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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

> Even in the UK and in Norway police officers are allowed to carry gun's but they rarely do, and rarely have to.

Not sure about Norway, but in the case of UK and Ireland most police officers are not allowed anywhere near firearms.

If an incident takes place that requires armed officers a senior policeman authorises the use of armed unit. Every force has access to them, and training is as much about de-escalation and negotiation as shooting. They are drawn from regular police and undergo significant extra regular training.

Wikipedia tells me roughly 6,000 of something like 140,000 UK police are authorised to carry firearms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorised_Firearms_Officer

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> Every force has access to them, and training is as much about de-escalation and negotiation as shooting.

Or just plain non-shooting solutions to the problem. When a person having some sort of psychotic break started smashing up a local games shop with a weapon, the local police made sure the staff were out, let the offender tire himself out breaking things, and then used pepper spray before arresting him.

I would be very surprised if the equivalent scenario in the US didn't involve shots being fired.

Who paid for the property damage incurred while they waited?

Its definitely not acceptable in the UK to save more of a shops property by murdering someone, that is a sure fire route to jail for life for a police officer and rightly so.

The answer is the insurance company. Property isn't worth more than a human life but I know in the USA they do have the premise of defending your property lethally, we don't have that in our culture we don't believe in capital punishment regardless of the crime. Shooting a man for property damage is a conviction and sentence to death by a police officer, that is not OK this isn't Judge Dread.

What instead of a trinket store it was the National Gallery and the perp was taking a knife to irreplaceable artwork?

Point is at some point you MUST assign a dollar value to human life, and to pretend otherwise is to have inconsistent morals.

The owner's insurance, I imagine. Killing someone for the value of a few DVDs is the sort of thing we associate with crazy people, not the police.

Police Service of Northern Ireland [1] officers routinely carry guns, but I don't understand the culture where a sidearm is drawn and pointed at a driver from the start in a routine broken tail light/uninsured driver type stop. That would probably make the news in NI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Service_of_Northern_Ire...

it wasn't a broken tail light stop, they were stopped because they matched the description of suspects in an earlier armed robbery

What was the description?

From all accounts so far the officer radioed he had a broad nose.

This is simply not true and the only place reporting this is a far-right blog. You are not entitled to your own facts.

Edit - Here's a Snopes link describing the particulars of the falsehood: http://www.snopes.com/philando-castile-was-not-wanted-for-ar...

Do you realize your link literally repeats what I said:

"Police who pulled over and killed Philando Castile reported they thought he might have resembled a suspect in an armed robbery case."

He was not stopped over a broken light, police _thought_ he could be armed and dangerous. (I can not judge the validity of their suspicions)

They usually do not draw a weapon on a routine stop. The stops with weapons drawn are usually when they have some reason to suspect that they are dealing with an actual criminal.

As for why they might pull their sidearm in such a case, just ponder the following statistics.

United States: 112 guns per 100 residents.

United Kingdom: 6.6 guns per 100 residents.

The United States has around 5% of the world's population, but 30-50% of the world's civilian owned guns. The gun homicide rate in the US is about 60 times that of the UK.

Other countries have high percentages of guns in their populace but without the homicide rates. The USA has a homicide issue and a large chunk of it is done with guns, but its not a universal trait that countries with guns have lots of homicide. Its not unique to the USA but its not correlated on a world level.

I've been seeing this logic quite a bit this week and I don't agree with it.

For one, the numbers I've seen for per-capita are around 88% (2014, I think), not 112%.

However, the number of gun owners is estimated from anywhere between 12-33%. So no, number of guns in the country can't be used as a rationale for the probability that an officer will encounter a gun in a stop. Gun owners are a minority.

And the other NI constabulary that has every officer armed is... Belfast Airport Police!

>Wikipedia tells me roughly 6,000 of something like 140,000 UK police are authorised to carry firearms.

Interesting - I would have guessed way more. The ones most visible to me (at airports) are always armed to the teeth.

Airport is MOD police, you have to be an Armed Responce officer in the UK to carry guns which is a specific qualification that requires training.

That said when armed response is called for they do not show up with handguns but with MP5's and since 2009 or so with full auto M4's.

> Airport is MOD police

That's wrong. UK airports are protected by whichever constabulary the airport geographically falls under, though the London Greater Metropolitan Area and Belfast are slightly different with dedicated units.

The Aviation Security Operational Command Unit (SO18) is a Specialist Operations unit of London's Metropolitan Police Service. The unit is responsible for providing law enforcement and security for both Heathrow and London City airports.[1] London's other airports, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are policed by Sussex, Essex and the Bedfordshire Police respectively, as they are not located in the Metropolitan Police District.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Security_Operationa...

Thanks for the correction, I was sure that Heathrow went under MOD in the past 10-15 years, especially since most of the AR officer I've seen at Heathrow were wearing the MODP badges (not literally, but cap and shoulder strap :)) but it could've been just localized reinforcement, I think the last time I've noticed a serious number of armed police at heathrow was in the weeks after the xmas day bomber.

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