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This episode is sponsored by 511, a company that I've used for well over a decade and continue to use to this day.

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And 511 is offering you guys, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a discount on every purchase you make with them.

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Before we get to that code, I want to highlight a couple of products that again, I personally use today.

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One of the most impressive products they just released is their Rush Backpack 2.0.

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Now for many of you, whether you're going to the fire station, the police station, whether you're traveling with your family,

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whether you're taking training courses, we have to fly, we have to drive, we have to take trains.

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And I have to say, I own multiple backpacks, many of 511's different ones, but as far as a daypack, this one was the most impressive.

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There are so many different compartments. The way it sits on your back is incredibly comfortable.

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If you are a concealed carry person, there's also a spot for a weapon.

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So they've thought of multiple, multiple things that a man or woman would have to do on a daily basis.

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That is in addition to all of the products that I talk about a lot.

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Their uniforms fit for men or fit for women in the first responder professions.

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The footwear that they offer, whether it's the Norris sneaker or the Atlas system that is designed for foot health

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and therefore knees and back and hips and shoulders and neck.

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As a civilian, I live in a lot of their clothes as well.

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Their jeans stretch, you can actually squat down in them.

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We live in Florida here, so I wear a lot of their shorts, which again, very, very lightweight material.

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You can get it wet and it will dry almost immediately.

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And then moving to the fitness and tactical space, I used to have just a regular weight vest.

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Recently, I switched to a 511 vest and actually bought ballistic plates as well.

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My thinking was simply if I'm going to have a vest, why not have one that protects me as well?

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And that tack vest is trusted by law enforcement all around the country.

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So I mentioned they were going to offer you a discount code.

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So if you go to 511tactical.com and enter the code SHIELD15, S-H-I-E-L-D-1-5,

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you'll get 15% off not just that one purchase, but every time you visit their store.

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And if you want to learn more about 511, their mission, their products,

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then listen to episode 338 of the Behind the Shield podcast with the CEO and founder, Francisco Morales.

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This episode is sponsored by Bubbs Naturals, yet another company that I track down to bring on as a sponsor

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because I myself love their products.

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They are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a 20% discount.

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But before we get to that, I do want to highlight a few of the products that I use myself.

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Firstly, collagen. I am about to turn 50.

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And so my hair, my skin, my nails, not really a big concern when I was younger, definitely a lot more of a concern now.

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However, where I've really seen the impact is joint health and gut health.

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And I've been blown away that when I'm consistent using collagen, Bubbs collagen in this case,

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I see a massive improvement in both.

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Another area, I drink coffee, love coffee, and in the morning I use the Halo Creamer.

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Now, originally I used the MCT Oil Powder, but now they have the Halo Creamer,

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which has also got grass-fed butter in it, a lot more creamy if you're not trying to go for the vegan option that they have as well.

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Now, it's important to mention as well the altruistic element of Bubbs Naturals.

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The origin story involves Glenn, Bub, Doherty, one of the two Navy SEALs killed in Benghazi,

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and a good friend of the founders, Sean and TJ.

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So 10% of every single sale goes towards the Glenn Doherty Foundation.

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Now, as I mentioned before, they are offering you, the audience, 20% off your purchase if you use the code SHIELD.

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That's S-H-I-E-L-D at bubsnaturals.com.

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And finally, if you want to hear more about their products and Glenn's powerful story,

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listen to episode 558 with co-founder Sean Lake.

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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing,

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and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show former British armed police officers Tony Long and Mark Williams.

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Now, in recent years, our armed units in the UK and our police officers here in the US have had their feet held to the fires after a shooting.

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Now, in most cases, it was a justified shooting and it's tragic that they were put in that circumstance in the first place.

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However, of course, there are times where the police officer was 100% at fault.

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So what I wanted to do was give a voice to the British armed police who have been lauded through the press recently and discuss a myriad of topics.

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Now, I myself am not only here in the US now, even though I'm originally from the UK, I'm also not a police officer and certainly not an armed police officer.

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So I pulled from my friends in those professions to try and cover the topics and the areas that our police officers are facing at the moment.

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So we discuss everything from the British knife crime epidemic, organizational betrayal, diminishing training, standards, fitness, sleep and so much more.

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Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.

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Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.

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Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.

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And this is a free library of well over 900 episodes now.

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So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.

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So with that being said, I introduce to you Tony Long and Mark Williams.

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Enjoy.

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Well, Mark and Tony, I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast.

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It is your afternoon in the UK, my morning here in Florida.

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For people listening, Tony, you are the guest on episode 424.

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So if people haven't heard that, you will hear Tony's full life story then.

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But I want to start initially anyway by welcoming you to the podcast today.

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So that's how important I am. I was number 424.

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I got 912 now, so you're falling below average as the weeks go on.

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All right. Well, I want to just kind of give an overview with you, Tony, because for people that haven't listened to that episode and then Mark will go to you and kind of lead you through your life story.

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And then obviously today we're going to unpack some of the challenges that face the British police and certainly the armed units that serve under them.

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So, Tony, if you want to just give us a kind of brief overview of your journey into policing, some of the areas that you ended up working and when you transitioned out.

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So I joined the police a matter of months after I left school. I was 18 and a half, very young, probably quite naive.

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Came up from a little town in Sussex on the South Coast to London because I wanted to be a big city cop.

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I got posted to a busy inner city, slightly deprived area called Lewisham, which was a good place to cut your teeth.

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Lots of street crime and lots of things to keep you busy. I did that for about five years.

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My intention was to be a detective because all the heroes in movies are detectives, right?

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So I wanted long hair. It was the 70s. I wanted to be chasing bad guys with a two inch revolver and getting in car chases and stuff like that.

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And then when I got in, I discovered that actually the detectives weren't all good young looking guys with long hair and flared trousers.

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They were middle aged fat guys sitting behind a tight rider and probably with quite a lot of alcohol in their system from the night before.

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And so I decided I didn't want to do that. So I went to a specialist unit, which was called the Special Patrol Group, which was a combination of plain clothes and uniform work.

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It was like the riot squad, for want of a better word. And I walked straight into the middle of the 1981 riots, which were probably some of the worst riots that the country had ever seen at that point.

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And while I was on the SPG, I got my basic firearms course.

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So now if you want to do the most basic course to carry a firearm, certainly in the Metropolitan Police, it's probably about five weeks in length.

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Mine was five days. It was four days on an indoor range, learning to shoot a revolver reasonably safely and then a day of tactics basically.

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So it was really, really crude. So crude, in fact, that I decided that I wasn't going to change things from the outside.

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So when they asked for volunteers for the training unit, which also had a SWAT role, I applied for that.

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And in 1983, I joined the unit. It's now called MO 19. Back then it was called D 11, D department being training.

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It's had various name changes over the years. And I served there for 25 years and retired in 2008.

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But I should have retired in 2005, in the summer of 2005. That would have been when my 30 years service was up.

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But literally a couple of months before my retirement date, I got involved in a fatal shooting of a guy called Azel Rodney, who was an armed drug dealer on route to get together with two accomplices to rob some Colombian drug dealers and kill them.

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So I ended up getting investigated. So the investigation in total took about a year.

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And then the job opportunity I was going to leave for had gone. So I stayed in the job for another three years.

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And then 10 years after the incident, so I shot Azel Rodney in 2005. In 2015, I was, or 2014 rather, I was charged with his murder and stood trial the following year.

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I'm not on the run. I was actually acquitted by a jury of my peers. And so as a consequence of that, and the way a lot of the stuff that was written about me in the press and in social media was pretty dramatically wrong.

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So I wrote a book to tell my side of the story called Lethal Force. And that's me pretty much up to date.

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While we're on that subject, because I've got so many things written down to talk about one thing I forgot to write down was media.

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So, especially from 2020 onwards here in the US between the George Floyd tragedy, which it was, that that man should still be with us today.

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Was he an angel? No, but should he have been killed? Also no.

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But the trial by media has just got worse and worse and worse here in the US.

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Talk to me and Mark, feel free to jump in on the subject as well.

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Talk to me on the impact of, would be the right word. Oh my goodness. Blanking on the word now.

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Irresponsible reporting on the lives of a civilian and or a police officer in this case.

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I think social media has affected all of us.

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There used to be an expression, you know, when I joined the police back in the 70s and probably right the way through the 80s and 90s,

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that criminal trends or trends generally that started in the United States would get to us, you know, ranging,

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depending on when you're talking about it, from like two years down to about six months.

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But now, of course, with social media, everything is instantaneous and you'll know that the, you know,

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the uproar over the death of George Floyd spread across the world within hours.

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And there were huge demonstrations in the United Kingdom and probably every other major capital in the world.

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And equally, rumour spreads and ill truths spread.

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So, yeah, we live in a totally different world to the, you know, when I joined the police force in the 1970s.

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And of course, the other thing is, is that there's no real way of verifying anything that's on social media as being genuine.

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And nowadays, you know, with AI, you don't even know whether the person you're looking at is a real person or, you know,

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or a bot or whatever the expression is.

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Interesting on that, James, we've pulled right away now the Police Farms Association from social media.

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You know, we've got a Facebook page and that's about it, but we're not on Twitter or all the other stuff, our Instagram and all that.

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We don't do any of that now.

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You know, we got trolled. We had lots of problems with that a couple of years ago.

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And, you know, I think what we all have to realise is that you can put something on Twitter that is completely the truth

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and displays exactly what happened and there will always be someone who disagrees with it or puts a steer on it in the opposite direction.

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And that's a big problem. We don't get involved with it now.

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There's no point really, because there's just some people out there that are pretty bored with their lives,

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they just want to get on their backsides and just want to criticise everybody and play the armchair critic, don't they?

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They've never done anything in their lives themselves.

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Well, I think what's made it even worse, and I'm interested in your perspective on this, I watched during the pandemic, for example,

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people that we paid a lot of money to be, air quotes, leaders, swear up and down that, for example, a vaccine was 100% effective.

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And if you take it, then you were a murderer. And how dare the ambulance people and the NHS nurses have the audacity to refuse it

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after being unprotected for a year and no one had a problem with that.

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And so even the mouthpieces of politics and the leadership in fire or police or whatever it was, we kind of sat and watched that they were wrong.

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And there was never any apology after, there's never any rescinding of jobs that were taken from vaccine mandates.

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And so you've got this media push and there's no accountability, even with some of these leaders.

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Like after all of that, don't get me wrong, at the beginning, everyone was scared around the entire planet.

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Everyone took it seriously. The most extreme right leaning people I know still said the same thing.

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The reality was there was only one truth that came out of the pandemic.

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The healthier the nation, the more likely they are to do well during a virus sweeping through their country.

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As we came out of this, there was almost no discussion on changing the food in schools, putting PE programs back in,

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supporting local farmers, all the things that will make people healthy, whether you choose to have a vaccine, whether you don't.

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That was the truth. And those people, the ones talking about that, were the ones lauded as heretics during the pandemic.

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How dare you say that my aunt died because she was 300 pounds. It was COVID. No.

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So this is the problem, I think, is there's been such a lack of trust, even with the people that we were supposed to trust,

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that it's created kind of anarchy in the media world where you can basically, they've shown you can say anything and get away with it.

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I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, I'm absolutely not a conspiracy theorist.

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Quite the reverse, but changing the subject slightly, but actually back to what we're here to talk about.

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You would be mistaken, you know, you didn't look at the way that police officers are treated and the way that the police are reported on in the press

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and not think that there was some undercurrent, that there was something sinister going on in the background,

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because it's almost, you know, just like it was in the States, you know, with defunding the police, it's almost as if there's a policy.

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And it's not just strident people with banners, you know, standing on a street corner and shouting about pigs anymore.

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You know, it's the language is different and it's a lot more subtle.

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But actually, there's been politicians of all sides of the House of Commons, basically just chipping away

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at an organization that they should be supporting because it's there to uphold the laws that they bring in.

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And of course, during the pandemic, I mean, that really didn't help the police case because we were seen as tyrants trying to uphold,

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you know, laws that were against people's liberty. So none of that has really helped.

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But I think one of the problems with the pandemic, if we go back to talking about that specifically, is we still don't actually know the truth.

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You know, I'm sure that a lot of the stuff that we were told at that time, they genuinely believed, you know, at some time or other,

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there was so much contrary information coming in from the scientific world.

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And what that's done is it's just bred a world of cynics and a world of conspiracy theorists.

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Up to that point, we had those that thought 9-11 was a conspiracy and they still exist.

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But for Christ's sake, we've even got flat earthers now.

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You know, where did they disappear in medieval times, for God's sake? Where did they come back from?

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You know, it's just bizarre.

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You got anything to add on to that, Mark?

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It's just a strange world. I think, you know, I'll just go on now thinking nothing really surprises me.

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But, you know, from a policing point of view, it beggars belief where we've got with policing, particularly in the UK,

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with people's attitude towards policing, the respect for police officers and the work they do.

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And I just wonder where it's all going to end up, you know.

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And, you know, we're getting old now. I mean, obviously I'm considerably younger than Tony.

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But joking, obviously. But I think, you know, we wonder where it's all going to end up, you know, in our lifetimes.

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And Tony and I have spoken quite a lot recently about where we see armed policing going in the UK

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and what it might look like in 10 years' time or whatever. But things are going to change.

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And I can't see it getting any better.

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No, I actually think that one of the cornerstones of British policing,

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and it's much misunderstood, but it's much talked about, is that the British police are unarmed.

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And of course, they predominantly are. You know, more officers have tasers now.

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But actually, when I started as an instructor in 1983, the Metropolitan Police consisted of about 32,000 officers,

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of which nearly 5,000 were trained in the use of firearms.

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Now there's 34,000 officers and we only train 2,500.

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So we train far less firearms officers now than we used to,

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but we train them to a much higher standard on a more effective range of weapons.

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So they have less lethal capability.

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They have weapons that can perform at far greater distances than the officers that we trained in the 80s just on a handgun.

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And they're better deployed.

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But the imagery has changed because of the fact that they're permanently deployed.

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So now they do look much more like American cops, for instance.

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And I've lost my track here a little bit.

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But I think one of the issues is that we have always been very proud in this country in the fact that we are unarmed.

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Personally, I think it's stupid and always have done.

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And I think it's a bit of British arrogance that we can turn around to the rest of the world and go,

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look how peaceful we are compared with our neighbors in Europe,

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because even our police officers don't need to carry guns.

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Well, actually, it's no more dangerous in Denmark or Iceland or, you know,

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Paris, well, perhaps not Paris, but, you know, parts of Europe than it is in the UK.

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But if it carries on going the way that it's going,

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our centuries old arrangement whereby the only people that carry guns have volunteered to do it,

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you're not going to get any volunteers.

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Already this year, where we would normally get about 250 applicants,

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typically for SO-19 or MO-19 when they advertise for it, they got six, six officers.

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Now, also, there's a huge line of people within our units queuing to leave to go to safer units

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where they're less likely to find themselves having to shoot someone.

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And so eventually, with no one coming in and people queuing up to go out,

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or literally just handing their ticket in and saying,

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look, I see the way my colleagues have been treated, I'm not going to carry a gun.

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Ironically, all of the people that are anti-police, anti-police firearms and everything else

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will force a situation where everyone coming into the police

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will have to do so on the understanding that they have to carry a firearm.

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So we're going to go from having two and a half thousand volunteers

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to 34,000 officers who don't particularly want to carry a gun,

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or shouldn't be carrying a gun, and who will go back to five days training

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instead of five weeks or eight weeks training.

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So it's almost like, you know, that old expression, you'll get the police force you deserve.

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You want to keep pushing, that's what you're going to get.

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And I don't think that's what you want.

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The numbers that you just gave really kind of highlights the recruitment crisis.

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And obviously it's there in the UK as well, but it's here all over the US and fire and police.

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And, you know, people are kind of getting by,

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but they're missing the point exactly like you underlined.

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When I tested for, for example, California, when I worked out west,

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I was testing against about a thousand people.

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And it wasn't a thousand civilians, a thousand people that had already gone through

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Fire Academy, EMT or paramedic school.

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They volunteered on ambulances, they worked as wildland firefighters.

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They've been in an explorer program.

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I mean, an incredibly impressive resume for a brand new firefighter.

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And it was a thousand of them and there was 30 spots.

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And now fast forward, it's a fraction of that.

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And the thing is, I think people miss that the average person that's not really kind of

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deconstructing what these politicians are telling them is that, yeah,

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you've got an 18 year old with a heartbeat now in a uniform.

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But before you used to be able to choose the top five, 10 percent of everyone that tested with you.

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Now you're taking all of them.

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So that means that the opportunity for mistakes, the opportunity for a bad apple in your group

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has just increased exponentially.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And this lowering of standards in order to get in is already taking place.

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We've got police officers in the London Metropolitan Police where English isn't their first language,

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which is fine, but they can barely read and write English.

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And their communication skills are poor.

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The only one thing you need is a police officer, armed or otherwise, is good communication skills.

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Now, I'm not saying that, you know, with the right training outside of the police service,

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they couldn't become a good candidate to join the job.

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But if you're taking them before, they're even capable of performing a basic skill.

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And the same with fitness.

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You know, we've now got a situation where they're so desperate to bring people in of all hues

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and of all sizes and shapes.

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They're talking about dropping the fitness standard even lower.

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Well, trust me, you're not going to get much lower than it is already.

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But some police officers are even talking about doing away with it altogether.

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You know, so we're just on a road to a bad place.

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Mark, question for you quickly.

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There's a term that has come up over and over again when it's me looking at my profession, the fire service,

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and that is simply false economy.

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There are people that this budget year, oh, we're going to make cuts,

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so we're going to keep the budget where it is.

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But then you look downstream at the immense cost that it is of, like you said, hiring a police officer

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that then has a heart attack five months later because they're 350 pounds.

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Or insert whatever issue that we have when the standards aren't held high

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and there isn't training, rest and recovery put around these first responders.

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Because what we're asking them to do is so much more than the average civilian does.

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I mean, the fire service to wake up from a dead sleep and then get on a rig

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and then drive to a fire and throw ladders and go into a burning building and find someone

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and then start doing CPR, that's three in the morning.

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You know what I mean?

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So we are working our firefighters into the ground here.

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And it's a false economy because the financial element of the retirements,

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of the overtime, of the lawsuits far outweigh what it would be to just simply put the standards back up

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and then actually fill all the vacancies properly.

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What, through your kind of unique lens, is the false economy in policing?

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What is the cost of one mistake by, let's just say, a bad officer?

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So let's just make it kind of black and white.

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The wrong candidate makes it into uniform.

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What can be the financial ramifications of that?

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Well, I mean, in armed policing, we've had a couple of officers recently,

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and I don't even want to mention their names on here, who are in prison at the moment for a long time.

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We'll spend the rest of their lives in prison because of what they've done.

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And what they did was despicable.

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And I guess you know the case I'm talking about.

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And the damage they've done to armed policing themselves has caused untold damage.

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It's probably damaged recruitment and everything.

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But I think the whole picture of funding for policing

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and where we're going with the quality of officers and things like that,

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a lot of this is down to the fact that forces, and this isn't just the Metropolitan Police Service,

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all the other forces are chasing targets.

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They get penalized if they don't recruit enough people, so they lose more money.

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Funding, everything costs more money.

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We mustn't forget they still have to pay electricity bills, gas bills for police stations, things like that,

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as well as paying for the cops and their pensions and etc.

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So everything costs a lot of money.

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But one thing that they've lacked investment in, that I've seen personally, is welfare.

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Looking after officers and their welfare, but looking after when they're injured and things like that.

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And a lot of forces come up with, particularly firearms units, are quite innovative.

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Is that the word?

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It is now.

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Yeah, you know what I'm trying to say.

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Over what they're trying to do to help people and, you know, like oxygen therapy and things like that,

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and physiotherapy in the bases themselves.

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But there's no real investment and there's never really been any investment in post shooting investigations

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or the treatment of officers and how we train the officers to go through that procedure.

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So we kind of lack a lot of stuff there.

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And that's why we've got charities like ours, because there isn't enough support for officers.

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So the whole picture, the whole picture is looking rather bleak really,

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because perhaps we're not attracting the right people to join the police service.

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I don't mean armed policing, but the police service itself.

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We are putting people off joining the police service.

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We've seen recent events in this country with officers being charged, etc.

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It puts people off.

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And what we mustn't ever lose sight of, and particularly people like myself and Tony,

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is that we're older generations.

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You know, when we joined the police service, it was different to how it is now.

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Young people think more differently than we did.

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You know, the social media, Tony, you mentioned earlier, is a great example, isn't it,

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where something can happen in this country in policing,

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and a young lad or lass up in Cumbria can read about something that happened down in Devon and Cornwall

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and straight away immediately about what's happening.

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And it may put them off joining the police service, may make them think twice about even applying.

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So there's all these kinds of things we're up against at the moment.

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And I think unless politicians get behind policing,

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unless the public take a step back and think about how good and how lucky they've been over police service like they've had,

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then I'm not sure where it's going to end up.

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If we're talking about the question that you put to mark there about false economy,

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one of the things I think that's really crippled the police service

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is just to put it in context, when I joined the police in 1975,

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I had no aspirations to do anything for the rest of my adult life and be a cop.

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I joined because I wanted to be a police officer and I had done for some time.

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It was either that or I was going to be a soldier.

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And back then, it was a bit of a thing, wasn't it?

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It was like, you know, young boys want to be a, you know, drive trains or be a fireman, you know,

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women, you know, want to be nurses or they want to be a secretary or something like that.

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That just doesn't exist anymore and it hasn't done for some considerable time.

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But what the government has done is they particularly for services like the police force,

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they don't want you to get a big pension.

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They can't afford to pay the big pensions that I'm getting and that Mark's getting.

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And so they put them on these sort of shorter pension contracts.

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And so when people join the police now, they don't join with an aspiration to make a career out of it.

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They join just to tick a box, something they can say they do, they've done,

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so that they can go on and get a degree in something else and go and get a job in some other.

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I hear it all the time.

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You know, I was only going to do five years and then I was going to sort of go down the legal route, become a lawyer.

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And it would give me a little insight into police work.

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Well, that did happen. It happened in 1975.

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There was a girl in my class. She went through 12 weeks of training.

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And at the end of it, she said, yeah, I only did it to fill the summer in.

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I'm off to university. I'm going to be a lawyer.

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And now I know the way you think. You go, well, you don't because you've been in the fun factory for 12 weeks.

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You know, you've been in.

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I don't blame young people for thinking like that because they do think differently to how we did.

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And I think, you know, if someone's thinking, you know, I'm going to join a police service and do 10 years in the police service and move on to do something else.

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I don't actually blame them for doing that because there's a lot more out in life now.

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I mean, my background is I left school with no qualifications, joined the army, did five years and I'm enjoying the police.

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And that is the only way I was going to get into police.

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But, you know, now young people are getting probably a better education on the whole.

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You know, they can go to there's more opportunity to go to university and further education.

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There's a lot more out in the world to see. They can get to countries easier.

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I'm used to be able to go and work in Europe a lot easier than they can now as well.

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But I think there's more for them. So I can understand.

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But the other thing is, is and I know, you know, Tony, I've discussed this, the what they're subjected to on a daily basis as police officers, not just from being police officers out there policing, but internally is enough to put anyone off.

