave, you know, and I think he actually got a Congressional Medal of Honor or something, you know, whatever the civilian equivalent was. And quite rightly so, because, you know, they do put themselves in harm’s way. And I, you know, yes, of course, you know, I take everybody’s life.

2:36:05 And I think on board everything you’re saying about you, there will always be, you know, officers that overreact and officers that react because they’re scared. But I think it’s easy to forget that the vast majority start a career in law enforcement because they want to do the right thing. And they want to be, you know, the good guy. And some people, you know, and it’s the same in the United Kingdom, you know, in the 70s, you know, and the 80s and, you know, you know, varying times in history, you know, there’ll be suddenly be an outburst of corruption cases.

2:36:35 Well, most of those guys joined for all the right reasons. And perhaps they got too close to the criminals and wanted a bit of what they had. And because we’re humans, you know, but I think that the important thing to try and bear in mind is that the vast majority come to work every day and put on a uniform to protect just ordinary members of the public. They might not always get it right. They might make mistakes. And sometimes, you know, you know, with tragic consequences. But here’s something for you. It’s a little statistic.

2:37:03 In 2005, I shot Zell Rodney. In the same year, a couple of months later, John Charles de Menezes was sadly tragically shot. Totally innocent Brazilian electrician on his way to work, mistaken for a suicide bomber. In the same year in the United Kingdom, 44 members of the public were killed in collisions involving police vehicles. You know, is yeah. When John Charles de Menezes got shot by mistake and died instantly, was that any more tragic than a young kid that got picked up on a pedestrian crossing and thrown 50 meters down the road and then survived, you know, with severe brain damage for six months before he died?

2:37:48 You know, they’re all tragedies. But we’re not going to take police cars off of policemen, are we? Because we need them to get from A to B. So you’re saying we have a bias as humans, we’re oversensitive to these? I think in the United Kingdom, the moment you mentioned the word gun, people go into a flat spin, particularly senior officers, less so now, because of what’s happened in Paris and the rest of it.

2:38:10 You know, a lot of senior officers have now had to grudgingly come out of the woodwork and support those armed officers. You know, the commissioner, you know, as you know, retires next week or whatever. And he gave his final speech the other day and he was saying that, you know, we need when a police officer gets involved in a shooting, we need to be more trusting and not automatically conclude that he’s done something wrong. Well, that’s nice to hear because he wasn’t quite so supportive in the early part of his career. And I think, you know, he now realizes he’s got a problem because cops don’t want to carry a gun if they think they’re going to get treated like I got treated.

2:38:45 You know, and he has to have arms on seats to be able to respond to these potential terrorist attacks. So, you know, we have always been because this thing about, you know, the biggest thing you can say about the British police, the one main thing, apart from fact, we’ve got stupid helmets, is that we don’t carry guns, you know. And it’s like to admit that we have to carry firearms is almost like admitting that we failed in some way. And I don’t think that’s the case. I just think you have to be, you know, realize that we’re in a different world.

2:39:15 Yeah. Tony, I really appreciate you coming on and telling your side of the story or your viewpoint from what you’ve been on. And, you know, I’ll be honest, a lot of people, you know, told us not to have you on, you know, because people see lethal force, they hear your story. And they’re like, yeah, why are we talking about this? I didn’t actually want to call it lethal force. Really? I was going to call it the seventh echo because my anonymity code was E7. And I thought, well, that’s quite subtle in its thing.

2:39:45 And I certainly didn’t want the Mets most they wanted to put the Mets most notorious skill. I’m like, no, you get notorious drug dealers and notorious, you know, gangsters that, you know, sells books, sells books. People don’t notice the seventh echo. Yeah, that’s probably true. And actually, you know, I thought about it and I thought, well, that’s actually what the book is about.

2:40:05 It’s about using lethal force. It’s a little bit of an American expression, I suppose. But actually, the bottom line is that’s what that’s what the book is about. Yeah. And I appreciate your candor when it comes down to this stuff. And look, we talked about a lot of things today.

2:40:18 You know, we talked about, you know, thoughts. We talked about people in London. We talked about racism, black on black crime, police, whether they should shoot or not. And I think we got to talk about all these things. So the beauty of what we do here on London Real, hopefully, is is to give you a chance to tell it all.

2:40:35 And I appreciate it. I don’t think there’s any people out there that are inherently bad people. I think everyone is working on the assumptions that they think are correct and the training and the situations they see and they’re doing what to them is is a human reaction. And I believe the same is true with you and probably the guys that you went head to head with in the street as well. And so I think only by talking about this stuff, we can move forward. And I think you pointing out some of these really interesting, inherent, I don’t know, identity issues and evolution of the Met police is very interesting.

2:41:09 Probably to a lot of people listening that don’t know this history and why we are the way we are here in Britain and even in the States. And hopefully we can get to some kind of greater truth. And when we have things like Brussels and Paris happening where, you know, pretty soon it’s not it’s going to be your family who’s in danger. You know, I think we should have these discussions. So thank you for coming on. My pleasure. I appreciate it.

2:41:31 Thank you for writing this book. And you know, for everyone, everybody watching and listening, you know, thanks for having an open mind about this stuff. And if you disagree, that’s all right. Please throw the comments at us on YouTube and throw them out of your way. I like a healthy discussion and I like some disagreement because I think it’s having to make progress. So there you go.

2:41:48 I’m London Real. We say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours, Tony. Thank you. Thanks for the time.