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And it's funny because I think about any of my children because people always ask the question, what do you do if one of your kids, so they want to join the police?

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Well, my late wife was a police officer. My granddad was a police officer. I was a police officer. I love policing.

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I'm still involved in policing. But seriously, if one of my kids came to me and I said, I'm thinking about joining the police, I would probably say to them, don't.

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And I never thought I'd ever say that. And it's not because of them being injured or getting involved in stuff like it's more about internally.

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What can happen? You say the wrong thing, something out of context to someone.

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And I've seen all this recently from the stuff we get through the PFOA, something out of context and your career is put on hold. And we've got our two colleagues from 19 who have now been going for is it five, five years, Tony?

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Nearly six, five and a half years.

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We've had another one eight years still ongoing. Why do I want to encourage my kids to do that? I'm not potentially getting involved in that.

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That's sad, isn't it?

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I agree with most of what you said, Mark. I kind of disagree on the education and the quality of education that people are getting.

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It may suit certain people that want to go into certain careers, but I think I think it's the Labour government that sort of introduced university careers for everyone.

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I went to a private school. I found out when I was in my late 40s that my dad wasn't actually my dad and that my mum had had an affair with her boss who was quite wealthy.

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He paid for me to go through private education and I wasn't I wasn't a good candidate for prep school.

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Trust me, I was as a wretch, you know.

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But when I was at school, the people that went to university were people that really should have gone to university.

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You know, we're talking about Greek scholars or people that were absolute brain boxes when it came to physics and things like that.

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I think what we've done is we've watered down university career to the point where you can get a degree in progressive dancing if you want.

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You know, and it doesn't really happen. What happens is it fills these kids with a sort of image in their head that they can do anything they want because they got a university degree.

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And when they get out in the real world, they find that it serves no purpose whatsoever. It's not going to get them a job.

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But there is an attitude, I think, when people come in the police that, you know, they can get promotion straight away.

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We've now got a ridiculous situation where three quarters of the senior management, a very senior management in the police force, have got literally years of police experience, literally a few years.

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I've heard of someone the other day that's gone from sergeant virtually to commander in about three years.

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Well, that would have been a 20 year track to get to commander from constable.

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You know, now it's three years. They've probably never set foot on the street or for the bare minimum amount of time.

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So they're not sort of getting their education in the in the school of hard knocks.

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You know, they're coming in really quite naively. A lot of them.

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I mean, I was naive. I came from a private school in Sussex straight into the police.

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But back then there was enough experienced guys. I mean, there were guys that I worked with at Lewisham that had gone to Lewisham police station in the 1950s.

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And 20 years later, they were still serving at the same police station.

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They knew the ground. They knew the streets. They knew the alleyways. They knew all the faces.

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You know, they knew a kid that they'd arrested when he was 13 for burglary.

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They knew his grandson, you know, and arrested him for burglary.

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And that's what police work was all about. It was knowing your community.

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Well, now what's coming? They don't get the benefit of more experienced officers.

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They reckon the average age of a street duty police officer, sorry, the average service of a street police officer in the United Kingdom right now is about five years because it's so hard.

392
00:35:11,000 --> 00:35:22,000
And it's so they put up with so much shite that really anybody that's got the get up to go gets up and goes and they go to any organization within the police.

393
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:32,000
They can where it's not going to be, you know, night duties, late shifts and early shifts and rolling around with some ungrateful member of the public in the street.

394
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:40,000
And they can get a nine to five office job. That's that's why police service has gone and all the management, the people that oversee all of this.

395
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:45,000
They understand that because they did exactly the same only sooner by taking promotion.

396
00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:53,000
So it's been a perfect storm. I mean, we closed Hendon. Hendon was world renowned as a police training college.

397
00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:58,000
That's where every recruit into the Metropolitan Police went through. And we've got rid of it completely.

398
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:02,000
You know, it used to be residential. You get up in the morning, you'd be paraded.

399
00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:06,000
You'd be marched from one part of the compound to another. You do Fizz every day.

400
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:14,000
You'd be in the gym getting thrashed or you'd be in the gym doing self-defense or you'd be in the swimming pool doing life saving, you know,

401
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:20,000
proper stuff that police officers have to do. They don't do any of that shit anymore.

402
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:31,000
I must admit, that's one of the things I think concerns me as well, because, you know, it's funny, I was at a reunion recently with some of my colleagues I joined the service with.

403
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:39,000
And we were watching now passing out parade. There must have been 200 officers passing out, marching around the square.

404
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:49,000
And I was thinking, God, you know, like, I remember when we all went into the theater, you know, you used to go to Hendon, Tony, you go into that theater area, you know, when you first joined.

405
00:36:49,000 --> 00:37:01,000
And there was hundreds of us, you know, and so I don't think they have that now. But also, when you're at training school, without a doubt, it weens out people that you don't really want or, you know, you think are a little bit unsavory, their characters, perhaps,

406
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:09,000
and they weren't perhaps performing as they should do. And that's the time to get them, not let them go out in the street and do the damage and then we get rid of them.

407
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:20,000
Yeah, so that we missed an opportunity there, I think, with a lot of that. And, and like Tony says, you know, just physical fitness, you know, doing training and stuff in the gym, the swimming pool, things like that, doing all those things.

408
00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:24,000
I don't know. How do they do a swimming test now? Do they do a swimming test now?

409
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:36,000
No, probably not, you know, and, and, and then the other thing is, you know, we, you know, we're then sending these young people out there, dropping them right in at the deep end, literally.

410
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:51,000
And they're then witnessing horrific things at work, you know, horrific accidents and violence, things like that. And that's one of the things that struck me, I think, over the last few years is the amount of violence that some of these officers witness and are

411
00:37:51,000 --> 00:38:05,000
subjected to and things like that, you know, on a weekly, if not daily basis. And it's the same all around the country, you know, where you hear of horrific attack on officers and things they witness and the barbarity of some of these criminals, you know, and the officers are going there and

412
00:38:05,000 --> 00:38:20,000
finding victims, you know, in appalling states and things like that. That's all part of this, you know, what goes on up there, isn't it? How they cope with these things. And if we don't train them properly, and they aren't the most resilient people that we can find because the procedures aren't there, you know, to recruit properly,

413
00:38:20,000 --> 00:38:36,000
they're going to suffer even more. You know, we do, you know, we get lots of every week, we get a phone call from somebody who's been injured on duty, who has literally burnt out. And it isn't just Met police, it's all around the country, we look after the whole of the country.

414
00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:44,000
And there's people burnt out all the time. And a lot of these guys and girls are doing their best. And they just and often the thing that tips them over.

415
00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:58,000
And this really I know gets me and Tony's got a little bit about this is the finger tips them over is people at work the way they're treated at work sometimes by people and it just tips them over the edge, where they're thinking, you know, they're dealing with everything that goes on the street and suddenly

416
00:38:58,000 --> 00:39:14,000
they're very own people are trying to shaft them. And I've said this so many times I'll say opening I'll say it's on blue in the face. The police service, the Metropolitan Police Service in particular what I served in is becoming a master at shaft and its own people.

417
00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:23,000
And that and I think that applies around the country. I can only talk for the Met because that's where I serve but it's a master at shaft and its own people because they're so easy to shaft.

418
00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:35,000
And some of these investigators and these people that go out for looking for evidence for their promotion and things like that. They're happy to tread and walk all over anyone they need to, to get there.

419
00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:44,000
That's terrific. It probably happens all around the world, James, I'm guessing. Yeah, well, I mean, just on that on that topic alone, what I've realized, I mean, I've been doing this seven and a half years now.

420
00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:57,000
So that's not almost a thousand conversations I've had getting close. And you realize that there's a lot of people that have seen and done some horrible shit in their life in their career. But it wasn't that wasn't the thing that really put them over the edge mentally.

421
00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:06,000
It was the organizational betrayal. I've had police officers hurt in uniform, you know, run over a shot, whatever, that were then discarded by their departments.

422
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:17,000
You know, I've had just so many different areas and things. Sadly, you see this a lot in a lot of these posts, you know, you see someone died suddenly, which we all know now is code for either suicide or overdose.

423
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:33,000
And, you know, you look at the back story and a lot of times there was some sort of, you know, termination or procedure because, you know, they pulled someone out of a building, burning building, but they didn't follow steps A through W.

424
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:52,000
And so they get reprimanded for that, whatever it was. That is such a huge compounding element of what they call moral injury. You've joined this tribe, you joined this group, you basically signed as a blank check, as they say, so that you will lay your life down for the people of London or whoever you serve.

425
00:40:52,000 --> 00:41:03,000
You know, you have the shared suffering through the academy, you put yourself through more as you level up and go to these different teams. You do everything that you were trained to do, and then they cut your legs from under you.

426
00:41:03,000 --> 00:41:13,000
And so if you think about ancient tribal civilizations, if you were shunned by your tribe, that was basically a death sentence. Well, you know, subconsciously, we still have that going.

427
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:29,000
And what's nauseating is this has become a toxic culture. This isn't the job. And I had two firefighter spouses on the show recently, and one of them talked about her little boy used to play with all the firefighter stuff, the trucks, the, you know, the costume, all that.

428
00:41:29,000 --> 00:41:40,000
And he was now in his teens. And she said, you know, you could be a firefighter one day. And he was like, I will never be a firefighter. He said, daddy's never home.

429
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:47,000
So it wasn't I'm worried daddy's going to get burned or daddy's going to get, you know, hurt in a car crash. It was daddy is never home.

430
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:58,000
And so this is what's happened is it's not the job. It's not the policing. It's not the fire. It's this toxic culture that's been created around it. The lack of rest and recovery, the betrayal in uniform.

431
00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:11,000
These are the things that are causing so much so many issues, the understaffing, you know, during COVID, you know, vaccine mandates, all these elements are taking our first responders from their family.

432
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:26,000
They're changing the first responders mentally. And that is what these children are seeing. So now you've got 20 years and sons of daughters of police officers of military veterans that see what that did to their family and go, no, I don't want to be a part of this.

433
00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:30,000
But it's not the job. It's the environment itself.

434
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:50,000
You know, I mean, I've said this quite a lot. I haven't said it for a long time, actually. But during my 33 years service with the Met, I was on the tactical team for about 25 years and over a 20 year period, I became involved in situations where I've had to shoot five suspects.

435
00:42:50,000 --> 00:43:07,000
Two of those survived, although both seriously injured, and three, sadly, died. I have never lost a moment's sleep through having to do what I was essentially trained to do.

436
00:43:07,000 --> 00:43:25,000
You know, you spend hours on a range preparing for that one occasion where you might have to pull the trigger. And I did it. And for the best of my knowledge, hand on heart, I never lost a moment's sleep or suffered any psychological issues as a result of having to do that.

437
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:45,000
But I've lost hours of sleep. And, you know, I've, I've worried to the point of exhaustion about the way I'll be treated and what the way I am or was being treated by the very people who you should be looking to for support.

438
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:51,000
Your senior leadership, senior management, call them what you work, call them what you will.

439
00:43:51,000 --> 00:44:01,000
But it's interesting, I just finished doing a series of talks about post incident procedure and how those incidents I've just described, how I was treated after them.

440
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:19,000
And when I, my first one was in 1985, and there was no setup whatsoever to deal with it. It was back in the, it was back in the 80s. It was like, here's a bottle of scotch, go and sit in the corner and drink yourself happy, you know, or come on, job's finished, we'll go over the pub and have a couple of pints.

441
00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:34,000
And they'd have a laugh, a pat on the back and all manly shit. Second job I was involved in was about 18 months later, and they created an organization, a welfare branch in within the Met, which hadn't existed before.

442
00:44:34,000 --> 00:44:42,000
And so I was given a bit more support, I've probably given too much support, they sent my wife and I'm family to the States on holiday, to California.

443
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:57,000
It's like, they must have thought I'd seen them coming, I think, but there's no one else got the benefit from that point on. But slowly but surely as other officers became involved in shootings, our post incident procedure developed and developed and developed.

444
00:44:57,000 --> 00:45:07,000
And you know, every time we made a mistake or every time something went slightly wrong, we'd learn from that mistake and we cut it off and make sure it didn't happen next time or put something in place to improve things.

445
00:45:07,000 --> 00:45:15,000
And to such an extent that when I started doing these lectures, I thought that I was giving them to SO19, I thought I was giving them to the firearms unit.

446
00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:26,000
And it transpired that almost all of my audience were actually senior officers from borough, from specialist units, nothing to do with firearms.

447
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:38,000
But someone somewhere finally twigged that there ought to be a post incident procedure for every police officer that gets involved in something traumatic. It never happened. No one had seen it.

448
00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:54,000
Now that progression that I described within SO19, how we work to make sure that we are always increasing the way in which we cared for our officers after they've been involved in shootings or similar incidents, that all came from troop level.

449
00:45:54,000 --> 00:46:02,000
No senior manager ever walked into the crew room and went, lads, I've had a thought, we need to look after you guys better when you get involved in an incident.

450
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:09,000
It was us sitting around the coffee table going, well, that couldn't have been right. What do we need to do to make that better next time?

451
00:46:09,000 --> 00:46:27,000
So for 20, well, for 30 odd years, nearly 40 years, the rest of the Met, the rest of senior management in the Met have done nothing, absolutely nothing to look after a young probationary police officer that goes to the aftermath of a fire where a baby's burnt to death.

452
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:33,000
Or goes to the scene of an incident where a cyclist has fallen under a lorry and their head's now a pancake.

453
00:46:33,000 --> 00:46:43,000
No one has thought, oh, they need some looking after. And then suddenly somewhere about 10 years ago, someone went, I think the firearms unit had some sort of thing.

454
00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:51,000
And now the firearms unit, although it's nothing to do with them really, are responsible for post-incident procedure for every unit within the Metropolitan Police.

455
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:55,000
And it's like, how do we get to this late stage of the game?

456
00:46:55,000 --> 00:47:06,000
You know, our first step into post-incident procedure was after my first shooting incident in 1985. And here we are, you know, nearly in 2005.

457
00:47:06,000 --> 00:47:18,000
And it's only in the last decade that they've learned from the people at troop level sitting around that coffee table, the way they ought to be looking after their officers.

458
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:30,000
I think in fairness, Tyler, I wouldn't agree with you on all of that because I think in the background, the College of Policing, for a long period of time, we're working with the IPCC as it was then.

459
00:47:30,000 --> 00:47:37,000
And, you know, senior level trying to establish some sort of guidance around it.

460
00:47:37,000 --> 00:47:39,000
But did they achieve anything?

461
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:44,000
Well, I think, yeah, but achievements, you know, you can say about anything. When you introduce something.

462
00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:45,000
Was there a procedure?

463
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:46,000
Yeah, there was.

464
00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:49,000
How come I don't know about it?

465
00:47:49,000 --> 00:47:54,000
There was a procedure. Well, there was a procedure in place when you shot yourself on me because I went out to it.

466
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:56,000
And there was, you know, criteria.

467
00:47:56,000 --> 00:47:58,000
You were my federate.

468
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:04,000
Yeah. So I think, you know, I think what you're saying about other officers is true.

469
00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:15,000
But what happens is there is a thing called DSR, deaf and serious injury instance, that there is now a guidance around that that falls in line with the firearm side of things.

470
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:21,000
So for any police officer involved in a deaf or serious injury investigation, there is a post-instance investigation.

471
00:48:21,000 --> 00:48:24,000
It's been a very long time in coming, isn't it?

472
00:48:24,000 --> 00:48:37,000
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, 100 percent. Because what it didn't do is that, James, for example, if you were in a collision in a car and someone died or you were, you know, someone seriously injured, they wouldn't have a particular, you know, a special post-instance investigation.

473
00:48:37,000 --> 00:48:38,000
So they do now.

474
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:50,000
But Tony's right in another in another way, though, because what we haven't got is this thing where, say, for example, an officer is exposed to extreme violence or witnesses something really bad.

475
00:48:50,000 --> 00:48:54,000
There isn't actually a designated post-instance procedure for that. It doesn't fall within the guidelines.

476
00:48:54,000 --> 00:49:03,000
So it's only if a deaf or serious injury involving a police officer in execution their duty, you know, revealed failing to command that kind of stuff.

477
00:49:03,000 --> 00:49:15,000
So I think there is a reluctance to look after people. And I think maybe I don't know what happens out on borough, you know, out on divisions around the country where, you know, hopefully they get some sort of support wrapped around them.

478
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:30,000
But I think the interesting thing is, is that senior management today, people that joined the job, say, within the last 20 years, would look back on senior manage my senior management when I first joined in the 70s and would label them as

479
00:49:30,000 --> 00:49:36,000
dinosaurs, uncaring, misogynistic, probably drinkers, probably uncouth.

480
00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:48,000
And for a large part, that was true. But just as one example, and I've got many, my chief superintendent was in charge of a police station of, I don't know, 200 plus officers.

481
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:54,000
He knew every officer by their first name. He knew the names of their wives and their children.

482
00:49:54,000 --> 00:50:06,000
And he was the scariest man I ever met. If you walked in the front office at Lewisham police station in the early 1970s, and he didn't have a good reason for being there. And he was sitting there and doing his morning checking the books.

483
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:16,000
He'd look up and he'd go, what the fuck are you doing in my front office, and like as a probationer, I was absolutely terrified of the guy, you know, your boots had to be polished.

484
00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:23,000
If you went up to see him and knock him on the door, even if it was for him to give you a slap on the back for a good arrest, he'd go, oh, tell me about that arrest you had.

485
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:28,000
So I'd tell him about it and you go, good effort, keep that up. You're going in the right direction.

486
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:38,000
And as you walked out the door, just as you're about to walk out the door, he'd go, come back here, get your fucking haircut and polish them fucking boots and iron those trousers and have fuck off out of my office.

487
00:50:38,000 --> 00:50:46,000
Now, if you said that to anyone nowadays, you would be gone. You'd be on the big bird out here because, oh, you know, you hurt their little feelings.

488
00:50:46,000 --> 00:51:03,000
But that man cared genuinely and was a genuine proper leader, 100% more than the majority of senior officers you've got now who have taken promotion for their own means and for their own progression and for no other reason.

489
00:51:03,000 --> 00:51:05,000
But things change, generations change.

490
00:51:05,000 --> 00:51:07,000
Well, they do change.

491
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:12,000
If I went into the PFOA office and spoke like to the girls now.

492
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:17,000
But you've got no dress code, have you? Perhaps you should introduce one.

493
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:22,000
Well, I think, you know, I think, yeah, you know, I think we can all look back and think that it was great in our day and things like that.

494
00:51:22,000 --> 00:51:26,000
And it probably was better. But I think things have changed.

495
00:51:26,000 --> 00:51:28,000
You know, the society's changed, people have changed.

496
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:36,000
And, you know, that's one thing I think we shouldn't lose sight of because it was good back in our days, but things were different, a lot different.

497
00:51:36,000 --> 00:51:38,000
There were things that weren't as good.

498
00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:42,000
There was a lot of bad behavior. There was a lot of issues with people.

499
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:47,000
And I think a lot of people went under the radar that, you know, perhaps shouldn't have done.

500
00:51:47,000 --> 00:51:51,000
And how we dealt with those people is more difficult because, you know, calling them out.

501
00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:54,000
Unfortunately, we've gone completely the other way now.

502
00:51:54,000 --> 00:51:56,000
Yeah, and I completely agree with that.

503
00:51:56,000 --> 00:51:59,000
I think one of the problems is, is because we no longer have a hand.

504
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,000
I mean, to be fair, you're absolutely right.

505
00:52:01,000 --> 00:52:03,000
You know, I'm painting a picture that everything was great.

506
00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:08,000
That particular governor I was talking about was a natural leader and there seemed to be more of them.

507
00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:11,000
But there was also bad governors. Of course, there were.

508
00:52:11,000 --> 00:52:20,000
But what I would say is, is that I think, ironically, going back to this issue, that if they don't do something about looking after volunteer firearms officers,

509
00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:30,000
they're going to find a load of themselves, a police force that is 100 percent armed, most of whom aren't really interested in carrying a gun or aren't safe around us.

510
00:52:30,000 --> 00:52:35,000
So you've got that issue, but this has been like a perfect storm brewing.

511
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:41,000
We've got close with international terrorism, stuff that's happened in places like Paris and other parts of Europe.

512
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:46,000
You know, the major terrorist attack on the streets of London, you know, that could just be the little thing that pushes it over the edge.

513
00:52:46,000 --> 00:52:49,000
And we'll have to have a fully armed police force.

514
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:58,000
But besides the logistical, there's partly logistical reasons, like we've sold off all the police stations that had firing ranges in them and things like that.

515
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:05,000
But we found a situation where we don't have a place where we can take new recruits from all walks of life,

516
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:12,000
but predominantly young people from modern society and teach them discipline.

517
00:53:12,000 --> 00:53:18,000
You know, people in modern society have been brought up to, you know, to question absolutely everything.

518
00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:22,000
And that's fine in the right time and place.

519
00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:32,000
But when you're in certain types of situations like a serious public order event, you know, or a firearms incident or some other major incident,

520
00:53:32,000 --> 00:53:38,000
you need to have discipline. You need to have sergeants that go, shut up, go over there, do that.

521
00:53:38,000 --> 00:53:43,000
Yeah. And there's a reason behind having your haircut.

522
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:48,000
You know, there's lots of reasons on that. You know, if you get in a fight and someone grabs your hair because you've got a ponytail as a bloke, you know,

523
00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:53,000
then you're going to have problems on you. And that's why, you know, the female officers used to put the hair up and things like that,

524
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:56,000
because it looks smarter and it was obviously safer and things like that.

525
00:53:56,000 --> 00:54:01,000
You know, there's all sorts of different things about, you know, we talk about tattoos, you know, and I've got tattoos.

526
00:54:01,000 --> 00:54:06,000
But if you've got a tattoo on your neck and all down your face, is that really appropriate to be a police officer?

527
00:54:06,000 --> 00:54:10,000
Probably not, because when you're dealing with young kids and things like that, they might be frightened of you.

528
00:54:10,000 --> 00:54:13,000
You know, so you have to think about those kinds of aspects of it.

529
00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:17,000
So I think the whole thing has changed. But I think this all comes down to Tony.

530
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:21,000
I think you're absolutely right about I think Hendon is one thing.

531
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:29,000
But the biggest worry for me, and we've discussed this a lot, as you know, is about where I see armed policing in the next 12 months.

532
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:38,000
And we're going to be doing a survey soon to ask officers, that are farms officers now, about how they feel about the job and where they see the future for themselves.

533
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:43,000
Because I'll tell you, we are a pivotal point in our history with policing in this country.

534
00:54:43,000 --> 00:54:48,000
And it was only when you mentioned it to me, Tony, a few weeks ago that I thought, Jesus, you know, he's right.

535
00:54:48,000 --> 00:54:51,000
This could actually go completely the way that we didn't want it to go.

536
00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:56,000
And that is, if you can't get volunteers, it will become mandatory.

537
00:54:56,000 --> 00:55:02,000
Just like the police service in Orvan Island, civil nuclear constabulary, ministry, defense, police are all armed.

538
00:55:02,000 --> 00:55:09,000
It can be done. It would be a massive headache and it'd be a complete nightmare because you'll have loads more guns out there.

539
00:55:09,000 --> 00:55:18,000
There'd be loads of different incidents, accidents, guns being taken off officers, guns being lost, all sorts of things that we know happens all around the world.

540
00:55:18,000 --> 00:55:25,000
It could happen in this country. And ironically, the people, these pressure groups that are always saying, you know, a minute we shoot someone, they're jumping all over again.

541
00:55:25,000 --> 00:55:28,000
Oh, they've shot an innocent member of the public again or whatever like that.

542
00:55:28,000 --> 00:55:31,000
Yet they're going to get the police service they want as well, aren't they?

543
00:55:31,000 --> 00:55:35,000
Because they're going to get, for example, in London, not two and a half thousand armed officers.

544
00:55:35,000 --> 00:55:41,000
They get 30,000 armed officers running around London with guns as an example.

545
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:47,000
Let me jump in there. I'm going to throw something else at you guys because I want to address the other side of the conversation.

546
00:55:47,000 --> 00:55:52,000
In the US, Pete, one of the criticisms is that our police officers, they go into war.

547
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:54,000
They just came back from Fallujah and they do.

548
00:55:54,000 --> 00:56:00,000
They've got body armor and, you know, sidearms and, you know, AR in the vehicle and tasers and extra mags.

549
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:06,000
And yeah, I mean, you look like you're getting ready for some sort of firefight, but then you look at the streets of America.

550
00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:08,000
And this is what no one fucking talks about.

551
00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:15,000
And it pisses me off with the whole police conversation is why do we have so much violence on our streets?

552
00:56:15,000 --> 00:56:19,000
Why do we have so much gang membership, et cetera, et cetera?

553
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:24,000
For me, you know, one of the things that I'm just I've sat down with the guy is spearheaded.

554
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:34,000
I think it's one of these solutions is the fact that we have sent addicts, not drug smugglers, not dealers, but addicts into the shadows, into the underworld.

555
00:56:34,000 --> 00:56:36,000
That's where they get their drugs, where they get their fix.

556
00:56:36,000 --> 00:56:44,000
And we've empowered guns. We've empowered so many, excuse me, we've empowered gangs, so many shitbags in the world through the prohibition of drugs.

557
00:56:44,000 --> 00:56:46,000
So that's just James Gearing's opinion.

558
00:56:46,000 --> 00:56:53,000
If we took addicts and brought them into the medical world, I think we'd cut the head off the snake of a lot of violence here in the US.

559
00:56:53,000 --> 00:56:59,000
That aside, what is the landscape now in the UK?

560
00:56:59,000 --> 00:57:03,000
Because no one I never hear this discussed, you know, all this police officer shot this person.

561
00:57:03,000 --> 00:57:14,000
Well, how did that young boy that was a toddler once all he cared about was his toy car and a ball get into the point where he's a yardie or whatever, whatever he found himself in?

562
00:57:14,000 --> 00:57:28,000
So what have you seen as far as the landscape of violence in the UK today? And are there any kind of common denominators that aren't being discussed that are creating violent offenders out of young children?

563
00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:36,000
Can I ask Tony, before you come in, Tony, I think you're better to talk about the gangs criminal element.

564
00:57:36,000 --> 00:57:44,000
One of the things that's always concerned me is the percentage and the amount of people with mental health issues that we engage.

565
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:56,000
So a lot of the incidents we're dealing with are people that have got mental health problems, which is sad in itself because then that's another issue altogether about what support they're getting from NHS and things like that in our case.

566
00:57:56,000 --> 00:58:09,000
And that worries me. And of course, you know, they're they're more unpredictable people that have got mental health issues and, you know, results in often us shooting them and sadly in a lot of cases that they die.

567
00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:23,000
So that that is a concern for me. And also it's a concern for me for the impact on the officers because, you know, I always thought of myself when I was an armed officer that, you know, I'd never have an issue shooting someone particularly because I know that I'll do I'll be doing the right thing because I had to.

568
00:58:23,000 --> 00:58:29,000
Particularly a terrorist or in Tony's case, you know, gangsters, you know, gangs that have got guns in their cars and things like that.

569
00:58:29,000 --> 00:58:37,000
You know, not an issue. But when someone's mentally ill and has a problem, then you subsequently find that out afterwards because of their actions, you have to deal with it.

570
00:58:37,000 --> 00:58:42,000
That's quite hard to take as well because you realize that they perhaps could have been helped some way down the line.

571
00:58:42,000 --> 00:58:49,000
And that young toddler you're talking about playing with their toys became poorly, you know, as they went on through their life and got all sorts of mental health problems.

572
00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:56,000
And then this result of them being shot by police. That is a completely different thing to what I know Tony is going to talk about.

573
00:58:56,000 --> 00:59:00,000
Well, I'm glad you know what I'm going to talk about because I'm racking my brain.

574
00:59:00,000 --> 00:59:08,000
But if you look at gangs, if you look at the people you were involved with, Tony and terrorism as well, that's a completely different entity about what we're doing, isn't it?

575
00:59:08,000 --> 00:59:18,000
And I remember one situation. Ironically, I never got a commendation for shooting bad people, but I got a commander's commendation for not shooting a guy.

576
00:59:18,000 --> 00:59:26,000
And it was when AIDS was more prolific before, you know, suitable drugs had come out and a call came out.

577
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:31,000
I was actually on the armed response vehicles at the time for my six week posting.

578
00:59:31,000 --> 00:59:43,000
And it was on a Sunday afternoon, I remember, we were just going off duty and a call came into Islington, which was just up the road from where our base was, to say that a man had been seen in a pub with a handgun.

579
00:59:43,000 --> 00:59:48,000
And so we all rushed to the rendezvous point just off of Islington, the main street in Islington.

580
00:59:48,000 --> 00:59:56,000
And there was a cordon's up and the local duty officer and local sergeant were there. They were directing people out of the zone and all the rest of it.

581
00:59:56,000 --> 01:00:03,000
I said, where's the pub? And they went, oh, it's just up to the corner, about 50 yards away to the left.

582
01:00:03,000 --> 01:00:08,000
And as we're saying that, this guy comes up to me and he goes, I'm the guy that rang you.

583
01:00:08,000 --> 01:00:14,000
And they went, right, he goes, I work in the pub. He said, it's a gay pub. And he went, I'm not gay.

584
01:00:14,000 --> 01:00:20,000
I'm not gay. I went, OK, so what happened then? And he said, this bloke came up to the bar.

585
01:00:20,000 --> 01:00:26,000
He said, and he overtly opened his jacket. For whatever reason, he asked me for something.

586
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:33,000
He said, he asked me whether the nearest minicab office was, but I saw the gun. My guess was he wanted me to see the gun.

587
01:00:33,000 --> 01:00:39,000
He said, I'm ex-army and I can tell you it's a Browning Hypal. So that was all. That's changed the colour.

588
01:00:39,000 --> 01:00:45,000
So where's he gone then? He's always gone to get a cab. So he's not in the pub anymore. No, no, no, he's left.

589
01:00:45,000 --> 01:00:49,000
So I looked at the inspector and I went, where's the nearest minicab office here?

590
01:00:49,000 --> 01:00:54,000
And he went there and about four foot to my left was the doorway to this minicab office.

591
01:00:54,000 --> 01:00:58,000
And literally as he pointed to the door, people started running out.

592
01:00:58,000 --> 01:01:05,000
Well, our tactic would be in that situation, certainly back then, would be to get all the innocent people out,

593
01:01:05,000 --> 01:01:11,000
contain it from the outside and call in and go, hey, you in the building, come out.

594
01:01:11,000 --> 01:01:18,000
But before I could do anything, this younger, more inexperienced ARV officer, he's gone.

595
01:01:18,000 --> 01:01:23,000
He's like greased weasel shit. He's up the stairs in this minicab office, which is above the shops.

596
01:01:23,000 --> 01:01:29,000
So we get to the top of the stairs and I give him some hand signals, which we used on the teams,

597
01:01:29,000 --> 01:01:32,000
which clearly meant nothing to him as an ARV dude.

598
01:01:32,000 --> 01:01:36,000
And I tapped him on the shoulder, not intending him to do anything other than hold.

599
01:01:36,000 --> 01:01:40,000
He burst into the room and I thought, oh shit, I'm going to have to go in the room now.

600
01:01:40,000 --> 01:01:43,000
So I come around the corner, there's a guy and he's sitting on a bench,

601
01:01:43,000 --> 01:01:47,000
you know, like you get in a minicab office while you're waiting for your cab to arrive.

602
01:01:47,000 --> 01:01:50,000
And he just looks up at me and he's got a Browning Hypal on his hand.

603
01:01:50,000 --> 01:01:55,000
And he just turns like that and just very slowly turns it towards me.

604
01:01:55,000 --> 01:01:59,000
And I didn't shoot. I know I would have been absolutely justified in shooting,

605
01:01:59,000 --> 01:02:05,000
but I just screamed at him to stop and I pretty well stuck the gun in his face.

606
01:02:05,000 --> 01:02:07,000
And he had a second thought and he dropped the gun.

607
01:02:07,000 --> 01:02:11,000
And I was fucking angry. I've never been that close to killing somebody.

608
01:02:11,000 --> 01:02:18,000
And it transpired that he was a gay man, that his partner had just died of AIDS

609
01:02:18,000 --> 01:02:20,000
and he wanted the police to kill him.

610
01:02:20,000 --> 01:02:26,000
And I've thought often about what you said, Mark, about how I would have felt about shooting that guy.

611
01:02:26,000 --> 01:02:30,000
He was an artist, he was a talented musician transpired.

612
01:02:30,000 --> 01:02:33,000
He was just a guy in a very bad, very dark place.

613
01:02:33,000 --> 01:02:39,000
So, yeah, I mean, we've gone off your question now about drugs.

614
01:02:39,000 --> 01:02:45,000
I've not long finished working for the London Ambulance Service driving paramedics.

615
01:02:45,000 --> 01:02:49,000
And one of the things that I've noticed, interestingly enough,

616
01:02:49,000 --> 01:02:55,000
is one of the first calls I took was about 20 miles through Kent and southeast London

617
01:02:55,000 --> 01:03:00,000
on a Friday afternoon in the rush hour to a man collapsed in the street,

618
01:03:00,000 --> 01:03:05,000
blue lights and two tones, driving like a lunatic, wrong side of the road, up the pavement, down the pavement.

619
01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:11,000
When I get there, there's two cops standing and the male cop is standing with his knee in this guy's back

620
01:03:11,000 --> 01:03:16,000
and the guy is just sitting on the pavement, clearly off his tits.

621
01:03:16,000 --> 01:03:18,000
And he's drunk, that's all he is.

622
01:03:18,000 --> 01:03:21,000
And I looked at the cop and I went, seriously?

623
01:03:21,000 --> 01:03:26,000
I said, this guy is drunk and disorderly, sorry, drunk and incapable all day long.

624
01:03:26,000 --> 01:03:28,000
Why are you calling an ambulance for this?

625
01:03:28,000 --> 01:03:33,000
And he's got a little cut on his head, look, you know, head injury.

626
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:36,000
He's going to have to go to... It's not a police matter, it's a medical matter.

627
01:03:36,000 --> 01:03:42,000
And then I get this WPC, female police officer, lecturing me about, oh, it's not an offence to be drunk.

628
01:03:42,000 --> 01:03:48,000
And I'm thinking, I'm pretty sure it still is, you know, it's an offence to be drunk in the street.

629
01:03:48,000 --> 01:03:53,000
Anyway, we end up taking this guy to hospital and he was drunk and incapable when he put him on the ambulance.

630
01:03:53,000 --> 01:03:56,000
But when we got halfway to the hospital and it's only me and my paramedic,

631
01:03:56,000 --> 01:04:00,000
he decides that he's not drunk and incapable, he's drunk and disorderly.

632
01:04:00,000 --> 01:04:03,000
So he starts giving my paramedic a hard time and I end up getting in the back of the truck

633
01:04:03,000 --> 01:04:10,000
and rolling around on the floor with his boat and, you know, possibly breaking a finger at this guy.

634
01:04:10,000 --> 01:04:15,000
And when I asked about it, the more I asked, it was like, no, we don't deal with drunks anymore.

635
01:04:15,000 --> 01:04:17,000
It's not a police matter, it's a medical matter.

636
01:04:17,000 --> 01:04:22,000
So if that's the case with drunks, you know, why aren't we doing the same like you quite rightly said?

637
01:04:22,000 --> 01:04:25,000
Marijuana, everybody goes, oh, marijuana is really harmless.

638
01:04:25,000 --> 01:04:27,000
Well, no, it's not.

639
01:04:27,000 --> 01:04:29,000
You know, I've come across a lot of, on the ambulance,

640
01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:36,000
came across a lot of people who had smoked particularly strong stuff and it triggered their paranoia.

641
01:04:36,000 --> 01:04:42,000
They were violent, they were aggressive, all the things that you don't expect from, you know, the use of cannabis.

642
01:04:42,000 --> 01:04:48,000
But they are. And that, again, has become more of a medical matter.

643
01:04:48,000 --> 01:04:52,000
I'm not sure it's actually curing anything, to be honest.

644
01:04:52,000 --> 01:04:55,000
If you think about your police career, and I've thought about it a lot,

645
01:04:55,000 --> 01:05:00,000
I can't remember going to many punch ups involving people that were smoking a joint.

646
01:05:00,000 --> 01:05:05,000
Well, yeah, things have changed, like you said, that, you know, it's not the same cannabis that you and I knew.

647
01:05:05,000 --> 01:05:08,000
And that's the problem, it's a lot stronger, isn't it?

648
01:05:08,000 --> 01:05:09,000
I mean, there's a lot stronger weed out there now.

649
01:05:09,000 --> 01:05:13,000
But what I'm making is that one of the issues, and it's not really what we're here to talk about,

650
01:05:13,000 --> 01:05:17,000
but if you're not going to arrest someone for their bad behaviour when they're drunk,

651
01:05:17,000 --> 01:05:22,000
if all you're going to do is take them and add them to the burden of people in a casualty department,

652
01:05:22,000 --> 01:05:27,000
or an accident and emergency, where they're already overrun,

653
01:05:27,000 --> 01:05:32,000
and you're just going to let this guy wander, you know, like a cannonball around, you know,

654
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:38,000
tripping over elderly people with broken limbs, you know, you're not actually solving any problems.

655
01:05:38,000 --> 01:05:41,000
All you're doing is diverting them, because sooner or later,

656
01:05:41,000 --> 01:05:46,000
somebody that behaves like that on a regular basis needs to answer for their bad behaviour.

657
01:05:46,000 --> 01:05:48,000
And that's what we're not doing in society right now.

658
01:05:48,000 --> 01:05:51,000
So that's just made it worse, in my opinion.

659
01:05:51,000 --> 01:05:56,000
So the false economy conversation to me, I think, goes into here as well.

660
01:05:56,000 --> 01:05:58,000
And a perfect example is the NHS.

661
01:05:58,000 --> 01:06:05,000
I think of the entire world, the philosophy of the NHS is the most beautiful,

662
01:06:05,000 --> 01:06:07,000
altruistic healthcare system on the planet.

663
01:06:07,000 --> 01:06:10,000
I really do. When funded properly and when staffed properly.

664
01:06:10,000 --> 01:06:14,000
I know it's been sliced and diced and, you know, cut apart now.

665
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:17,000
But the beautiful thing about the NHS, if it's done properly,

666
01:06:17,000 --> 01:06:22,000
is then there would be a massive push to make the British people as healthy as possible.

667
01:06:22,000 --> 01:06:24,000
So you use as little taxpayers' money.

668
01:06:24,000 --> 01:06:31,000
Conversely, when I go home every year, my beloved British people seem to get fatter and fatter and fatter.

669
01:06:31,000 --> 01:06:33,000
So clearly there's a disconnect.

670
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:37,000
You talk about the mental health issues you respond to, the domestic violence you respond to,

671
01:06:37,000 --> 01:06:40,000
the gang membership, the addiction, the drunks.

672
01:06:40,000 --> 01:06:43,000
The nucleus, again, is mental health.

673
01:06:43,000 --> 01:06:49,000
So to me, it's not so much that the substance is addressing the mental health crisis that creates addiction,

674
01:06:49,000 --> 01:06:56,000
that creates violence, that creates, you know, searching for a mentor that ends up being a shitbag gang member

675
01:06:56,000 --> 01:07:00,000
instead of, you know, a recruiting officer in the military or whatever it is.

676
01:07:00,000 --> 01:07:04,000
So that's the kind of false economy is they keep sending our police paramedics,

677
01:07:04,000 --> 01:07:08,000
fire to call after call after call and they fill our hospitals.

678
01:07:08,000 --> 01:07:12,000
But we're not proactively addressing the issues, you know.

679
01:07:12,000 --> 01:07:21,000
And so I didn't come here to talk about ambulance crews or paramedics or anything, but, you know, I'm here.

680
01:07:21,000 --> 01:07:22,000
So I might as well mention it.

681
01:07:22,000 --> 01:07:28,000
I mean, I used to have long conversations with my paramedic and the other paramedics were in the crew room.

682
01:07:28,000 --> 01:07:35,000
And as you would expect, paramedics like cops, like firefighters, particularly paramedics and cops,

683
01:07:35,000 --> 01:07:40,000
are as cynical as each other with the same dark sense of humor.

684
01:07:40,000 --> 01:07:47,000
And I reckon if you were to ask any London ambulance member or the vast majority, you know, what the percentage was of wasted calls,

685
01:07:47,000 --> 01:07:56,000
they'd probably say that 75 to 80, if not more percent, of calls that emergency ambulances go to aren't emergencies.

686
01:07:56,000 --> 01:08:05,000
And the reason they the reason we go to them is because the National Health Service has said, yeah, you know, people just treat it as a service.

687
01:08:05,000 --> 01:08:13,000
One of my last calls I dealt with, again, I drove a long distance on blue lights through heavy traffic to get to a woman with difficulty in breathing.

688
01:08:13,000 --> 01:08:21,000
And when we pull up outside, she's leaning on a front gate, smoking a cigarette, takes one look at us and go, wow, you got here quickly.

689
01:08:21,000 --> 01:08:23,000
You know, that in an emergency, is it?

690
01:08:23,000 --> 01:08:24,000
You know, and that happens.

691
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:29,000
That's probably I would say a good 70 or 80 percent of the calls that they get called to.

692
01:08:29,000 --> 01:08:31,000
And there's no financial consequence.

693
01:08:31,000 --> 01:08:37,000
Now, we always talk about the NHS, like you said, it's altruistic, it's beautiful.

694
01:08:37,000 --> 01:08:46,000
But it functioned fine when we had the population that we had back in the 1950s, 1960s.

695
01:08:46,000 --> 01:08:48,000
It doesn't it doesn't operate now.

696
01:08:48,000 --> 01:08:50,000
And there are other we kind of dismiss it.

697
01:08:50,000 --> 01:08:55,000
We're very good in Great Britain of going, oh, look how all our policemen are on our wonderful NHS.

698
01:08:55,000 --> 01:09:01,000
But we kind of ignore the fact that other places around the world have their NHS.

699
01:09:01,000 --> 01:09:12,000
It's not run exactly the same, you know, but I know places in Europe, for instance, which have an NHS system where if you go into A&E with something that isn't an emergency,

700
01:09:12,000 --> 01:09:17,000
you know, or you call an ambulance and it's not an emergency, you get you have to pay a fee.

701
01:09:17,000 --> 01:09:19,000
Yeah, you get billed.

702
01:09:19,000 --> 01:09:22,000
But the thing is, it's not the NHS that's necessarily broken.

703
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:24,000
It's a victim of its own success.

704
01:09:24,000 --> 01:09:26,000
It's a bit like the M25. Yeah, yeah.

705
01:09:26,000 --> 01:09:27,000
It's a success.

706
01:09:27,000 --> 01:09:30,000
So everyone bombards it.

707
01:09:30,000 --> 01:09:40,000
And of course, unfortunately, in our society nowadays, some people are pretty stupid and they ring up for stupid reasons, like they ring the police for stupid reason, the fire service for stupid reasons.

708
01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:43,000
You know, they just panic or whatever like that, or they're badly educated.

709
01:09:43,000 --> 01:09:46,000
But it's a victim of its own success.

710
01:09:46,000 --> 01:09:54,000
And you could throw billions more into it. And I'm not sure unless it was managed correctly, it would ever be any better.

711
01:09:54,000 --> 01:10:02,000
You know, I spoke to someone today, one of our members whose daughter was born with a cancer and nearly died.

712
01:10:02,000 --> 01:10:08,000
She's now 18. She's got a recurrence of what they believe could be something to do with this.

713
01:10:08,000 --> 01:10:14,000
I've been told a year, they probably have to wait until they get the proper scans a year.

714
01:10:14,000 --> 01:10:19,000
This is a young person that was born with this condition.

715
01:10:19,000 --> 01:10:24,000
And now they're going to have to wait a year potentially. So he's going private.

716
01:10:24,000 --> 01:10:27,000
So, you know, what can you know?

717
01:10:27,000 --> 01:10:31,000
And of course, that brings in all the arguments about, well, who's accessing all these services?

718
01:10:31,000 --> 01:10:35,000
You know, are these people accessing it? Are they really allowed to be accessing it? Should they be accessing it?

719
01:10:35,000 --> 01:10:37,000
What have they paid into the system?

720
01:10:37,000 --> 01:10:43,000
There's a person who's given all his life to his country, working, paying his national insurance, his tax, things like that.

721
01:10:43,000 --> 01:10:49,000
And now his daughter has got to wait potentially for a year to get looked after by the NHS.

722
01:10:49,000 --> 01:10:51,000
It's complete.

723
01:10:51,000 --> 01:10:57,000
It's the 30,000 cops with a gun instead of the two that are trained.

724
01:10:57,000 --> 01:11:01,000
This is the problem, is that it should be focused on the people who really need it.

725
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:09,000
And I think that's the philosophy, is that everyone contributes so that, God forbid, one of you has a massive car accident and needs the help.

726
01:11:09,000 --> 01:11:11,000
It's there. No questions asked.

727
01:11:11,000 --> 01:11:17,000
And I saw the NHS, you know, with my granddad, who was 99 years old, riddled with cancer, get the most amazing treatment.

728
01:11:17,000 --> 01:11:20,000
But this is the problem. It depends on where you live.

729
01:11:20,000 --> 01:11:22,000
Very geographic.

730
01:11:22,000 --> 01:11:24,000
Postcode lottery.

731
01:11:24,000 --> 01:11:35,000
And the other thing is, I mean, if you look at, you know, going off on a tangent here, but, you know, you have to look at commercials on TV and all about full fat foods and crap that young kids are being encouraged to eat.

732
01:11:35,000 --> 01:11:37,000
And, you know, I've got a sweet, I'm as bad as I know.

733
01:11:37,000 --> 01:11:45,000
But, you know, but kids aren't getting in the gym. They're not they're not going outside anymore and doing stuff that we used to do when we were kids and things like that.

734
01:11:45,000 --> 01:11:55,000
And I think there's a vicious circle of crap, isn't it, really, that's creating this perfect storm that's going to, you know, financially is going to cause us huge problems.

735
01:11:55,000 --> 01:12:04,000
Of course, those financial commitments then that have to be addressed, i.e. for the NHS come out of policing, military, everything.

736
01:12:04,000 --> 01:12:07,000
Everyone else has to pay towards it, don't they?

737
01:12:07,000 --> 01:12:09,000
It has to be paid for somehow.

738
01:12:09,000 --> 01:12:12,000
Well, I think it's an optimistic lens.

739
01:12:12,000 --> 01:12:18,000
This could also be viewed as the tipping point where we have to actually start changing things for the better.

740
01:12:18,000 --> 01:12:22,000
I mean, because like in the American Fire Service and we're fire and EMS, so I'm a firefighter and a paramedic.

741
01:12:22,000 --> 01:12:25,000
We do it combined here. A lot of areas.

742
01:12:25,000 --> 01:12:32,000
They're struggling to recruit. So either you finally fix the things that are broken or you just don't have fire and EMS anymore.

743
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:36,000
Your choice. And like you said about the police officers, I said this about the fire.

744
01:12:36,000 --> 01:12:39,000
All we have firefighter is a serve for three, four years.

745
01:12:39,000 --> 01:12:43,000
And then it's like a military service, one tour and then then you're out.

746
01:12:43,000 --> 01:12:48,000
So you never get anyone responding to your home that has any more than four years experience.

747
01:12:48,000 --> 01:12:51,000
Do you want that? And when your kids choke in or are stuck in a fire?

748
01:12:51,000 --> 01:12:55,000
Is it cost effective to spend all that money training somebody?

749
01:12:55,000 --> 01:13:00,000
We've had this internally within within UK policing, certainly in the Met, which is obviously a big force.

750
01:13:00,000 --> 01:13:02,000
But, you know, I hinted at it earlier.

751
01:13:02,000 --> 01:13:08,000
There were guys when I joined that had been on the same shift at the same police station for 20 years.

752
01:13:08,000 --> 01:13:10,000
They knew everything. They knew everybody.

753
01:13:10,000 --> 01:13:13,000
They had no aspirations to go anywhere else.

754
01:13:13,000 --> 01:13:16,000
You know, they knew the route into work. They knew the route back.

755
01:13:16,000 --> 01:13:21,000
It was just that they were quite happy, but senior leadership weren't happy with that.

756
01:13:21,000 --> 01:13:23,000
They go, we're going to move you.

757
01:13:23,000 --> 01:13:25,000
You know, we don't think it's right that you've been in this one place for all this time.

758
01:13:25,000 --> 01:13:28,000
So they transfer them to the neighboring division where they don't know anybody.

759
01:13:28,000 --> 01:13:31,000
They don't need to know the streets or anything like that.

760
01:13:31,000 --> 01:13:33,000
And so you've lost all of that expertise.

761
01:13:33,000 --> 01:13:35,000
And it was the same with us in the firearms unit.

762
01:13:35,000 --> 01:13:38,000
I had to go back and do 14 months.

763
01:13:38,000 --> 01:13:44,000
It should have been two years, but I can't wait for 14 months of, you know, back to street duty policing.

764
01:13:44,000 --> 01:13:49,000
I actually quite enjoyed it, but it served no purpose whatsoever.

765
01:13:49,000 --> 01:13:52,000
People were saying, oh, yeah, other people want your job.

766
01:13:52,000 --> 01:13:57,000
They want to crack at your job. I used to call it fat bloke in in gold syndrome.

767
01:13:57,000 --> 01:14:00,000
It was like, well, you know, you've been the goalie and you've saved all these goals.

768
01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:04,000
But the fat kid over there that never gets picked, you know, he wants to go in gold.

769
01:14:04,000 --> 01:14:07,000
Let him come and have a go. Well, is he not a goalkeeper?

770
01:14:07,000 --> 01:14:10,000
Well, no, but you know, we'll be letting him have a go.

771
01:14:10,000 --> 01:14:12,000
It's like, well, is that what you want?

772
01:14:12,000 --> 01:14:16,000
Do you want an average, you know, it's his turn to do it?

773
01:14:16,000 --> 01:14:19,000
Or do you want the right people in the right place doing the right job?

774
01:14:19,000 --> 01:14:26,000
When I reapplied to come in, not one person from my borough, my division, applied for the unit.

775
01:14:26,000 --> 01:14:31,000
Not one. So this perception that everybody wanted my job was a load of old bollocks.

776
01:14:31,000 --> 01:14:41,000
But on a positive note, if there is one, I think as we know, there's an accountability review going on at the moment that the Home Office Commissioned or sanctioned.

777
01:14:41,000 --> 01:14:43,000
And it's early doors yet.

778
01:14:43,000 --> 01:14:50,000
But I think that is partly a way of us policing, saying enough's enough.

779
01:14:50,000 --> 01:14:54,000
You know, we need to be judged differently to the average member of the public because of the work we're doing.

780
01:14:54,000 --> 01:15:00,000
And we've had this conversation somewhere about we ask farms officers, we train them to a high standard.

781
01:15:00,000 --> 01:15:07,000
We ask them to go out and on behalf of the state to risk their lives for us, for people they've never met before.

782
01:15:07,000 --> 01:15:11,000
And then we treat them so bloody awfully and badly when they do something that we've trained them to do.

783
01:15:11,000 --> 01:15:15,000
So I think this accountability review should have some sort of an impact on it.

784
01:15:15,000 --> 01:15:27,000
But what also we need to do is people need to take a step back and bosses, leaders need to lead and support their men and women because that's lacking, sadly.

785
01:15:27,000 --> 01:15:35,000
And there's not many governors out there have got the bollocks and wherever the female equivalent is to go and do make a decision to support their people.

786
01:15:35,000 --> 01:15:43,000
And I don't understand that. And I can't understand how you can have a farm officer, for example, that shoots someone and yet the leader of the organization that they're in,

787
01:15:43,000 --> 01:15:49,000
it doesn't have to be the Met, could be anywhere around the country, doesn't want to go and visit the officer and support them.

788
01:15:49,000 --> 01:15:55,000
Yeah, who will visit the victim's family, you know, a young criminal that's got himself shot.

789
01:15:55,000 --> 01:15:56,000
Yeah.

790
01:15:56,000 --> 01:15:58,000
Or visit him before they visit their own officers.

791
01:15:58,000 --> 01:16:00,000
That's disgraceful. That's disgraceful.

792
01:16:00,000 --> 01:16:06,000
If you ask any business person in this country, hopefully that runs a business of any kind,

793
01:16:06,000 --> 01:16:14,000
if one of their team, their staff was injured or risked their life or did something like that, they'd go and visit them. Why would they not come visit them?

794
01:16:14,000 --> 01:16:19,000
What is the problem here? Now, what is this issue about going to talk to people when they've been involved in it?

795
01:16:19,000 --> 01:16:26,000
And where is this innocent until proven guilty gone that we were born with, you know, innocent until proven guilty.

796
01:16:26,000 --> 01:16:31,000
So therefore you give them the support. And you know what? If they're found guilty, what's going to happen to you then?

797
01:16:31,000 --> 01:16:36,000
What? Because you showed them support. You're not going to get any problems with that, are you?

798
01:16:36,000 --> 01:16:40,000
You just showed them support because they were innocent until proven guilty.

799
01:16:40,000 --> 01:16:45,000
You know, so that beggars belief, I mean, Tom, we've discussed this so many times and we, you know.

800
01:16:45,000 --> 01:16:55,000
I think when you're talking about policing generally in the UK, not necessarily armed policing, but policing generally, I think, you know, we talked about it earlier.

801
01:16:55,000 --> 01:17:14,000
I don't know where this anti-police sort of rhetoric is all coming from or why is that, you know, they never report on mainstream media about good things that the police do, you know, when somebody rescues a kid from a river or something like that, very rarely.

802
01:17:14,000 --> 01:17:19,000
But all of the emphasis on what is wrong seems to be the police.

803
01:17:19,000 --> 01:17:31,000
And of course, the police is just a cog in a wheel. And the other cogs are the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts, you know.

804
01:17:31,000 --> 01:17:37,000
I'm a long way away from, you know, courts and the judicial system now.

805
01:17:37,000 --> 01:17:43,000
But I remember as a young police officer, I'd be in magistrates court two or three times a week.

806
01:17:43,000 --> 01:17:49,000
You know, I'd be going to give evidence at Crown Court in front of a jury, probably four or five times a year.

807
01:17:49,000 --> 01:17:52,000
We've now got officers that have got, say, 10 years service.

808
01:17:52,000 --> 01:18:00,000
And the first time that they appear in court as an armed officer will be, you know, as the defendant.

809
01:18:00,000 --> 01:18:03,000
They'll never have given evidence in court before.

810
01:18:03,000 --> 01:18:16,000
So, you know, I actually think that the police service and the whole criminal justice service needs a review. And part of that would be the independent office of police complaints.

811
01:18:16,000 --> 01:18:27,000
The IOPC, which is the body that investigates police officers when they get involved in wrongdoing or shooting or whatever is brought to their attention.

812
01:18:27,000 --> 01:18:31,000
And I think one of the reasons that morale is so bad within armed policing at the moment,

813
01:18:31,000 --> 01:18:42,000
one of the reasons people aren't applying for roles and who are trying to get out of roles or go to a safer armed posting like close protection or diplomatic protection,

814
01:18:42,000 --> 01:18:47,000
is because of the way that they're being treated by this specific organization.

815
01:18:47,000 --> 01:18:50,000
I think it's broken. I think it's lost track.

816
01:18:50,000 --> 01:19:00,000
I don't think it's got any experience or anyone that's investigating officers that have got any worldly experience that can put themselves in a position where they understand why someone has had to use lethal force.

817
01:19:00,000 --> 01:19:08,000
But, yeah, I just think that there needs to be a complete review of that.

818
01:19:08,000 --> 01:19:16,000
And if they're truly independent, then in addition to looking after the interest of the victim or his family,

819
01:19:16,000 --> 01:19:24,000
they should also have a statutory obligation to look after the welfare of the police officer or the person they're investigating.

820
01:19:24,000 --> 01:19:31,000
So if, for instance, we as a police force took as long as they did to investigate a crime,

821
01:19:31,000 --> 01:19:39,000
you know, and that came down to incompetence, when it came down to, you know, something that was controllable,

822
01:19:39,000 --> 01:19:48,000
then it would probably ironically be the IOPC that were investigating the police for not carrying out the investigation thoroughly or properly.

823
01:19:48,000 --> 01:19:51,000
And yet there seems to be no time limits on them.

824
01:19:51,000 --> 01:19:56,000
You know, police officers are traditionally not kept up to speed with what's happening within the investigation.

825
01:19:56,000 --> 01:20:00,000
They have to constantly be asking.

826
01:20:00,000 --> 01:20:08,000
And so I think, you know, if you're going to take a police officer, and most police officers in modern day times, because they're badly paid,

827
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:14,000
rely on overtime in order to pay their mortgage, you know, or their wife's going to have to go to work or get a better job or whatever.

828
01:20:14,000 --> 01:20:26,000
If you're going to suspend someone for six and a half years, or, you know, eight years on basically basic pay with no opportunity to earn overtime,

829
01:20:26,000 --> 01:20:30,000
then, you know, all the guy's done is done what he's trained to do.

830
01:20:30,000 --> 01:20:32,000
And he's been punished because of that.

831
01:20:32,000 --> 01:20:41,000
Like I said, you know, it might be, you know, nearly a quarter of your third of your of your pensionable service lost.

832
01:20:41,000 --> 01:20:49,000
So I think that's one of the problems. If they think they're going to call themselves independent, then they should be as, you know,

833
01:20:49,000 --> 01:20:54,000
required to look after the interests of police as they are the people that complain.

834
01:20:54,000 --> 01:21:00,000
I think for me, what saddens me though, as well as I think about these guys and girls that are

835
01:21:00,000 --> 01:21:06,000
have been off operational duty for so long, suspended or whatever, you know, when you wake up in the morning,

836
01:21:06,000 --> 01:21:13,000
you know, hopefully we've all got something to look forward to and we're going to have a day ahead of us, whether it's work or with our families or doing sports or whatever.

837
01:21:13,000 --> 01:21:23,000
And every single day, like the two guys in particular, Tony, that we're talking about from the 19 years for six years, they're waking up thinking about that.

838
01:21:23,000 --> 01:21:31,000
What's going to happen to them? They don't know. They can't plan anything with their families, you know, and it's just the toll that takes on them.

839
01:21:31,000 --> 01:21:40,000
But and also the other thing that's really sad is that, I mean, I had a really I had a very enjoyable police career and I had, you know,

840
01:21:40,000 --> 01:21:50,000
I came out reasonably unscathed, but I speak to so many people now that are not and they're very bitter against the job and things like that saddens me because I wasn't, you know,

841
01:21:50,000 --> 01:21:58,000
and so I can't really relate to that because I think, you know, I had a good career. I was very fortunate to go out unscathed.

842
01:21:58,000 --> 01:22:06,000
But some people have been shafted by the organization itself so badly. They're so bitter and angry about it all.

843
01:22:06,000 --> 01:22:11,000
And all they want to do is just get out and get on with their lives and do something else. But they'll never forget that.

844
01:22:11,000 --> 01:22:15,000
It'll always be with them all the way through their lives. I mean, we don't have long lives, do we?

845
01:22:15,000 --> 01:22:23,000
We have short lives and to be worrying about all that crap when you shouldn't be, you know, I don't know what you went through, Tony.

846
01:22:23,000 --> 01:22:28,000
You were retired when you went through all that. I mean, Christ, mate, you know, I mean, you know, I look at my life.

847
01:22:28,000 --> 01:22:33,000
I've had a few things happen, but I've had a really good time since I've been retired and done lots of nice things that I like doing.

848
01:22:33,000 --> 01:22:45,000
I've got a good job. I like doing. But to have all that to worry about, like in your case, you know, been on trial at the Old Bailey for murder, you know, Jesus, you know, this is what we're doing to our people.

849
01:22:45,000 --> 01:22:54,000
You know, it's just completely wrong and causing so much damage to people, not just them, their families as well, their kids, the impact it has on them.

850
01:22:54,000 --> 01:22:58,000
You know, we pick up a lot of the collateral damage here. You know, we're officers.

851
01:22:58,000 --> 01:23:07,000
It's their partners that are suffering because, you know, they're going through this and they're trying to support the kids around them, the family around them and things like that.

852
01:23:07,000 --> 01:23:14,000
Because that's the other thing, you know, I think about my age now, but these people that have got all these problems are younger people that have got young kids, young families.

853
01:23:14,000 --> 01:23:21,000
You know, when you think about Tony with your situation, because it was so long after the shooting, your kids would have been 10 years younger when they actually happened.

854
01:23:21,000 --> 01:23:24,000
You know, so they were younger people, wouldn't they? You know, and things like that.

855
01:23:24,000 --> 01:23:31,000
And it just affects people in so many different ways. And it saddens me that we put our people through this.

856
01:23:31,000 --> 01:23:35,000
Well, that loss of autonomy is very detrimental and being in limbo is very detrimental.

857
01:23:35,000 --> 01:23:39,000
And I think this is what people don't realize. You're dragging this on, dragging this on.

858
01:23:39,000 --> 01:23:44,000
I mean, you know, like you said it perfectly. I think that's what people got a taste of in Covid.

859
01:23:44,000 --> 01:23:47,000
Like stay in your house, shut the fuck up, we'll tell you when to come out.

860
01:23:47,000 --> 01:23:48,000
People didn't like it very much.

861
01:23:48,000 --> 01:23:50,000
I loved it.

862
01:23:50,000 --> 01:23:52,000
The first lockdown was alright, wasn't it?

863
01:23:52,000 --> 01:23:54,000
The weather was fantastic.

864
01:23:54,000 --> 01:23:58,000
I spent the whole time in the garden doing all these things.

865
01:23:58,000 --> 01:24:07,000
But that gave us a chance to reset in some ways, James. And it gave the environment a chance to recover.

866
01:24:07,000 --> 01:24:10,000
Oh yeah, we learned that lesson, didn't we?

867
01:24:10,000 --> 01:24:11,000
Yeah, yeah.

868
01:24:11,000 --> 01:24:13,000
And we just drove twice as much.

869
01:24:13,000 --> 01:24:19,000
And it gave certain people opportunities to millions and millions of pounds out of PPE contracts.

870
01:24:19,000 --> 01:24:23,000
You know, there's always something going on in the background, isn't there?

871
01:24:23,000 --> 01:24:26,000
Absolutely. Yeah, the mother nature thing was beautiful.

872
01:24:26,000 --> 01:24:28,000
Everyone's like, oh my God, there's dolphins in the Nile.

873
01:24:28,000 --> 01:24:32,000
And then it was like, ah, fuck it. And then I was completely disregarded.

874
01:24:32,000 --> 01:24:34,000
Let's just go back to where we were, you know.

875
01:24:34,000 --> 01:24:36,000
Exactly, let's learn nothing.

876
01:24:36,000 --> 01:24:38,000
It just kind of reset everything, didn't it?

877
01:24:38,000 --> 01:24:40,000
But, you know, and I don't know.

878
01:24:40,000 --> 01:24:45,000
I mean, it was an odd time, but people got short memories and they forget about it now, don't they?

879
01:24:45,000 --> 01:24:46,000
They do.

880
01:24:46,000 --> 01:24:48,000
I want to throw a couple of questions at you.

881
01:24:48,000 --> 01:24:50,000
So I've got a close friend of mine.

882
01:24:50,000 --> 01:24:53,000
He was in one of the London armed units for a full career.

883
01:24:53,000 --> 01:24:55,000
He's not obviously able to come on today.

884
01:24:55,000 --> 01:24:57,000
So this is through his lens, not me.

885
01:24:57,000 --> 01:25:03,000
I mean, they're going to be asking, well, how does an American firefighter paramedic have these questions about armed policing?

886
01:25:03,000 --> 01:25:07,000
The first one he had, one of his concerns was tactics themselves.

887
01:25:07,000 --> 01:25:12,000
I know he's done a lot of training with tier one units in the military side as well.

888
01:25:12,000 --> 01:25:24,000
The way he was explaining it is sometimes some of the tactics, the armed officers are told to be very close on a vehicle, for example, versus staying back, using cover, that kind of thing.

889
01:25:24,000 --> 01:25:35,000
What are your perspectives on the situations the tactics are putting the officers in and the increased likelihood that they are going to have to shoot in that case, if anything at all?

890
01:25:35,000 --> 01:25:38,000
Well, I think it's I've got some really strong opinions on this.

891
01:25:38,000 --> 01:25:44,000
So there's a type of stop that we that is carried out.

892
01:25:44,000 --> 01:25:45,000
I'm not sure what they call it now.

893
01:25:45,000 --> 01:25:48,000
They probably call it a type one or a type two or type three or whatever.

894
01:25:48,000 --> 01:25:54,000
Originally, it was called an enforced vehicle stop or sometimes shortened to hard stop.

895
01:25:54,000 --> 01:25:56,000
And I'll tell you how this tactic came about.

896
01:25:56,000 --> 01:26:04,000
So below the radar, because we weren't officially allowed to do other jobs or earn money outside of police work in the 90s.

897
01:26:04,000 --> 01:26:10,000
But for about a decade, I would go out to the states a little bit like Coles to Newcastle.

898
01:26:10,000 --> 01:26:17,000
And I would help run SWAT schools or run my own SWAT schools in the states, mainly in Utah, bizarrely of all places.

899
01:26:17,000 --> 01:26:20,000
But I helped out in other parts of the country.

900
01:26:20,000 --> 01:26:31,000
And one of the other parts where I literally just helped out was a guy called Ward Stanley, who was the SWAT team sergeant for Hollywood PD in Brow County.

901
01:26:31,000 --> 01:26:32,000
Is it Brow County?

902
01:26:32,000 --> 01:26:36,000
Yes, not too far from where I am now.

903
01:26:36,000 --> 01:26:52,000
OK, so so Walt very much like he'd been in the he'd been in the military, been in the Green Berets in his military service and as a Green Beret, his theater operations was and this was like Cold Warish sort of time was Germany.

904
01:26:52,000 --> 01:26:57,000
So he'd been posted in Germany, spoke German quite fluently.

905
01:26:57,000 --> 01:26:59,000
But he loved the whole European thing.

906
01:26:59,000 --> 01:27:07,000
Proudly American, but he would love to have police officers from Europe on his SWAT course so that we could all learn from each other.

907
01:27:07,000 --> 01:27:13,000
So he'd pay my way over there and I'd stay at his house and I'd help him run the course.

908
01:27:13,000 --> 01:27:18,000
But I'd also do like a one hour lecture on UK police tactics.

909
01:27:18,000 --> 01:27:24,000
And he also had a contact that used to come over on a similar basis called Manfred from Germany.

910
01:27:24,000 --> 01:27:29,000
And Manfred was a blonde. He looked like a surfer.

911
01:27:29,000 --> 01:27:39,000
In fact, he was called Sonny by his German mates because his one goal in life was to meet a good looking American girl and get a green card and then stay at the same thing.

912
01:27:39,000 --> 01:27:42,000
He gave a lecture on German tactics.

913
01:27:42,000 --> 01:27:46,000
And I remember one bit was quite funny because at the end of the lecture, he goes, Is there any questions?

914
01:27:46,000 --> 01:27:54,000
And his big bodybuilding, like local cop says, Yeah, Manfred, I noticed you didn't mention you use gas at all.

915
01:27:54,000 --> 01:27:56,000
Use gas in any tactical options at all.

916
01:27:56,000 --> 01:28:03,000
And Manfred goes, No, in Germany, the use of gas is very political because I think in the past, we have gas too many people.

917
01:28:03,000 --> 01:28:08,000
And all the British cops at the back of the audience were just looking at each other and biting our hand.

918
01:28:08,000 --> 01:28:10,000
But he was just a funny guy.

919
01:28:10,000 --> 01:28:14,000
Yeah, I know it's not very appropriate that this was in the 80s, well 90s.

920
01:28:14,000 --> 01:28:24,000
But one night we were sitting in a strip bar in Florida and we're talking about tactics and we got some coasters, you know, the old beer coasters out.

921
01:28:24,000 --> 01:28:27,000
And he's asking us about our tactics.

922
01:28:27,000 --> 01:28:34,000
Now, our tactics at the time were basically stolen from an American felony vehicle stop.

923
01:28:34,000 --> 01:28:38,000
You know, we pull up behind the vehicle, you angle your vehicle, get on the tannoy.

924
01:28:38,000 --> 01:28:41,000
Driver, put your keys on top of the car.

925
01:28:41,000 --> 01:28:42,000
Driver, let me see your hands.

926
01:28:42,000 --> 01:28:44,000
Driver, open the door slowly, slowly.

927
01:28:44,000 --> 01:28:45,000
Get out.

928
01:28:45,000 --> 01:28:46,000
Walk backwards towards me.

929
01:28:46,000 --> 01:28:47,000
Turn around three times.

930
01:28:47,000 --> 01:28:48,000
All that sort of shit.

931
01:28:48,000 --> 01:28:51,000
Like we would do talking to a suspect out of a house.

932
01:28:51,000 --> 01:28:53,000
And that was in our manual.

933
01:28:53,000 --> 01:28:55,000
But do you think it worked in London?

934
01:28:55,000 --> 01:28:56,000
No.

935
01:28:56,000 --> 01:28:59,000
Because the little slag in the car just got out and walked up to you.

936
01:28:59,000 --> 01:29:00,000
And we're most fucking problem with, mate.

937
01:29:00,000 --> 01:29:02,000
We were flushing your blue lights.

938
01:29:02,000 --> 01:29:04,000
So it never really worked.

939
01:29:04,000 --> 01:29:10,000
So when I said this to Manfred, he goes, but Tony, those are ordinary police tactics.

940
01:29:10,000 --> 01:29:11,000
You are the specialist team.

941
01:29:11,000 --> 01:29:12,000
What tactics do you do?

942
01:29:12,000 --> 01:29:14,000
And I said, well, what do you do?

943
01:29:14,000 --> 01:29:21,000
And so they were from Hamburg, SEK or Special Einsatzkommando, which was, sorry, MEK,

944
01:29:21,000 --> 01:29:26,000
Mobilize Einsatzkommando, which was like a cross between a surveillance team,

945
01:29:26,000 --> 01:29:28,000
a public order team and a SWAT team.

946
01:29:28,000 --> 01:29:32,000
So they all had ponytails and earrings and beards and God knows what else.

947
01:29:32,000 --> 01:29:36,000
And he described this system whereby they only worked in covert vehicles.

948
01:29:36,000 --> 01:29:40,000
Covert vehicle did the overtake of the bandit car or the bad guy car.

949
01:29:40,000 --> 01:29:42,000
Slam the brakes on.

950
01:29:42,000 --> 01:29:46,000
And then normally the driver, there would only be one person in that lead vehicle

951
01:29:46,000 --> 01:29:48,000
and they get out of the car and they run across the street

952
01:29:48,000 --> 01:29:51,000
and they'd stop the traffic coming in the other direction.

953
01:29:51,000 --> 01:29:56,000
In the meantime, the next car would come alongside a block, the Bravo car.

954
01:29:56,000 --> 01:30:00,000
And then the Charlie car would basically gently ram the vehicle

955
01:30:00,000 --> 01:30:02,000
and nudge the vehicle from behind.

956
01:30:02,000 --> 01:30:04,000
They disrupt everyone in the vehicle.

957
01:30:04,000 --> 01:30:09,000
And the guys that were in the side car, ballistic helmets, shields, and they would cover

958
01:30:09,000 --> 01:30:12,000
and they would talk the occupants of the car out onto the sidewalk.

959
01:30:12,000 --> 01:30:14,000
That was the way that they did it.

960
01:30:14,000 --> 01:30:20,000
That was called a Lima because it had an L-shaped arcs of fire.

961
01:30:20,000 --> 01:30:21,000
And then they had an Oscar.

962
01:30:21,000 --> 01:30:26,000
And an Oscar was basically the same, but you gave enough room between the side blocking car

963
01:30:26,000 --> 01:30:29,000
for the occupants to get out and you basically swarmed on the car.

964
01:30:29,000 --> 01:30:33,000
You smashed the windows, you threw stun grenades under the car,

965
01:30:33,000 --> 01:30:35,000
maximum aggression.

966
01:30:35,000 --> 01:30:40,000
That was meant for hostage rescue where you had the element of surprise.

967
01:30:40,000 --> 01:30:42,000
So we brought this tactic back.

968
01:30:42,000 --> 01:30:46,000
And I described it to the guys in London using beer mats in the pub.

969
01:30:46,000 --> 01:30:47,000
I mean, well, that's good.

970
01:30:47,000 --> 01:30:52,000
So we documented it all and it became part of our, and we trained for it,

971
01:30:52,000 --> 01:30:54,000
and we modified it, and we tweaked it.

972
01:30:54,000 --> 01:31:02,000
And that became our primary tactic using covert vehicles with the element of surprise.

973
01:31:02,000 --> 01:31:06,000
So in most cases, there would be a surveillance team alongside you,

974
01:31:06,000 --> 01:31:10,000
and they would follow the suspect until it got to the point where you were going to do the hit

975
01:31:10,000 --> 01:31:13,000
and then they'd peel off and you'd do your job.

976
01:31:13,000 --> 01:31:19,000
Now, unfortunately, it's as sexy as fuck, loads of aggression, loads of shouting.

977
01:31:19,000 --> 01:31:28,000
But it's not tactical in a marked vehicle where the suspects have seen you arriving.

978
01:31:28,000 --> 01:31:32,000
And what's happened is one of the tactics that was open to the armed response vehicles

979
01:31:32,000 --> 01:31:39,000
when they first started was the felony vehicle stop type, pull up behind, call them out.

980
01:31:39,000 --> 01:31:41,000
But that never got used.

981
01:31:41,000 --> 01:31:45,000
And they started doing this thing where they would block the vehicles in marked vehicles.

982
01:31:45,000 --> 01:31:49,000
And 999 times out of 1,000, it's going to work because when you do it,

983
01:31:49,000 --> 01:31:54,000
for the most part, criminals aren't as big and hard as they like to think they are.

984
01:31:54,000 --> 01:31:59,000
And they'll normally fall when you give them a massive show of force.

985
01:31:59,000 --> 01:32:03,000
But sadly, we've had incidents, and Azel Rodney was one of them,

986
01:32:03,000 --> 01:32:06,000
where the suspects don't come to the briefing.

987
01:32:06,000 --> 01:32:09,000
They don't know what your plan is, and they do whatever the fuck they want.

988
01:32:09,000 --> 01:32:13,000
And when that happens, suspects get shot.

989
01:32:13,000 --> 01:32:18,000
And so we've come under criticism for two specific ones, the Azel Rodney shooting

990
01:32:18,000 --> 01:32:23,000
and what was it, the start of the riots, Mark? Mark Dunning.

991
01:32:23,000 --> 01:32:27,000
And the Mark Duggan incident, where suspects have been shot by police.

992
01:32:27,000 --> 01:32:32,000
On both occasions, they were armed, but we've come under criticism for it.

993
01:32:32,000 --> 01:32:36,000
Armed response vehicles have had stops where shots have been fired,

994
01:32:36,000 --> 01:32:38,000
and they've come under criticism for it as well.

995
01:32:38,000 --> 01:32:48,000
So I'm not against the tactic per se, but I think there's different tactics for different jobs.

996
01:32:48,000 --> 01:32:55,000
And I think there's also a situation where we like to make a lot of noise in police

997
01:32:55,000 --> 01:32:57,000
armed tactics in the UK.

998
01:32:57,000 --> 01:33:00,000
When we search in rooms, they like to do a lot of shouting and stuff.

999
01:33:00,000 --> 01:33:03,000
Whereas when I first did it, we did everything really quietly.

1000
01:33:03,000 --> 01:33:06,000
We'd use mirrors to check behind doors. We'd use hand signals.

1001
01:33:06,000 --> 01:33:08,000
We'd bring the dog up.

1002
01:33:08,000 --> 01:33:10,000
Now there just seems to be this thing that you've got to shout.

1003
01:33:10,000 --> 01:33:13,000
You've got to let everyone else know what you're thinking and doing.

1004
01:33:13,000 --> 01:33:19,000
And actually, when you do these stops where you're in close proximity to the suspects,

1005
01:33:19,000 --> 01:33:24,000
unless just one person is shouting, all you do is confuse the suspect.

1006
01:33:24,000 --> 01:33:27,000
He's going to do something, and you're going to end up causing yourself,

1007
01:33:27,000 --> 01:33:30,000
putting yourself in a situation where you have to shoot.

1008
01:33:30,000 --> 01:33:35,000
So I think there needs to be a look at vehicle tactics generally,

1009
01:33:35,000 --> 01:33:39,000
just like there should always be an ongoing look at all the tactics that we do,

1010
01:33:39,000 --> 01:33:43,000
whether it's searching for suspects in buildings or searching open countryside

1011
01:33:43,000 --> 01:33:47,000
for suspects or working with dogs or whatever it might be.

1012
01:33:47,000 --> 01:33:49,000
Tactics should constantly be under review.

1013
01:33:49,000 --> 01:33:52,000
My personal feeling, and it's been this way for a long time,

1014
01:33:52,000 --> 01:34:01,000
is I don't like to see marked uniform vehicles doing enforced vehicle type stops.

1015
01:34:01,000 --> 01:34:03,000
I think there's too much.

1016
01:34:03,000 --> 01:34:06,000
You haven't got the element of surprise, and there's too much can go wrong.

1017
01:34:06,000 --> 01:34:08,000
That's my personal feeling.

1018
01:34:08,000 --> 01:34:14,000
I've written down here, one's going to be a lot shorter answer, James.

1019
01:34:14,000 --> 01:34:21,000
I've written down here, one, two, three, four, five, six incidents in the last,

1020
01:34:21,000 --> 01:34:25,000
the longest one going back to eight years with a colleague of ours,

1021
01:34:25,000 --> 01:34:30,000
and five and a half of them are all unmarked cars,

1022
01:34:30,000 --> 01:34:34,000
because the most recent one was half and half unmarked.

1023
01:34:34,000 --> 01:34:41,000
Every one of them has resulted in a disciplinary or criminal action

1024
01:34:41,000 --> 01:34:44,000
against the police officer involved.

1025
01:34:44,000 --> 01:34:48,000
I've actually said to the head of armed police in UK Armed Policing,

1026
01:34:48,000 --> 01:34:51,000
and I'm no tactician, I've been out of the job for 10 years now,

1027
01:34:51,000 --> 01:34:55,000
I was an ARV officer, but from my observations as a Fed rep

1028
01:34:55,000 --> 01:34:59,000
and as a CEO of a charity that looks after officers,

1029
01:34:59,000 --> 01:35:03,000
we need to have a proper review of vehicle stops,

1030
01:35:03,000 --> 01:35:06,000
how we go about those stops, whether it's geographically or whatever,

1031
01:35:06,000 --> 01:35:13,000
but a country-wide review on stopping vehicles, armed stops on vehicles.

1032
01:35:13,000 --> 01:35:15,000
That's all I want to say on the matter,

1033
01:35:15,000 --> 01:35:20,000
because every one of them has turned into absolute grief for the people involved.

1034
01:35:20,000 --> 01:35:23,000
The problem is, what do you do?

1035
01:35:23,000 --> 01:35:25,000
Because I've thought about this long and hard.

1036
01:35:25,000 --> 01:35:29,000
Like I said, the tactic that I introduced as a result of talking to a drunk

1037
01:35:29,000 --> 01:35:34,000
and German bloke in a pub in Florida is still going strong,

1038
01:35:34,000 --> 01:35:39,000
and it hasn't really been reviewed, because 99% of the time it works.

1039
01:35:39,000 --> 01:35:42,000
It's those occasions when it doesn't work.

1040
01:35:42,000 --> 01:35:44,000
Some would argue that it did work.

1041
01:35:44,000 --> 01:35:49,000
I'll argue that Azel Rodney put himself in a position where he was shot,

1042
01:35:49,000 --> 01:35:53,000
and he had guns in the car, and we had to force that stop,

1043
01:35:53,000 --> 01:35:57,000
because if we'd lost them, he would have, you know,

1044
01:35:57,000 --> 01:36:00,000
and we'd lost them and they'd gone on and killed...

1045
01:36:00,000 --> 01:36:04,000
But playing devil's advocate, what if these guys had seen a marked car?

1046
01:36:04,000 --> 01:36:07,000
Their actions may have been different if they'd seen a marked car

1047
01:36:07,000 --> 01:36:09,000
rather than an unmarked car.

1048
01:36:09,000 --> 01:36:11,000
But they had guns on the wall, didn't they?

1049
01:36:11,000 --> 01:36:14,000
And they were literally minutes away from doing the robbery.

1050
01:36:14,000 --> 01:36:17,000
So if we'd let them go and they'd killed Colombian drug dealers,

1051
01:36:17,000 --> 01:36:19,000
of course, you know, the British being the British,

1052
01:36:19,000 --> 01:36:21,000
we have a duty of care to Colombian drug dealers,

1053
01:36:21,000 --> 01:36:23,000
and we mustn't see them hurt.

1054
01:36:23,000 --> 01:36:27,000
Yeah, I mean, felony-type vehicle stops, containment,

1055
01:36:27,000 --> 01:36:33,000
calling it away from a position just is very unlikely to work in the UK,

1056
01:36:33,000 --> 01:36:37,000
because what's happened is the American public have been educated

1057
01:36:37,000 --> 01:36:40,000
to do certain things when they get stopped by police,

1058
01:36:40,000 --> 01:36:43,000
and for the most part, they adhere to it,

1059
01:36:43,000 --> 01:36:47,000
although increasingly, you're getting these sovereign citizens

1060
01:36:47,000 --> 01:36:50,000
and other idiots that want to film the cops and wind them up

1061
01:36:50,000 --> 01:36:53,000
and get out of their vehicles and do all sorts of stupid things,

1062
01:36:53,000 --> 01:36:55,000
knowing that they might get themselves shot.

1063
01:36:55,000 --> 01:37:00,000
But for the most part, vehicle stops are conducted

1064
01:37:00,000 --> 01:37:04,000
in a much more disciplined way in the United States.

1065
01:37:04,000 --> 01:37:09,000
That's a very interesting point, because being a Brit now living in the US

1066
01:37:09,000 --> 01:37:14,000
for 22 years, I think I've been here now, you do learn that.

1067
01:37:14,000 --> 01:37:17,000
And I've got a firearm, I've gone through training

1068
01:37:17,000 --> 01:37:20,000
with actual training groups run by Green Berets,

1069
01:37:20,000 --> 01:37:23,000
and not that I'm a great person with weapons, I'm not,

1070
01:37:23,000 --> 01:37:25,000
I'm still very much a white belt,

1071
01:37:25,000 --> 01:37:27,000
but I have an understanding of the danger of a firearm,

1072
01:37:27,000 --> 01:37:31,000
I have an understanding of the danger of the sleep deprived, overworked,

1073
01:37:31,000 --> 01:37:34,000
maybe having PTSD caught that's going to be walking over,

1074
01:37:34,000 --> 01:37:37,000
and so my hands are nice and clear on the steering wheel,

1075
01:37:37,000 --> 01:37:41,000
and I'll let them know, hey, there's a firearm, it's here,

1076
01:37:41,000 --> 01:37:43,000
I'm going to keep my hands here, do you want me to step out?

1077
01:37:43,000 --> 01:37:46,000
Because it's not about the color of your skin.

1078
01:37:46,000 --> 01:37:48,000
And this is one of the things I think is so ridiculous,

1079
01:37:48,000 --> 01:37:51,000
is that a police officer wakes up hoping to kill someone

1080
01:37:51,000 --> 01:37:53,000
that doesn't look like them that day.

1081
01:37:53,000 --> 01:37:56,000
I mean, that fucking narrative is just so ridiculous.

1082
01:37:56,000 --> 01:38:03,000
One of your first questions was about looking at it from a UK point of view,

1083
01:38:03,000 --> 01:38:06,000
and something that's become really apparent recently,

1084
01:38:06,000 --> 01:38:10,000
and it's actually been voiced on TV programs,

1085
01:38:10,000 --> 01:38:13,000
and I've certainly mentioned it on radio shows and things like that,

1086
01:38:13,000 --> 01:38:24,000
but there was a study done fairly recently by a black guy,

1087
01:38:24,000 --> 01:38:28,000
he was a Harvard educated doctor or something,

1088
01:38:28,000 --> 01:38:31,000
and he did a study in Texas about stocks.

1089
01:38:31,000 --> 01:38:34,000
I think, by the way, you're nodding, I'm guessing that you know the one I'm talking about.

1090
01:38:34,000 --> 01:38:38,000
I literally just shared the video of him talking a few weeks ago,

1091
01:38:38,000 --> 01:38:39,000
I know exactly who he's talking about.

1092
01:38:39,000 --> 01:38:44,000
And so he got closed down because he published his statistics,

1093
01:38:44,000 --> 01:38:49,000
and what he found was that actually a white police officer was less likely

1094
01:38:49,000 --> 01:38:53,000
to shoot a black suspect than he was a white suspect,

1095
01:38:53,000 --> 01:38:56,000
and actually the statistics kind of bear that out.

1096
01:38:56,000 --> 01:38:59,000
And certainly over here in the UK,

1097
01:38:59,000 --> 01:39:07,000
I've heard a female officer that was involved in a shooting say publicly,

1098
01:39:07,000 --> 01:39:10,000
my first thought was thank God he's white,

1099
01:39:10,000 --> 01:39:14,000
because it will get dealt with differently by the OOPC,

1100
01:39:14,000 --> 01:39:16,000
there is no doubt about it.

1101
01:39:16,000 --> 01:39:19,000
We had a situation the other week where a stalker,

1102
01:39:19,000 --> 01:39:24,000
with the previous intelligence about stalking or convictions, I'm not sure,

1103
01:39:24,000 --> 01:39:28,000
turned up at a woman's address with a crossbow and knives and a sword, I think,

1104
01:39:28,000 --> 01:39:32,000
and he was shot dead by police, and it was just like it never happened.

1105
01:39:32,000 --> 01:39:35,000
It was mentioned on the news, and that was it.

1106
01:39:35,000 --> 01:39:38,000
Yeah, but you know, genuine suspect, that's it.

1107
01:39:38,000 --> 01:39:42,000
If you shoot somebody of colour, then there's a very good possibility

1108
01:39:42,000 --> 01:39:47,000
it will be investigated in a very, very different way.

1109
01:39:47,000 --> 01:39:55,000
And I think that is an issue, and it's one that you can't keep avoid in talking about.

1110
01:39:55,000 --> 01:39:59,000
There's always been concerns about community impacts, isn't there,

1111
01:39:59,000 --> 01:40:01,000
when there's a shooting going on?

1112
01:40:01,000 --> 01:40:06,000
We all get that, but it shouldn't be to the extent where it colours

1113
01:40:06,000 --> 01:40:09,000
the decision-making process of an officer.

1114
01:40:09,000 --> 01:40:12,000
No, the investigation should be the same, absolutely 100%.

1115
01:40:12,000 --> 01:40:15,000
And I think a lot of it, I've criticised in the past

1116
01:40:15,000 --> 01:40:18,000
how we engage with the communities after a police shooting,

1117
01:40:18,000 --> 01:40:21,000
because there's a reluctance to engage sometimes.

1118
01:40:21,000 --> 01:40:25,000
The flip side of that is they go and visit the families of the people we shoot,

1119
01:40:25,000 --> 01:40:28,000
but the community engagement is so important,

1120
01:40:28,000 --> 01:40:31,000
and hopefully they're getting it right now around the country.

1121
01:40:31,000 --> 01:40:34,000
But I still worry about some forces that don't have an awful lot of shootings,

1122
01:40:34,000 --> 01:40:36,000
how they're going to react to it.

1123
01:40:36,000 --> 01:40:41,000
The other thing is if you are able to attach the label terrorist

1124
01:40:41,000 --> 01:40:45,000
to somebody that's shot by police, then again the investigation,

1125
01:40:45,000 --> 01:40:54,000
the two young black men that killed the guardsman, Lee Rigby,

1126
01:40:54,000 --> 01:40:58,000
were shot by police.

1127
01:40:58,000 --> 01:41:01,000
If you were to look at those officers' statements,

1128
01:41:01,000 --> 01:41:03,000
there were three officers in the armed response vehicle,

1129
01:41:03,000 --> 01:41:06,000
I think two of them fired, one of them deployed a taser.

1130
01:41:06,000 --> 01:41:10,000
If you were to read their statements, you'd think that they were lying,

1131
01:41:10,000 --> 01:41:12,000
because the incident happened really quickly,

1132
01:41:12,000 --> 01:41:16,000
but all three of their statements contradict each other to a certain extent,

1133
01:41:16,000 --> 01:41:23,000
and that was all because of stress, tunnel vision, tunnel hearing,

1134
01:41:23,000 --> 01:41:26,000
all those sorts of things.

1135
01:41:26,000 --> 01:41:28,000
But the suspects were shot and wounded,

1136
01:41:28,000 --> 01:41:35,000
and literally the next day the Prime Minister is sending the officers Harrods...

1137
01:41:35,000 --> 01:41:37,000
Hampers, weren't it? Yeah, yeah.

1138
01:41:37,000 --> 01:41:39,000
What did you call it? Harrods?

1139
01:41:39,000 --> 01:41:41,000
Hampers. Yeah, Harrods Hamper.

1140
01:41:41,000 --> 01:41:44,000
You should know that, shouldn't I go into public school?

1141
01:41:44,000 --> 01:41:46,000
So Harrods Hampers, yeah.

1142
01:41:46,000 --> 01:41:53,000
And the commissioner and the mayor were queuing up to shake their hands.

1143
01:41:53,000 --> 01:41:57,000
No one was queuing up to shake my hand when I shot Zell Rodney.

1144
01:41:57,000 --> 01:42:01,000
No one was queuing up to shake the hands of the officer that shot Mark Duggan,

1145
01:42:01,000 --> 01:42:03,000
because we were the problem.

1146
01:42:03,000 --> 01:42:08,000
We had created for them a problem because we had shot a young man of colour,

1147
01:42:08,000 --> 01:42:13,000
whereas the officers in the Lee Rigby case, they were the knights that...

1148
01:42:13,000 --> 01:42:16,000
The problem was the fact that Lee Rigby had been killed.

1149
01:42:16,000 --> 01:42:19,000
The problem was that the public were having to do the job of the local police

1150
01:42:19,000 --> 01:42:22,000
and trying to convince these criminals to put their knives down

1151
01:42:22,000 --> 01:42:25,000
because the unarmed police officers, because they're held from safety,

1152
01:42:25,000 --> 01:42:27,000
weren't allowed to approach.

1153
01:42:27,000 --> 01:42:30,000
So when the ARV turned up and shot the suspects,

1154
01:42:30,000 --> 01:42:34,000
they were the knights on white charges that came along and slayed the dragon,

1155
01:42:34,000 --> 01:42:36,000
and they were always going to be heroes.

1156
01:42:36,000 --> 01:42:42,000
So like you said, you could be dressed in a Ronald McDonald costume,

1157
01:42:42,000 --> 01:42:48,000
and if you were a terrorist and got shot, well, no one's going to worry about it.

1158
01:42:48,000 --> 01:42:52,000
Just want to do a different lens again from my friend in the armed unit.

1159
01:42:52,000 --> 01:42:57,000
He mentioned about the high esteem that the British armed units are held

1160
01:42:57,000 --> 01:42:58,000
throughout the world.

1161
01:42:58,000 --> 01:43:00,000
So talk to me about that. How will you receive?

1162
01:43:00,000 --> 01:43:03,000
You talk about going to Utah and coming here to Florida

1163
01:43:03,000 --> 01:43:06,000
and helping with the training and the knowledge sharing,

1164
01:43:06,000 --> 01:43:09,000
and I love the fact that there's an American member of law enforcement

1165
01:43:09,000 --> 01:43:11,000
who has the humility to go,

1166
01:43:11,000 --> 01:43:14,000
let's invite other countries, let's knowledge share, let's all help each other.

1167
01:43:14,000 --> 01:43:16,000
I think we need so much more of that.

1168
01:43:16,000 --> 01:43:21,000
But talk to me about how the British armed police are viewed from the rest of the world,

1169
01:43:21,000 --> 01:43:23,000
because again, it's criticism.

1170
01:43:23,000 --> 01:43:26,000
All we get from inside is criticism usually.

1171
01:43:26,000 --> 01:43:28,000
What is the reception overseas?

1172
01:43:28,000 --> 01:43:33,000
I think a lot of it is just curious interest, if I'm honest.

1173
01:43:33,000 --> 01:43:37,000
One of the first things I used to do when I ran my own training in Utah

1174
01:43:37,000 --> 01:43:42,000
was do a presentation of what our capabilities were,

1175
01:43:42,000 --> 01:43:46,000
what our equipment was like, what our training facilities were like,

1176
01:43:46,000 --> 01:43:48,000
what our personal equipment was like,

1177
01:43:48,000 --> 01:43:53,000
because back then, certainly in the late 80s, early 90s,

1178
01:43:53,000 --> 01:43:57,000
our equipment was better than American equipment.

1179
01:43:57,000 --> 01:44:00,000
And the reason for that is, and it still exists in the States to a degree,

1180
01:44:00,000 --> 01:44:04,000
is you just have so many different law enforcement agencies,

1181
01:44:04,000 --> 01:44:08,000
even within one geographic, let's say a state in Utah,

1182
01:44:08,000 --> 01:44:11,000
you're going to have state police, you're going to have various county sheriffs,

1183
01:44:11,000 --> 01:44:13,000
you're going to have small police departments

1184
01:44:13,000 --> 01:44:19,000
that maybe range anything from three officers to 20 officers to 200 officers.

1185
01:44:19,000 --> 01:44:23,000
I think in Salt Lake Valley, there was probably about eight or nine police departments

1186
01:44:23,000 --> 01:44:25,000
just in the Salt Lake Valley area.

1187
01:44:25,000 --> 01:44:27,000
And when people talk about Salt Lake police over here,

1188
01:44:27,000 --> 01:44:31,000
Salt Lake City Police Department, they don't realize you're talking about downtown Salt Lake.

1189
01:44:31,000 --> 01:44:34,000
That's what you're talking about. You're not talking about a big geographical area.

1190
01:44:34,000 --> 01:44:40,000
So, you know, we found all sorts of things whereby we set up an exercise,

1191
01:44:40,000 --> 01:44:45,000
and the guys from one county swore blind

1192
01:44:45,000 --> 01:44:47,000
that they were able to speak to the officers from another county,

1193
01:44:47,000 --> 01:44:49,000
but then when they actually did an exercise,

1194
01:44:49,000 --> 01:44:52,000
they discovered that their radios weren't compatible.

1195
01:44:52,000 --> 01:44:54,000
So it highlighted a lot of problems.

1196
01:44:54,000 --> 01:44:57,000
I think a lot of it was just cultural.

1197
01:44:57,000 --> 01:45:01,000
They paid more attention because they were listening to a British accent.

1198
01:45:01,000 --> 01:45:04,000
So they had to try a little bit harder.

1199
01:45:04,000 --> 01:45:08,000
I mean, I remember talking to one course,

1200
01:45:08,000 --> 01:45:10,000
and I said we were doing CQB, and I said something like,

1201
01:45:10,000 --> 01:45:16,000
so remember when you enter the room, you know, light up the corners with your torch.

1202
01:45:16,000 --> 01:45:19,000
And after about three days, this guy came up to me and he goes,

1203
01:45:19,000 --> 01:45:24,000
Tony, when you say torch, you mean flashlight, right?

1204
01:45:24,000 --> 01:45:27,000
And I went, yeah, and he said, geez, we thought you guys were fucking serious.

1205
01:45:27,000 --> 01:45:31,000
You had claim throwers on your MP5s.

1206
01:45:31,000 --> 01:45:34,000
There's always that little language barrier that you had to kind of get around.

1207
01:45:34,000 --> 01:45:37,000
And I think as a result of that, people were more likely to ask questions,

1208
01:45:37,000 --> 01:45:40,000
and they just liked our sense of humor as well.

1209
01:45:40,000 --> 01:45:46,000
I mean, one course I ran, an Israeli training team had run a course the week before,

1210
01:45:46,000 --> 01:45:49,000
and all they'd done is thrash these poor cops.

1211
01:45:49,000 --> 01:45:53,000
These cops had paid like $800 to $1000 a head.

1212
01:45:53,000 --> 01:45:58,000
They locked them out of their own pocket just to get kicked and have gravel thrown at them

1213
01:45:58,000 --> 01:46:00,000
and shouted at by Israelis, you know.

1214
01:46:00,000 --> 01:46:05,000
So they quite liked our British way, I suppose.

1215
01:46:05,000 --> 01:46:10,000
So, but yeah, I think, you know, I've spoken to cops all over the world,

1216
01:46:10,000 --> 01:46:13,000
and they don't really know what to make of us.

1217
01:46:13,000 --> 01:46:17,000
I spoke to some French cops who just thought we were, it was just,

1218
01:46:17,000 --> 01:46:22,000
I was out in Nice at the time we had a terrorist attack in the UK,

1219
01:46:22,000 --> 01:46:29,000
and I think it was the time the officer was murdered at the Houses of Parliament.

1220
01:46:29,000 --> 01:46:33,000
And I ended up talking to some Nice police officers,

1221
01:46:33,000 --> 01:46:37,000
and two of them had been on the promenade when the lorry drove down the promenade

1222
01:46:37,000 --> 01:46:42,000
and killed all those people, and one of them had opened fire with his revolver.

1223
01:46:42,000 --> 01:46:45,000
And he said, you know, I've been to London, you know,

1224
01:46:45,000 --> 01:46:49,000
if none of your police officers have guns, or very few of them,

1225
01:46:49,000 --> 01:46:52,000
I don't know how far would that lorry have gone before,

1226
01:46:52,000 --> 01:46:56,000
that truck would have gone before an armed officer was able to stop it.

1227
01:46:56,000 --> 01:46:58,000
So, yeah, it's a mixture.

1228
01:46:58,000 --> 01:47:03,000
I think there's a respect for doing the job unarmed, you know, definitely.

1229
01:47:03,000 --> 01:47:04,000
There's definitely a respect.

1230
01:47:04,000 --> 01:47:08,000
I think it was stupid, but they admire the fact that their officers are prepared

1231
01:47:08,000 --> 01:47:12,000
to do the same job as they do effectively, but without a gun.

1232
01:47:12,000 --> 01:47:14,000
I mean, interesting from my perspective.

1233
01:47:14,000 --> 01:47:19,000
I think I'm going over to Eurocop next week.

1234
01:47:19,000 --> 01:47:21,000
So, you know, the European forces get together,

1235
01:47:21,000 --> 01:47:24,000
and there's the federations and the force themselves.

1236
01:47:24,000 --> 01:47:29,000
And we've been asked to present on post-instance procedures.

1237
01:47:29,000 --> 01:47:31,000
So what happens after, you know,

1238
01:47:31,000 --> 01:47:33,000
How come I haven't got an invite?

1239
01:47:33,000 --> 01:47:37,000
They want to speak from the 2020s. That was all.

1240
01:47:37,000 --> 01:47:39,000
OK.

1241
01:47:39,000 --> 01:47:45,000
So we're going over there with a view to we're running a workshop with them, Eurocop,

1242
01:47:45,000 --> 01:47:46,000
to discuss a lot of post-instance procedures.

1243
01:47:46,000 --> 01:47:49,000
So obviously they look at our country and look at what we've got now.

1244
01:47:49,000 --> 01:47:50,000
You know, it's all right.

1245
01:47:50,000 --> 01:47:53,000
I'm saying we don't do enough, but compared to other European forces,

1246
01:47:53,000 --> 01:47:57,000
because we talk a lot about America here, obviously that's miles and miles away from here.

1247
01:47:57,000 --> 01:47:58,000
We're in Europe.

1248
01:47:58,000 --> 01:48:03,000
And, you know, there's a lot in Europe that they could learn from us as well,

1249
01:48:03,000 --> 01:48:05,000
in particular, you know, maybe not so much tactically,

1250
01:48:05,000 --> 01:48:08,000
because I think they've got it pretty well, sort of most countries there.

1251
01:48:08,000 --> 01:48:12,000
But I think certainly the way our procedures are and things like that,

1252
01:48:12,000 --> 01:48:15,000
how we look after people, because there's also always an assumption

1253
01:48:15,000 --> 01:48:16,000
they look after people better than we do.

1254
01:48:16,000 --> 01:48:19,000
Everyone does it better than us because we don't look after our people,

1255
01:48:19,000 --> 01:48:20,000
but we probably do.

1256
01:48:20,000 --> 01:48:24,000
At least we've got some sort of guidance around what we do when someone does get injured

1257
01:48:24,000 --> 01:48:28,000
or we do kill someone or seriously injure someone as well.

1258
01:48:28,000 --> 01:48:31,000
So, you know, there's an example there that they've come to us

1259
01:48:31,000 --> 01:48:36,000
to go and help out in this workshop for Eurocop around post-instance procedures,

1260
01:48:36,000 --> 01:48:38,000
which is a nice thing to be asked to do.

1261
01:48:38,000 --> 01:48:40,000
Yeah.

1262
01:48:40,000 --> 01:48:41,000
The last place I work.

1263
01:48:41,000 --> 01:48:43,000
No, go Tony, please, go.

1264
01:48:43,000 --> 01:48:45,000
I think there's one thing that the Brits are really good at,

1265
01:48:45,000 --> 01:48:50,000
and that is, you know, overthinking shit.

1266
01:48:50,000 --> 01:48:56,000
So, you know, because we've got the time sometimes to sit back and look at a problem

1267
01:48:56,000 --> 01:49:01,000
and come up with a really interesting but totally overcomplicated solution to it.

1268
01:49:01,000 --> 01:49:06,000
And I think one of the reasons that, you know, we're perhaps good at post-incident

1269
01:49:06,000 --> 01:49:11,000
is because we have taken the time to look at the subject and do it.

1270
01:49:11,000 --> 01:49:15,000
I'm sure, you know, when I go to the States,

1271
01:49:15,000 --> 01:49:19,000
it seems to be so fragmented because there's so many different law enforcement agencies

1272
01:49:19,000 --> 01:49:23,000
that try to get, you know, the bane of police officers' lives in the UK

1273
01:49:23,000 --> 01:49:25,000
is the College of Policing.

1274
01:49:25,000 --> 01:49:28,000
No one's got much good to say about the College of Policing,

1275
01:49:28,000 --> 01:49:33,000
but the reality is that it does set standards that are adhered to pretty much

1276
01:49:33,000 --> 01:49:36,000
by all the 43 police forces in the UK.

1277
01:49:36,000 --> 01:49:38,000
I don't put myself in that category.

1278
01:49:38,000 --> 01:49:40,000
I've got to say about the College.

1279
01:49:40,000 --> 01:49:42,000
Oh, you're in favour of the College, aren't you?

1280
01:49:42,000 --> 01:49:46,000
Well, I run a company that's got a contract with the College to deliver post-incident.

1281
01:49:46,000 --> 01:49:49,000
I wouldn't do it.

1282
01:49:49,000 --> 01:49:50,000
I won't put you on the spot.

1283
01:49:50,000 --> 01:49:53,000
So, this is from my perspective is that, you know,

1284
01:49:53,000 --> 01:49:58,000
they will liaise with different police forces

1285
01:49:58,000 --> 01:50:01,000
and they'll come up with a concept of how to deal with a particular problem.

1286
01:50:01,000 --> 01:50:03,000
It doesn't have to be firearms or anything.

1287
01:50:03,000 --> 01:50:04,000
It could be absolutely anything.

1288
01:50:04,000 --> 01:50:08,000
It could be, you know, how we go about managing crime scenes or anything else.

1289
01:50:08,000 --> 01:50:13,000
But at least the advantage of that is that you can go anywhere in the UK

1290
01:50:13,000 --> 01:50:17,000
as a police officer, whether it be as a detective or an armed officer

1291
01:50:17,000 --> 01:50:20,000
or anything else, as a surveillance officer,

1292
01:50:20,000 --> 01:50:22,000
and you can work with officers from all over the country.

1293
01:50:22,000 --> 01:50:27,000
And for the most part, your practices and procedures will be the same.

1294
01:50:27,000 --> 01:50:31,000
Whereas in the United States, ironically, I think there's actually quite a lot good to be said

1295
01:50:31,000 --> 01:50:33,000
for smaller police departments in the States.

1296
01:50:33,000 --> 01:50:40,000
It quite annoys me that we've capitalised in Great Britain on community policing.

1297
01:50:40,000 --> 01:50:43,000
Oh, yes, yeah, British probably on the beat.

1298
01:50:43,000 --> 01:50:44,000
Well, we don't do any of that shit anymore.

1299
01:50:44,000 --> 01:50:47,000
Actually, there's plenty of places in the States you can go to,

1300
01:50:47,000 --> 01:50:54,000
small police departments, you know, not in suburbia or out in the countryside,

1301
01:50:54,000 --> 01:50:58,000
where the population is quite small and the chief of police knows everybody

1302
01:50:58,000 --> 01:51:00,000
and everybody knows the chief of police.

1303
01:51:00,000 --> 01:51:02,000
And he's only got four officers and a dog handler.

1304
01:51:02,000 --> 01:51:07,000
And actually, they're better at community policing than anywhere in the UK

1305
01:51:07,000 --> 01:51:11,000
because they have that community, that small community that's manageable.

1306
01:51:11,000 --> 01:51:16,000
And we don't have that anywhere in the UK, to the best of my knowledge.

1307
01:51:16,000 --> 01:51:20,000
You use the word fragmented and that's a phrase I use all the time.

1308
01:51:20,000 --> 01:51:23,000
And obviously, my world is fire and EMS, not law enforcement.

1309
01:51:23,000 --> 01:51:26,000
But I know that we share the exact same problem.

1310
01:51:26,000 --> 01:51:29,000
And the small departments, I think, are great.

1311
01:51:29,000 --> 01:51:33,000
The problem is when those small departments and large departments aren't talking to each other.

1312
01:51:33,000 --> 01:51:36,000
And it's crazy because every single one will reinvent the wheel,

1313
01:51:36,000 --> 01:51:39,000
a peer support programme, a fitness programme.

1314
01:51:39,000 --> 01:51:42,000
Someone will want to start a non-profit because of mental health,

1315
01:51:42,000 --> 01:51:43,000
because they lost one of their people.

1316
01:51:43,000 --> 01:51:46,000
There are already people doing amazing jobs in all those areas.

1317
01:51:46,000 --> 01:51:49,000
And all we have to do is band together and unite.

1318
01:51:49,000 --> 01:51:53,000
But in the fire service specifically here, we have a union that beats its chest

1319
01:51:53,000 --> 01:51:56,000
and tells everyone how great they are.

1320
01:51:56,000 --> 01:51:59,000
But the name union means bringing people together.

1321
01:51:59,000 --> 01:52:02,000
And they haven't been a voice for that collective department.

1322
01:52:02,000 --> 01:52:07,000
So, like you said, you could have – and I've seen this – you could have such fragile egos

1323
01:52:07,000 --> 01:52:09,000
that a county and a city won't even talk to each other.

1324
01:52:09,000 --> 01:52:10,000
Oh, yeah.

1325
01:52:10,000 --> 01:52:13,000
And they'll work against each other at fires or scenes.

1326
01:52:13,000 --> 01:52:16,000
And then obviously now you fast forward to some sort of school shooting,

1327
01:52:16,000 --> 01:52:18,000
that ends up with dead children.

1328
01:52:18,000 --> 01:52:19,000
Yeah.

1329
01:52:19,000 --> 01:52:20,000
No, it's really, really true.

1330
01:52:20,000 --> 01:52:24,000
And I think there's – I've certainly come across the expression,

1331
01:52:24,000 --> 01:52:29,000
you know, give me a 14-man police department and I'll show you a 14-man SWAT team.

1332
01:52:29,000 --> 01:52:34,000
You know, in the Metropolitan Police, you've got 34,000 officers.

1333
01:52:34,000 --> 01:52:39,000
So you've got a huge gene pool to select the very best guys for your SWAT team.

1334
01:52:39,000 --> 01:52:42,000
You know, I've worked with small police departments where the guys were very enthusiastic,

1335
01:52:42,000 --> 01:52:48,000
but one guy was a homicide detective, another guy was a school's liaison officer,

1336
01:52:48,000 --> 01:52:50,000
another guy was a traffic cop.

1337
01:52:50,000 --> 01:52:53,000
And they came together every Wednesday night and did a bit of training.

1338
01:52:53,000 --> 01:52:58,000
And, you know, once a year they'd have a get-together and they'd have a week of training and stuff.

1339
01:52:58,000 --> 01:53:01,000
But they weren't talking to the neighboring police department.

1340
01:53:01,000 --> 01:53:04,000
And quite often the chief of police would have a SWAT team, but he wouldn't fund it.

1341
01:53:04,000 --> 01:53:09,000
He just wanted to be able to say, my department's big enough to have a SWAT team.

1342
01:53:09,000 --> 01:53:12,000
But that's why it's important that we've got a college of policing,

1343
01:53:12,000 --> 01:53:15,000
because whether or not you think you're doing a good job,

1344
01:53:15,000 --> 01:53:18,000
at least we've got something in place that tries to make sure that everyone's doing it the same way.

1345
01:53:18,000 --> 01:53:21,000
No, I get that.

1346
01:53:21,000 --> 01:53:24,000
If we didn't have the college, then it would be carnage, you know.

1347
01:53:24,000 --> 01:53:32,000
And I think, you know, we have to have certain levels of consistency around all different aspects of policing.

1348
01:53:32,000 --> 01:53:35,000
And it's such a, you know, wealth of different things to be able to do.

1349
01:53:35,000 --> 01:53:39,000
But I think, you know, on the whole, at least we've got that in place.

1350
01:53:39,000 --> 01:53:43,000
But obviously European forces don't have that luxury that we've got.

1351
01:53:43,000 --> 01:53:46,000
And it may not be perfect, but it's better than nothing.

1352
01:53:46,000 --> 01:53:52,000
No, I mean, if you look at most European police forces, they're not actually that dissimilar to the United States.

1353
01:53:52,000 --> 01:53:58,000
So in Spain, for instance, you'll have the Guarda Civil, which is like a national paramilitary police force.

1354
01:53:58,000 --> 01:54:04,000
You know, then you'll have city police, you know, then you'll have, you know, township polices and police.

1355
01:54:04,000 --> 01:54:10,000
So it's very much the same in Italy as well, as I understand, probably France.

1356
01:54:10,000 --> 01:54:15,000
So it's not, you know, the American system isn't unique.

1357
01:54:15,000 --> 01:54:22,000
I think we're probably more unusual in point of fact, because effectively, even if you're a member of a different constabulary,

1358
01:54:22,000 --> 01:54:26,000
the police force is sort of national, isn't it? Sort of.

1359
01:54:26,000 --> 01:54:32,000
Yeah. So another area I want to get to that my friend asked me to ask you guys, and I'll give a personal example.

1360
01:54:32,000 --> 01:54:37,000
I've worked for arguably one of the best fire departments in America and one of the worst.

1361
01:54:37,000 --> 01:54:39,000
And the worst should be one of the best.

1362
01:54:39,000 --> 01:54:46,000
But what's happened in that particular place is that all the people at the top have never actually done the job.

1363
01:54:46,000 --> 01:54:54,000
So all the way from the EMS chief up to the operations chief, who's supposed to be in charge of all the things that we do.

1364
01:54:54,000 --> 01:55:05,000
And then the chief chief, you know, they came up either through dispatch, answering 999 calls, 911 calls here, or fire prevention, checking outlets and fire extinguishers.

1365
01:55:05,000 --> 01:55:10,000
And so what I have seen personally is there's a lack of operational understanding.

1366
01:55:10,000 --> 01:55:12,000
And then you add a fragile ego in.

1367
01:55:12,000 --> 01:55:17,000
Now, when you've got the boots on the ground, going to them and saying, hey, this is the problem.

1368
01:55:17,000 --> 01:55:21,000
We're more than happy to get together and put training on and fix it.

1369
01:55:21,000 --> 01:55:25,000
There's a shut up, don't you tell me what to do. I'm a chief kind of mentality.

1370
01:55:25,000 --> 01:55:27,000
And it creates massive resistance.

1371
01:55:27,000 --> 01:55:32,000
My friend was asking the tactical firearms commander position.

1372
01:55:32,000 --> 01:55:41,000
He in his eyes has seen a woeful lack of actual field experience in many of his own personal kind of experiences with that.

1373
01:55:41,000 --> 01:55:51,000
And what worried him was if you haven't actually been in that role and now you're offering tactical advice to a scene that could be very dangerous.

1374
01:55:51,000 --> 01:55:53,000
What is your perception of that?

1375
01:55:53,000 --> 01:55:56,000
Well, I won't comment on this because I don't think it's fair to comment.

1376
01:55:56,000 --> 01:56:01,000
OK, so I mean, I've been retired 10 years. I don't want to give examples or so.

1377
01:56:01,000 --> 01:56:09,000
I'm not going to give any examples as such, but I actually share your concern about leadership that's never actually done the job.

1378
01:56:09,000 --> 01:56:20,000
One of the things that frighten me most is that we were talking about, you know, Mark introduced the subject about, you know, kids being better educated and university educated and everything else.

1379
01:56:20,000 --> 01:56:36,000
I think in the last couple of decades, there's become a sort of thing that's crept in from university graduated officers that you don't need shop floor experience

1380
01:56:36,000 --> 01:56:42,000
in order to be working on the shop floor, you know, to be a manager. Sorry.

1381
01:56:42,000 --> 01:56:50,000
And I think that's wrong. I'm sorry. But, you know, if you're talking about budgets and things like that, yes, I kind of get it.

1382
01:56:50,000 --> 01:57:02,000
But when somebody comes into the department in a very senior position with a fragile ego, perhaps I've just seen so many things go wrong over the years.

1383
01:57:02,000 --> 01:57:08,000
So when I joined my unit in 83, it was much smaller. There was only about 40 of us in total.

1384
01:57:08,000 --> 01:57:15,000
But the superintendent, who became our chief superintendent, had joined the department 10, 15 years earlier as a sergeant.

1385
01:57:15,000 --> 01:57:20,000
Then he'd gone out on promotion as an inspector and come back as an inspector and then a chief inspector.

1386
01:57:20,000 --> 01:57:27,000
And now here he was as a superintendent in charge of the unit. He knew the subject inside out, police use of firearms.

1387
01:57:27,000 --> 01:57:32,000
He'd been involved in projects to select new weapons and ammunition. He'd helped develop new tactics.

1388
01:57:32,000 --> 01:57:39,000
He'd been to visit GSG 9 and the other specialist units around the world. His expertise was second to none.

1389
01:57:39,000 --> 01:57:46,000
And everybody at troop level looked up and went, yeah, he's our boss and he knows what he's talking about.

1390
01:57:46,000 --> 01:57:54,000
And then slowly as the years went by, we found ourselves in a situation where we were recruiting people that didn't come from that degree of knowledge.

1391
01:57:54,000 --> 01:57:59,000
And that's not always possible to do that. You can't constantly promote from within.

1392
01:57:59,000 --> 01:58:03,000
But people would go, I'll come in. But I've never been a firearms officer before. So I'll tell you what I'll do.

1393
01:58:03,000 --> 01:58:11,000
I'll put myself on a firearms course and I'll take two weeks and at least then I'll be able to speak with some knowledge.

1394
01:58:11,000 --> 01:58:16,000
I'm not a SWAT team guy, but at least I've been a shot. Oh, the lads are abseiling.

1395
01:58:16,000 --> 01:58:22,000
Let me go up on the roof and see if they'll put a harness on me and chuck me off the roof and all that sort of stuff, which to me would be good leadership.

1396
01:58:22,000 --> 01:58:34,000
But increasingly, what I've found is that you've got people that come in and not only do they have no knowledge, but they're not really interested in gaining any knowledge.

1397
01:58:34,000 --> 01:58:38,000
They just want to tick a box on their CV.

1398
01:58:38,000 --> 01:58:43,000
That's not the question. The question was about people in TFC.

1399
01:58:43,000 --> 01:58:48,000
Yeah, I know. But I'm talking generally. That's a different thing altogether, isn't it? Because I think we've got to be careful.

1400
01:58:48,000 --> 01:58:59,000
No, it's not. So let me finish. So what you're getting is you used to get, so for argument's sake, the floor that I worked on was on the third floor and above us was the manager's floor.

1401
01:58:59,000 --> 01:59:04,000
And so what you get is you get a new senior officer come in the department and they would come in now.

1402
01:59:04,000 --> 01:59:10,000
Some of them might actually go on the third floor, stick their head around the corner and go, hey, I'm the new boss. You know what's going.

1403
01:59:10,000 --> 01:59:13,000
Now, they're going to get a load of shit on that first encounter, aren't they?

1404
01:59:13,000 --> 01:59:19,000
Because they're going, oh, we've got a set of ears that will listen to us now. Come in, have a cup of coffee.

1405
01:59:19,000 --> 01:59:25,000
And then they'll get their ears chewed off. If they come back and do it again a second time, the ear chewing won't be so bad.

1406
01:59:25,000 --> 01:59:29,000
If you come back the last time, you'll be treated as one of the one of the guys and girls.

1407
01:59:29,000 --> 01:59:34,000
And, you know, the coffee will be pre-made for you and everyone will give you 100 percent respect.

1408
01:59:34,000 --> 01:59:41,000
But I see so many people used to come in and go straight to the floor and avoid any contact with the people under them.

1409
01:59:41,000 --> 01:59:48,000
And it was as if they, you know, they went in and they got that first ear bashing and I'm not doing that again.

1410
01:59:48,000 --> 01:59:56,000
And so what they would then do is they would, as they became more knowledgeable in their role, they would go to meetings at Scotland Yard where something would be discussed.

1411
01:59:56,000 --> 01:59:58,000
Whereas in the past, it would have been passed down the tree.

1412
01:59:58,000 --> 02:00:10,000
They're not going to pass it down the tree now because this gives me a bit of power and a bit of strength that I wouldn't otherwise have because I feel threatened by people of a lower rank who have been doing the job for 20 years and know it inside out.

1413
02:00:10,000 --> 02:00:16,000
So I think that, you know, that generally and I'm talking about SO-19, but I think that's generally an issue throughout management.

1414
02:00:16,000 --> 02:00:22,000
I'm not going to talk about tactical firearms advisors and things, but to be honest, I'll get confused by the lettering now.

1415
02:00:22,000 --> 02:00:39,000
You know, there seems to be so many levels of tactical advice, but I think, yeah, I have a concern about this this impression that you can just go into a specialization as a manager and not need to really know much about that specialization.

1416
02:00:39,000 --> 02:00:42,000
I think that's wrong.

1417
02:00:42,000 --> 02:00:44,000
Mark, you don't want to talk about specifically, you don't need to.

1418
02:00:44,000 --> 02:00:47,000
I mean, this is a question from a friend.

1419
02:00:47,000 --> 02:00:50,000
He was just working up until very recently.

1420
02:00:50,000 --> 02:01:00,000
I think if someone's trained to be a TFC or an SFC or OFC, they've done a course, they've been accredited, they've been, you know, they've done an exam or whatever.

1421
02:01:00,000 --> 02:01:04,000
And if they've passed that and they've met the criteria, then they do the role.

1422
02:01:04,000 --> 02:01:09,000
So, you know, and whether they, however much experience they got, these are all different individuals.

1423
02:01:09,000 --> 02:01:10,000
There's hundreds of them.

1424
02:01:10,000 --> 02:01:12,000
Yeah, maybe someone's got more experience than someone else.

1425
02:01:12,000 --> 02:01:15,000
I don't think we can generically say, oh, well, that's wrong.

1426
02:01:15,000 --> 02:01:18,000
You know, they haven't got enough experience because no one ever, ever have a chance to do anything.

1427
02:01:18,000 --> 02:01:21,000
Well, no, I'll get that, Mark, but I'll give you one example.

1428
02:01:21,000 --> 02:01:24,000
I'm not even going to use the terminology because I don't know what terminology was at the time.

1429
02:01:24,000 --> 02:01:39,000
But just after I'd left, they introduced, so whereas when I was in, if a customer, let's say the flying squad ran up the inspector's office for the SFO teams and said, right, we've got a job bubbling for tomorrow.

1430
02:01:39,000 --> 02:01:42,000
We've got this robbery team going to rob a bank, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1431
02:01:42,000 --> 02:01:45,000
They would have a meeting with the officer that picked up the phone.

1432
02:01:45,000 --> 02:01:58,000
It would normally be of inspector rank and they would come up with the tactics and decide on what the options were and what resources we could, we could give them to assist them with that.

1433
02:01:58,000 --> 02:02:02,000
And all of those inspectors had all gone through the SFO course.

1434
02:02:02,000 --> 02:02:06,000
So they had just as much knowledge as anyone else on the teams.

1435
02:02:06,000 --> 02:02:10,000
And so we're in a position to give good advice because they'd actually been out there and done it.

1436
02:02:10,000 --> 02:02:17,000
And then they introduced this thing where they brought in outsiders. They gave them a brief course, which was I think about three weeks, two or three weeks.

1437
02:02:17,000 --> 02:02:29,000
And when you bear in mind that the SFO team guys will have done like probably an eight or nine week course, you know, just to get onto the teams and then would take quite some time to develop that expertise and knowledge.

1438
02:02:29,000 --> 02:02:32,000
They put these people in a three week course and then they were giving the tactical advice.

1439
02:02:32,000 --> 02:02:36,000
So the same flying squad detective would would ring up and they go, oh, yeah, we can do that.

1440
02:02:36,000 --> 02:02:38,000
There was no consultation with the team.

1441
02:02:38,000 --> 02:02:40,000
They just tell the team, you're on a job tomorrow.

1442
02:02:40,000 --> 02:02:43,000
When they get to the scene, they go, oh, we weren't told.

1443
02:02:43,000 --> 02:02:48,000
Oh, we need this to we would have brought that with us if we'd have been told, you know, or someone.

1444
02:02:48,000 --> 02:02:54,000
One of the one of these new guys said to a team leader, yeah, there's no need to do a recce of Google Earth.

1445
02:02:54,000 --> 02:03:01,000
Well, you don't rely on Google Earth because the photographs taken on Google Earth might be four years old.

1446
02:03:01,000 --> 02:03:03,000
You got sent someone out and do reconnaissance.

1447
02:03:03,000 --> 02:03:09,000
But because he'd never done it himself, this guy thought it was perfectly adequate just to get on Google Earth.

1448
02:03:09,000 --> 02:03:11,000
So that's what I'm talking about markets.

1449
02:03:11,000 --> 02:03:20,000
You know, yes, you can train someone, but they're never going to gain that sort of experience by going straight into a role that they've never done.

1450
02:03:20,000 --> 02:03:25,000
I'm not going to comment on each individual instant because I think that's unfair.

1451
02:03:25,000 --> 02:03:32,000
But, you know, I mean, that's you have to see that you have to admit, at least if somebody's just coming and done three week course with no firearms background whatsoever.

1452
02:03:32,000 --> 02:03:36,000
And they're now giving tactical advice on jobs that they've never done.

1453
02:03:36,000 --> 02:03:38,000
They won't be giving it to SFO teams, will they?

1454
02:03:38,000 --> 02:03:40,000
Because you've got your own tactical advisors.

1455
02:03:40,000 --> 02:03:42,000
Well, no, but they were. This was it.

1456
02:03:42,000 --> 02:03:44,000
They would decide on what the allocation was.

1457
02:03:44,000 --> 02:03:49,000
I don't know. But I mean, you know, they'll ask the question, why did the team go underground then?

1458
02:03:49,000 --> 02:03:54,000
And so without even getting a proper briefing then about what equipment they needed.

1459
02:03:54,000 --> 02:03:56,000
Well, no, it didn't get to that.

1460
02:03:56,000 --> 02:03:59,000
It didn't get to that point because they queried it.

1461
02:03:59,000 --> 02:04:05,000
But they, you know, it's not very well, there is.

1462
02:04:05,000 --> 02:04:07,000
There's loads of examples, but everything you've given there.

1463
02:04:07,000 --> 02:04:11,000
But there is going to be less examples if somebody's experience.

1464
02:04:11,000 --> 02:04:15,000
And I don't know what goes on now.

1465
02:04:15,000 --> 02:04:17,000
It's not my problem anymore.

1466
02:04:17,000 --> 02:04:21,000
So I think I think this is this is pulled out a common theme, though.

1467
02:04:21,000 --> 02:04:26,000
I think if you expand back out, which is, you know, like we talked about with universities back in the day,

1468
02:04:26,000 --> 02:04:31,000
it used to be the smartest people that went to university and that would be a route to medicine, law.

1469
02:04:31,000 --> 02:04:34,000
You know, now I'm a huge fan of the trade schools. That's what I went through.

1470
02:04:34,000 --> 02:04:37,000
I wasn't super successful in school and I have a college degree.

1471
02:04:37,000 --> 02:04:39,000
And honestly, it was worth next to nothing.

1472
02:04:39,000 --> 02:04:44,000
I did it in sports science. Didn't really give me any any training experience whatsoever.

1473
02:04:44,000 --> 02:04:50,000
It just taught me how to be in a lab measuring people jumping pretty much a very expensive piece of paper.

1474
02:04:50,000 --> 02:04:52,000
But, you know, so you've got that track.

1475
02:04:52,000 --> 02:04:58,000
And it's the same here in the U.S. Well, if you're going to be a lieutenant, you need to get a bachelor's degree.

1476
02:04:58,000 --> 02:05:00,000
Well, what is that really doing?

1477
02:05:00,000 --> 02:05:05,000
If you've just thrown up the ladder now and you've only got three, four or five years as a firefighter.

1478
02:05:05,000 --> 02:05:11,000
Now you've got your piece of paper and your office of course is now you just got promoted and you've only seen five years

1479
02:05:11,000 --> 02:05:13,000
and now you're three or four.

1480
02:05:13,000 --> 02:05:19,000
And now you're in charge of a, you know, of a scene of, you know, an engine of four people and maybe a scene of, you know,

1481
02:05:19,000 --> 02:05:24,000
20 people and all their welfare and you just don't have that experience.

1482
02:05:24,000 --> 02:05:27,000
So, you know, expanding out from that one role.

1483
02:05:27,000 --> 02:05:30,000
What about an army officer then? What about an army officer? Where do you think they get their experience from?

1484
02:05:30,000 --> 02:05:32,000
Well, there's a difference with army officers.

1485
02:05:32,000 --> 02:05:35,000
First of all, they go through a very substantial training.

1486
02:05:35,000 --> 02:05:40,000
But then when they go out, you know, and I know that they're not in charge of the platoon, are they?

1487
02:05:40,000 --> 02:05:42,000
They're not in charge of the troop, are they?

1488
02:05:42,000 --> 02:05:53,000
It's actually an unwritten, but actually very well established thing in the British Army that it's the NCOs that run the troop or the platoon.

1489
02:05:53,000 --> 02:05:59,000
And until that young officer has got some experience, he doesn't really run it at all.

1490
02:05:59,000 --> 02:06:04,000
But he has to make some decisions because otherwise they wouldn't bother with it.

1491
02:06:04,000 --> 02:06:07,000
He or she has to make decisions.

1492
02:06:07,000 --> 02:06:10,000
So what I'm saying is, you know, everyone has to learn their trade.

1493
02:06:10,000 --> 02:06:13,000
You can't just get people that are 100% experienced.

1494
02:06:13,000 --> 02:06:18,000
Where do they come from? You've got to, people have got to be given time to, you know, and if they are making...

1495
02:06:18,000 --> 02:06:26,000
And some would argue what was wrong then with everybody coming in as a constable and doing a period of time as a constable before they took promotion.

1496
02:06:26,000 --> 02:06:36,000
You know, my attitude with it nowadays is that I think, and I always have thought, that there's a missing rank within the British police force.

1497
02:06:36,000 --> 02:06:43,000
I think that there should be something, you can call it a corporal, you can call it senior constable, you can call it a junior sergeant.

1498
02:06:43,000 --> 02:06:49,000
I don't care what you call it, but you shouldn't be allowed to sit promotion until you have demonstrated.

1499
02:06:49,000 --> 02:06:54,000
And that rank can be on Velcro so that if you don't perform well, they can fucking rip it off.

1500
02:06:54,000 --> 02:06:59,000
But you should be put in charge of a group of people because you've been selected because you seem to have something about you.

1501
02:06:59,000 --> 02:07:05,000
You seem to have some leadership potential. You're intelligent, you're bright. People seem to get on with you.

1502
02:07:05,000 --> 02:07:13,000
You're then given the responsibility of doing what we used to call section sergeant roles, which was being out on the street and supervising officers out on the street.

1503
02:07:13,000 --> 02:07:20,000
And then if you prove your worth there, we don't expect you to study in your own time to become a sergeant, which is absolute nonsense.

1504
02:07:20,000 --> 02:07:28,000
We actually send you to a sergeant's training course, whether it be five weeks or six weeks, like a junior command course or a senior command course.

1505
02:07:28,000 --> 02:07:31,000
They've got the money to do that.

1506
02:07:31,000 --> 02:07:32,000
Well, they can't do that.

1507
02:07:32,000 --> 02:07:37,000
They haven't got training school, let alone a sergeant's, you know, junior.

1508
02:07:37,000 --> 02:07:40,000
They could do it if they wanted to do it.

1509
02:07:40,000 --> 02:07:43,000
You don't have to have a college in a hotel and run it in a hotel.

1510
02:07:43,000 --> 02:07:47,000
That's how you do stuff, isn't it?

1511
02:07:47,000 --> 02:07:53,000
So basically what you've got in any any establishment like the police or whatever is you've got a pyramid.

1512
02:07:53,000 --> 02:07:58,000
And at the top, you've got the commissioner or the chief of police or, you know, the chief constable, call it what you will.

1513
02:07:58,000 --> 02:08:02,000
And down at the bottom of the pyramid, you've got the troops.

1514
02:08:02,000 --> 02:08:12,000
If you don't get that first step off the foundations onto the first floor, which is sergeant rights, you know, before you do is promote someone as we do in this country,

1515
02:08:12,000 --> 02:08:17,000
simply because they want to be a sergeant and wake up one morning and nothing else at sergeant's exam.

1516
02:08:17,000 --> 02:08:18,000
No one says, no, you can't.

1517
02:08:18,000 --> 02:08:20,000
You're not good enough.

1518
02:08:20,000 --> 02:08:26,000
If you pass the sergeant's exam, which has got nothing to do whatsoever with your ability as a sergeant.

1519
02:08:26,000 --> 02:08:33,000
It's just got something to do with your ability to learn a certain amount of facts and figures and to be able to quote, you know, current policy.

1520
02:08:33,000 --> 02:08:35,000
Then you get on the next rank.

1521
02:08:35,000 --> 02:08:44,000
That is not a good basis, because all you've done is you promoted someone that shit is going to then become a shit inspector, a chief inspector and so on and so forth.

1522
02:08:44,000 --> 02:08:48,000
Well, we don't speak generically because you're saying that everyone.

1523
02:08:48,000 --> 02:08:59,000
No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is, if you want the original foundation, the promotion is based on you wanting to be a sergeant, but without demonstrating any leadership skills.

1524
02:08:59,000 --> 02:09:01,000
But there are some good people.

1525
02:09:01,000 --> 02:09:02,000
But there are some good people.

1526
02:09:02,000 --> 02:09:05,000
Of course there will always be some decent people that slip in through the net.

1527
02:09:05,000 --> 02:09:17,000
I can honestly say absolutely open hearted that every single senior officer that I've ever had dealings with, that I've had respect for and have gone, yeah, he's a leader.

1528
02:09:17,000 --> 02:09:19,000
I would follow him. Yeah.

1529
02:09:19,000 --> 02:09:23,000
Yeah, he gives a big briefing with confidence. He stands up.

1530
02:09:23,000 --> 02:09:27,000
He's the sort of person that you or she is the sort of person that you would follow.

1531
02:09:27,000 --> 02:09:33,000
The only reason that they've got where they've got is because they just happen to be a natural leader.

1532
02:09:33,000 --> 02:09:38,000
No one has actually mentioned leadership to them or tried to teach them leadership.

1533
02:09:38,000 --> 02:09:40,000
A lot of natural leaders don't want to take promotion.

1534
02:09:40,000 --> 02:09:42,000
No, exactly my point. And exactly.

1535
02:09:42,000 --> 02:09:44,000
You're going back to your military thing now.

1536
02:09:44,000 --> 02:09:46,000
My son's a color sergeant in the Royal Marines.

1537
02:09:46,000 --> 02:09:48,000
He would have never been a color sergeant in the Royal Marines.

1538
02:09:48,000 --> 02:09:52,000
He would have been quite happy to stay as a Marine, kicking in doors and shooting Taliban.

1539
02:09:52,000 --> 02:09:54,000
He didn't want promotion at all.

1540
02:09:54,000 --> 02:09:56,000
But someone said to him, you're going to take promotion.

1541
02:09:56,000 --> 02:09:58,000
You've got to take promotion.

1542
02:09:58,000 --> 02:10:02,000
There is no future for you in this organization unless you take promotion.

1543
02:10:02,000 --> 02:10:07,000
So that's why you get leadership in the military and you don't get leadership in the police.

1544
02:10:07,000 --> 02:10:09,000
It's an interesting conversation.

1545
02:10:09,000 --> 02:10:10,000
This is what I love about this.

1546
02:10:10,000 --> 02:10:11,000
This isn't about, you know, bitching.

1547
02:10:11,000 --> 02:10:16,000
This is about pulling problems out of the shadows and then discussing solutions.

1548
02:10:16,000 --> 02:10:20,000
And it sounds to me again, excuse me, complete layman's perspective.

1549
02:10:20,000 --> 02:10:25,000
I'm a firefighter and I'm in America and I'm talking about English policing or British policing.

1550
02:10:25,000 --> 02:10:34,000
But some of the things that you guys talk fondly about in your early career seem to be the solutions to some of the things.

1551
02:10:34,000 --> 02:10:38,000
So putting the standards back up, having a more comprehensive training.

1552
02:10:38,000 --> 02:10:40,000
But then you say about the money.

1553
02:10:40,000 --> 02:10:42,000
This is the thing I've seen in here.

1554
02:10:42,000 --> 02:10:46,000
We have exams that we take to promote in the fire service.

1555
02:10:46,000 --> 02:10:51,000
But I mean, so many people in my profession have come on here have said, but it doesn't teach you how to be a leader.

1556
02:10:51,000 --> 02:10:59,000
So you get the piece of paper and you learn, you know, skill A, B and C, but you're not actually taught leadership per se.

1557
02:10:59,000 --> 02:11:05,000
And then so if we kind of go around to the false economy, you guys are being asked to do more with less.

1558
02:11:05,000 --> 02:11:08,000
You know, stations and gun ranges are being closed down.

1559
02:11:08,000 --> 02:11:11,000
So let's play devil's advocate for a second.

1560
02:11:11,000 --> 02:11:21,000
If we had or you had a progressive leader that said, look, we're going to reinvest into the into the law enforcement community in the UK.

1561
02:11:21,000 --> 02:11:30,000
What initiatives would you put to the front so that you could actually turn turn the tide and get a better environment for the police officers,

1562
02:11:30,000 --> 02:11:37,000
raise the fitness standards again and then bring back all those people into the teams that want to be there?

1563
02:11:37,000 --> 02:11:45,000
I think I mean, my focus would be on welfare and mental health, you know, really, and encouraging healthy diets, fitness and things like that.

1564
02:11:45,000 --> 02:11:54,000
You know, we're you know, we're getting people to think about what they're eating and how they're looking after themselves and, you know, peer support and things like that.

1565
02:11:54,000 --> 02:11:58,000
You know that because if you invest in the people to look after themselves, they'll last longer.

1566
02:11:58,000 --> 02:12:02,000
It's like a car, isn't it? If you service your car regularly, it lasts longer.

1567
02:12:02,000 --> 02:12:05,000
In fact, some cars last for a lifetime.

1568
02:12:05,000 --> 02:12:08,000
And that's what we need to do with people. We need to invest more in people.

1569
02:12:08,000 --> 02:12:12,000
And, you know, taking away the side of, you know, supervision and leadership and things like that.

1570
02:12:12,000 --> 02:12:18,000
That's a whole different subject that we could talk about for the rest of the day and tomorrow.

1571
02:12:18,000 --> 02:12:28,000
But, you know, if you're looking at ways of investing and changing policing and changing how people feel, if you've got a healthy workforce,

1572
02:12:28,000 --> 02:12:36,000
if you've got a person, a young man, a woman that feels good, looks good in themselves, are eating well,

1573
02:12:36,000 --> 02:12:42,000
just looking after themselves in all sorts of different ways, then I think you're going to get a better police officer at the end of it.

1574
02:12:42,000 --> 02:12:51,000
You know, someone who's a bit more switched on because we all know and particularly from the sort of, you know, the work you do, being fit helps you stay switched on

1575
02:12:51,000 --> 02:13:01,000
because you're making life or death decisions potentially going into a smoke-filled environment, flames, heights, all the other dangers, you know, vehicles exploding, that kind of stuff.

1576
02:13:01,000 --> 02:13:07,000
You have to make really split-second decisions with life-changing consequences.

1577
02:13:07,000 --> 02:13:16,000
And if you're healthy and you're fit and you look after yourself, those decisions will be a little bit easier and hopefully make the right decision.

1578
02:13:16,000 --> 02:13:24,000
So I think investing in people, but their mental health, their wellbeing, just everything about them, you know, how they look, their appearances,

1579
02:13:24,000 --> 02:13:33,000
keeping some standards up there where, you know, there's a reason why soldiers ball their shoes, why they iron their trousers and their shirts and things like that.

1580
02:13:33,000 --> 02:13:37,000
And, you know, why we have discipline and marching and things like that.

1581
02:13:37,000 --> 02:13:49,000
March isn't just because, you know, we want to march, it's because we want to get a body of men and women from one place to another in a smart and orderly fashion, not like a rabble.

1582
02:13:49,000 --> 02:13:53,000
That's why we do things like that. There's a reason behind, the method behind all the man-ish, you know.

1583
02:13:53,000 --> 02:14:03,000
I'm an ex-guardsman. You know, I still have things I did as a guardsman wherever I, you know, look at, you know, for example, if I was going to a meeting tomorrow,

1584
02:14:03,000 --> 02:14:11,000
I would wear a collar and a tie probably. I'd make sure I don't shave, make sure whatever hair I've got left is looking smart. It's smart in appearance, isn't it?

1585
02:14:11,000 --> 02:14:17,000
And I think we need to look at that in policing and there are things that we can easily do. But again, it needs investment.

1586
02:14:17,000 --> 02:14:25,000
Absolutely. And again, it's that false economy. It's funny. I just interviewed a lady, Tulsi Gabbard, who I hope is going to be the president of the US one day.

1587
02:14:25,000 --> 02:14:33,000
But you look at everything, you know, homelessness, addiction, gang-mode, it's always the same. It's a reactive response over and over and over again.

1588
02:14:33,000 --> 02:14:37,000
And we need a courageous leader to say, look, it's going to cost a little bit more money. Let me tell you why.

1589
02:14:37,000 --> 02:14:42,000
Let me tell you, you know, five years from now what it's going to look like. It's going to be so much better.

1590
02:14:42,000 --> 02:14:47,000
You know, you're going to be safer. You're going to be happier. But we need to reinvest. We've been cutting and cutting and cutting.

1591
02:14:47,000 --> 02:14:53,000
Prevention or cure, isn't it? Prevention. Prevention is probably right. Let's prevent these things happening before we need to get a cure, really.

1592
02:14:53,000 --> 02:15:04,000
Let's prevent it happening and have a bit of, you know, because some of the, you know, the stuff, you know, becomes very cost effective and actually saves huge amounts of money in the long term if we invest in the short term.

1593
02:15:04,000 --> 02:15:16,000
And we know that, you know, so if you educate people to cast themselves and give them the tools they need for all of that, that investment short term when they start will last throughout their career.

1594
02:15:16,000 --> 02:15:31,000
You know, and hopefully we'll maintain them throughout their career. You know, fitness is a massive thing. You know, it's, you know, it does so much good for people, you know, just to get some training in and have time to do it and have a facility to do it as well.

1595
02:15:31,000 --> 02:15:39,000
Not all people do that because some people do let themselves go. They're not interested in doing it or they're tired. Tiredness is a massive thing, isn't it?

1596
02:15:39,000 --> 02:15:57,000
You know, how do we do that? And also, you know, from our point of view as a charity, you know, one of the things we have always been really keen to do is impress upon our members that we look after their families as well because if they've got a problem at home and it's because one of their family members, we need to help them as well because it helps the officer.

1597
02:15:57,000 --> 02:16:10,000
And then he or she can get back to some sort of normality, you know, so our families are important. Our loved ones around us, you know, so, you know, there's a whole load of different things, but it comes down to money, doesn't it? A lot of it.

1598
02:16:10,000 --> 02:16:26,000
It does. But it's again, it's a false economy and it's that community coming together and, you know, being part of the solution and, you know, whether it's addressing why we have mental health issues, why, you know, more and more kids are finding themselves leaning in the gangs, why, you know, some of them picking up knives more than ever.

1599
02:16:26,000 --> 02:16:48,000
But, you know, so we as a nation have to adjust that. But then we also have to support our men and women so that when we're asleep, you know, God forbid something happens to our teenager or whatever it is that our men and women that are protecting our communities in uniform are able to deliver the best, you know, service and make the right decision under a huge amount of stress.

1600
02:16:48,000 --> 02:17:02,000
And, you know, people like yourself running towards a danger when other people are running away, you know, people going into burning buildings, getting people out of cars, you know, out of rivers, all sorts of things, you know, risking their lives for people they've never met.

1601
02:17:02,000 --> 02:17:09,000
That's just to me, you know, I look at that, I think, crikey, you know, like, thank God we've got people like that.

1602
02:17:09,000 --> 02:17:24,000
I could drive down the road, get in a collision somewhere and end up in a river. And some cop will drive along or firefighter or an ambulance crew will drive along and probably enter the water to try and save me.

1603
02:17:24,000 --> 02:17:34,000
They've never met me before, they don't know who I am or anything, do they? It doesn't matter what religion you are, what color you are, when you're in that position, does it really? It's just like everyone just goes to try and save someone's life, don't they?

1604
02:17:34,000 --> 02:17:41,000
And, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work tragically, you know, and it's, you know, so I think that's another thing that, you know, we should never lose sight of.

1605
02:17:41,000 --> 02:17:50,000
And I never want people, the people that do the job. So I look at all our members, you know, the police officers, and I always want them to remember.

1606
02:17:50,000 --> 02:17:55,000
And that's why I need to be, need to be positive about a lot of this is that we need them to do what they're doing.

1607
02:17:55,000 --> 02:18:00,000
We don't want to put them off doing what we're doing. I mean, you know, my personal opinion about my children is my own personal opinion.

1608
02:18:00,000 --> 02:18:10,000
But those that have stepped up to do it need to be supported. Because they may well have gone against their parents wishes, what aren't they, these young people?

1609
02:18:10,000 --> 02:18:16,000
You know, they told me I shouldn't join the police because it's a complete nightmare and I'm going to get f**ked over by the job or whatever like that.

1610
02:18:16,000 --> 02:18:25,000
And actually, they need to be supported even more, don't they? Because they took that decision, didn't listen to their parents, perhaps, and thought, no, I want to do this because I feel that passionate about it.

1611
02:18:25,000 --> 02:18:29,000
We need that passion. You wouldn't do what you did unless you were passionate about it.

1612
02:18:29,000 --> 02:18:44,000
No, no. And I think this is what I've said, you know, there's a lot of conversation with the Gen Z's like, oh, you know, they don't want to work and all these kind of ridiculous examples that people give that, yeah, of course, there's a group that, you know, doesn't maybe, you know, want to enter a uniform anymore.

1613
02:18:44,000 --> 02:18:52,000
And we've got to give them grace, too. There's a massive group of children that graduated into COVID. So they didn't go into the workforce because they couldn't go into the workforce.

1614
02:18:52,000 --> 02:19:03,000
So we've got to give them some grace, too. But, you know, I think this is where we're at now is when you and I, you know, you start your career before me, but, you know, roughly that time when you looked in what's it like to be a cop?

1615
02:19:03,000 --> 02:19:10,000
What's it like to be a firefighter? It was, oh, this looks fun. This looks, you know, courageous. This looks like a life of service. I'm going to go do this.

1616
02:19:10,000 --> 02:19:20,000
But now when you look into what is it like to be a British police officer or American firefighter, all the good stuff comes up. But so does all the bad because we have the internet and you can see everything.

1617
02:19:20,000 --> 02:19:26,000
You can see the court cases that lasted six years after a police officer did exactly what he was trained to do.

1618
02:19:26,000 --> 02:19:31,000
Or you can see the suicides and divorces and overdoses and, you know, all these other things. And so it's all there.

1619
02:19:31,000 --> 02:19:42,000
The beautiful thing, like I said before, is that this is an opportunity to fix it, because if we fix the things around the work itself, people will flock to the jobs again.

1620
02:19:42,000 --> 02:19:53,000
Then you'll be able to take that top 10 percent like you used to. But if we, you know, don't change it, what is that message to, you know, not only the uniform professions, but the civilians in general?

1621
02:19:53,000 --> 02:19:57,000
Like, yeah, we're not really supporting them. We just hope, you know, hopefully they'll show up.

1622
02:19:57,000 --> 02:20:11,000
But if you actually finally see this as a sign to truly proactively invest in the first responder professions, you will have, you know, a line out the door and you will have a group of people selflessly serving,

1623
02:20:11,000 --> 02:20:15,000
you know, training themselves, you know, doing extra course, just like I did through my whole profession.

1624
02:20:15,000 --> 02:20:23,000
So this, I think, is an opportunity for us to really make a difference, to really turn the tide now, because we have got to a critical mass.

1625
02:20:23,000 --> 02:20:29,000
Yeah, let's be positive about it. You know, there's always a few bad apples in any organization, any set up.

1626
02:20:29,000 --> 02:20:39,000
And those bad apples, unfortunately, in our occupations, and I include firefighting here and ambulances, you know, NHS, whatever, let us down terribly,

1627
02:20:39,000 --> 02:20:43,000
because we all get told by the same brush and it's completely unfair, completely unfair.

1628
02:20:43,000 --> 02:20:47,000
You know, those two police officers are on police officers rotting away in prison.

1629
02:20:47,000 --> 02:20:57,000
They're nothing to me. They mean nothing to me. I'm only interested in investing in the people that are out there doing a great job, looking after people and being brave and doing it on a daily basis.

1630
02:20:57,000 --> 02:21:03,000
So a few bad apples, same in every occupation, every occupation.

1631
02:21:03,000 --> 02:21:14,000
Absolutely. All right. Well, speaking of that, I started this podcast seven and a half years ago after basically going to six of my friends' funerals in two years, firefighters.

1632
02:21:14,000 --> 02:21:18,000
I've had some of the guys from or the ladies from the Firefighters Charity.

1633
02:21:18,000 --> 02:21:24,000
Again, the origin story of that is just wanting to help the fire service. And that's not the government. That's a nonprofit.

1634
02:21:24,000 --> 02:21:34,000
What kind of what were the events that led you to create in the PFOA and having served all those years in uniform, want to do even more for the men and women that you serve with?

1635
02:21:34,000 --> 02:21:47,000
Well, I mean, you know, my background was military, so I left school with no qualifications, joined the army. I joined the Grenadier Guards, served five years, left two weeks after leaving the army, joined the police, went to Hendon, struggled at Hendon academically.

1636
02:21:47,000 --> 02:21:56,000
I didn't mind the practical stuff, but I was always always wanted to be a cop, always wanted to be a police officer, went to Wandsworth, served nine years at Wandsworth.

1637
02:21:56,000 --> 02:22:01,000
I loved driving, so I wanted to be an advanced driver, which I did, and then always wanted to be on the armed response vehicle.

1638
02:22:01,000 --> 02:22:09,000
So I went to SO-19 as it was then. And really, I never looked back. I had a fantastic career and I enjoyed myself immensely.

1639
02:22:09,000 --> 02:22:19,000
But around about 2000, 2001, I got involved in the police federation aspect of our work. So looking after the interests of the officers, their welfare, legal support, that kind of stuff.

1640
02:22:19,000 --> 02:22:33,000
But most importantly, in our department, being involved in the police shooting. So when our officers discharge their firearms, I was getting involved from a legal, from a federation point of view.

1641
02:22:33,000 --> 02:22:45,000
And of course, that went on and on for a number of years. And through, again, you know, victims of our own success with our department, we got involved in more firearms operations.

1642
02:22:45,000 --> 02:22:53,000
More firearms operations meant we were going to get involved in more shootings. And that's where I think was my fault.

1643
02:22:53,000 --> 02:23:01,000
I got asked to do a lot of presentations around post-institution procedures, how we looked after officers following the police shooting.

1644
02:23:01,000 --> 02:23:12,000
And but I was still not particularly happy about the way some of our colleagues got treated. It was appalling in some cases, depending on the circumstances of shooting.

1645
02:23:12,000 --> 02:23:26,000
And in 2009, I decided to get together with a colleague of mine and said, look, we need to do something to support the families, but also the officers, but more importantly, the families in this case, because they get left behind and they didn't sign up like we did.

1646
02:23:26,000 --> 02:23:40,000
So we started the PFA, the Police Firearms Association. We became a charity in 2010. And it's funny because I often laugh, the day one I literally walked around the corridors at our base and I bumped into a mate of mine, Adam, who's still a member now.

1647
02:23:40,000 --> 02:23:52,000
He's member number three, me being one and my colleague being number two. And I said to Adam, look, what do you think of this? I'm going to start an association that supports you and your families if you're involved in stuff.

1648
02:23:52,000 --> 02:24:04,000
Doesn't have to be shootings, anything. And he went, yeah, yeah, I said sign there. And he just signed it, you know, and and we're sort of ten and a half thousand strong now, all these years later and and families.

1649
02:24:04,000 --> 02:24:12,000
And, you know, since then, we've we've provided over four and a half million pounds worth of support to officers and their families direct support.

1650
02:24:12,000 --> 02:24:22,000
And we do lots of different things. We've got a 24 hour phone support line. We have a GP line so that they can go into a doctor over here is a complete nightmare now so they can access a GP.

1651
02:24:22,000 --> 02:24:33,000
But most importantly, the phone line gives an opportunity for officers if they are members feeling not good in a bad place, they want to speak to someone they can do 24 seven and that's prevented people

1652
02:24:33,000 --> 02:24:46,000
from completing suicide, which is vitally important, obviously, and something I'm passionate about because, you know, like you have had a number of my colleagues that have passed away through various different reasons, but some through suicide.

1653
02:24:46,000 --> 02:24:50,000
And it's not particularly pleasant for them or their families.

1654
02:24:50,000 --> 02:25:02,000
So, you know, we can do something about it. So that's where that came about really. And it's just sort of grown and grown and, you know, we've got a fantastic team and we are every day, we are providing support to officers in one way shape or form every

1655
02:25:02,000 --> 02:25:15,000
single day, whether it's counseling, NLP coaching, physiotherapy, respite breaks, hampers, financial support, anything we do anything if it's outside the box as well we do it.

1656
02:25:15,000 --> 02:25:27,000
And you mentioned about suicide. I mean, this is something that we are seeing more and more and more often whether it was just kind of kept in the shadows before I mean, like I said, you know, sadly when I see that we've lost someone and we just lost someone

1657
02:25:27,000 --> 02:25:41,000
in LA recently, you know, the died suddenly usually means, you know, suicide or overdose and overdose, I think is still the stigma that still people don't want to acknowledge yet, but it's still part of the same mental health crisis as is the alcoholism in our profession.

1658
02:25:41,000 --> 02:25:56,000
But what we're realizing now and this is just, you know, what we call line of duty death is just, you know, simply when we are wearing the uniform and I would argue that a lot of our retirees are suffering way more because that's when it really starts to manifest.

1659
02:25:56,000 --> 02:26:04,000
But the law enforcement here they've lost twice as many to suicide than they have law in a line of duty deaths like the other line of duty deaths.

1660
02:26:04,000 --> 02:26:09,000
What are you seeing in British police is policing as far as the impact of the mental health side.

1661
02:26:09,000 --> 02:26:13,000
I think, actually on the subject of suicide.

1662
02:26:13,000 --> 02:26:19,000
If you look to tip there's no actual statistics recorded in this country for police suicides.

1663
02:26:19,000 --> 02:26:26,000
For some reason, though, you know, obviously, each force will know who and how their people died.

1664
02:26:26,000 --> 02:26:34,000
But one of the common denominators for suicide and attempted suicide policing is people under investigation.

1665
02:26:34,000 --> 02:26:35,000
Organizational betrayal.

1666
02:26:35,000 --> 02:26:48,000
Organizational shaft in their own people again, you know, and whilst it would be inappropriate to mention someone's name but there was an incident where an officer was involved, had an altercation with the police,

1667
02:26:48,000 --> 02:26:52,000
went into work the next day, got his gun, shot himself.

1668
02:26:52,000 --> 02:26:59,000
Three in one year three police farms officers in this country shot themselves with their own service weapons.

1669
02:26:59,000 --> 02:27:04,000
And like literally on duty going in and then go to the toilet and shoot themselves.

1670
02:27:04,000 --> 02:27:15,000
You know, it's just just incredible when you know, I don't know, Tony, you must know people that have taken their own lives throughout your service as well.

1671
02:27:15,000 --> 02:27:23,000
For whatever I know, I'll be honest, I've never known someone sort of personally, if you like.

1672
02:27:23,000 --> 02:27:25,000
Obviously, no one has.

1673
02:27:25,000 --> 02:27:33,000
But, you know, we work in an organization as big as the Met, you know, the likelihood that you might know, you know, there were three or four people come to have an ear for it.

1674
02:27:33,000 --> 02:27:36,000
So the likelihood of you knowing would be quite, quite remote.

1675
02:27:36,000 --> 02:27:38,000
But, you know, certainly consciously, it happens.

1676
02:27:38,000 --> 02:27:49,000
And of course, we go back to the subject that we were talking about earlier about the potential of, you know, if you push the volunteer aspect of firearms much further, you're not going to have any volunteers.

1677
02:27:49,000 --> 02:27:54,000
You can multiply that suicide rate with at least a handgun a year.

1678
02:27:54,000 --> 02:28:02,000
You know, we'd be issuing people with handguns in order to prevent them being killed on duty and they would actually be giving them the means of killing themselves.

1679
02:28:02,000 --> 02:28:17,000
And I know, James, I know it sounds a bit sensationalist, but I totally agree with Tony. I think inevitably if you put, you know, 30,000 guns out there or people who have access to firearms that weren't before, something's going to happen.

1680
02:28:17,000 --> 02:28:30,000
You know, something that I've thought for a very long time, back in the 80s when I first became issued interested in the police use of firearms, a friend of mine got hold of the New York's annual

1681
02:28:30,000 --> 02:28:34,000
Use of Firearms Report and it was about that thick.

1682
02:28:34,000 --> 02:28:44,000
And it basically at the back or the front, it had loads of pie charts and it showed literally everything, you know, how many rounds were fired in your average confrontation.

1683
02:28:44,000 --> 02:28:47,000
What distance were those shots fired at? What were the light conditions?

1684
02:28:47,000 --> 02:28:56,000
You know, was it a male officer? Was it a female officer? All this sort of stuff. And then what they did is they went through and they itemized each individual incident

1685
02:28:56,000 --> 02:29:02,000
so that you knew what the background of that incident was. And there must have been well over 100 in this thing.

1686
02:29:02,000 --> 02:29:07,000
But one of those circles was, you know, death by suicide.

1687
02:29:07,000 --> 02:29:15,000
And I remember one distinctly where a couple of officers, male and female, they'd obviously been having an affair or something of that nature.

1688
02:29:15,000 --> 02:29:24,000
And they both had a suicide pact, drove into a back alleyway in their patrol car and they both shot each other.

1689
02:29:24,000 --> 02:29:30,000
You know, so, you know, if you've got a call for that size.

1690
02:29:30,000 --> 02:29:41,000
It's so sad, you know, when you hear stuff, you know, I think through the PFOA, I think we've had seven of our members complete suicide since we started.

1691
02:29:41,000 --> 02:29:46,000
One of them I knew quite well.

1692
02:29:46,000 --> 02:29:54,000
And, you know, just like you say, Tony, some people, the others I didn't, you know, but sometimes you knew the names or whatever.

1693
02:29:54,000 --> 02:30:04,000
But it just, you know, it's just awful. But, you know, there's, you know, there's police officers that get cancer, all sorts of problems, you know, that people get ill,

1694
02:30:04,000 --> 02:30:11,000
people get, you know, they get killed on duty, you know, as we know from injuries and, you know, so on weight to and from duty.

1695
02:30:11,000 --> 02:30:22,000
Yeah, badly, you know, too many. And but there's a lot of us and I suppose, you know, that happens inevitably when you've got a lot of people, you know, as the PFOA is growing in size, we get more people get cancer.

1696
02:30:22,000 --> 02:30:25,000
You know, we get more people that get injured. And that's the way it goes.

1697
02:30:25,000 --> 02:30:29,000
And if there was 500 of us, we wouldn't probably, you know, but, you know, it's just one of those things.

1698
02:30:29,000 --> 02:30:37,000
But, you know, I look back now and it's it's never grown list. And one of our colleagues died recently, Tony, Glenn, Glenn Powell.

1699
02:30:37,000 --> 02:30:42,000
Yeah, today. Yeah. So he was a terrific guy. And he's a retired guy.

1700
02:30:42,000 --> 02:30:49,000
You know, I remember him on my rifle course. I did. And top instructor. Good. I think he was an ARV level two, was he going?

1701
02:30:49,000 --> 02:30:55,000
And I'm level two. So I think, you know, I think he had cancer.

1702
02:30:55,000 --> 02:31:02,000
So very sad, you know, but but people pass away, don't they? It's just life, isn't it?

1703
02:31:02,000 --> 02:31:10,000
Well, another is that you speak in a. Well, another area that you don't hear people talking about that is a contributor to cancer,

1704
02:31:10,000 --> 02:31:13,000
that is a contributor to mental ill health is also sleep deprivation.

1705
02:31:13,000 --> 02:31:18,000
So the shifts that our people are working on, you know, those in themselves are bad enough.

1706
02:31:18,000 --> 02:31:23,000
But then you factor in, like you said, mandatory overtime, which is huge in the fire service here at the moment.

1707
02:31:23,000 --> 02:31:30,000
You're you know, every night that you don't sleep, you're massively increasing your chance of cancer risk.

1708
02:31:30,000 --> 02:31:32,000
You know, you're massively decreasing all your health.

1709
02:31:32,000 --> 02:31:39,000
The British Fire Brigade don't seem to have that problem. They seem to. I think they actually issue with pajamas.

1710
02:31:39,000 --> 02:31:45,000
Well, the thing is in America, to be to be fair, the US counterparts, like I said, we do fire and EMS.

1711
02:31:45,000 --> 02:31:53,000
So they're running like all the time. And the UK, they do 12, 12 or 10s and 14s shifts,

1712
02:31:53,000 --> 02:31:59,000
which actually, ironically, isn't isn't good to flip flop from days to nights. But the US, we're doing 24 hour shifts.

1713
02:31:59,000 --> 02:32:06,000
So we work a lot more hours per week than our British counterparts. So that's another thing why it's even worse here.

1714
02:32:06,000 --> 02:32:12,000
Well, there's quite there's quite a few memes on Instagram between British police,

1715
02:32:12,000 --> 02:32:18,000
ambulance service and the fire brigade. And it's like, you know, you've been busy.

1716
02:32:18,000 --> 02:32:22,000
Yeah, we played volleyball and then I cook the cook lunch.

1717
02:32:22,000 --> 02:32:29,000
Therefore, what might I can only imagine if you added the paramedic requirement to it, just how busy they would be.

1718
02:32:29,000 --> 02:32:35,000
Because, like I said, having worked with the London Ambulance Service, it's literally back to back calls.

1719
02:32:35,000 --> 02:32:43,000
And ARVs. I was at our base a few months ago and I was saying about arm response vehicles in London

1720
02:32:43,000 --> 02:32:48,000
responded to some like 800 requests for defibs and immediate first aid.

1721
02:32:48,000 --> 02:32:58,000
That's a really it's a really interesting one. In fact, it's like you will hear from if an ARV member or an SFO member shoots somebody,

1722
02:32:58,000 --> 02:33:05,000
you know, we all know the consequences of that. But no one mentions something like 400 occasions last year

1723
02:33:05,000 --> 02:33:14,000
where the ARVs were first on scene and arrest and were able to do, you know, very efficient CPR.

1724
02:33:14,000 --> 02:33:21,000
Obviously, guns, everything. Yeah, particularly knife, knife, knife, knife, and gunshot wounds.

1725
02:33:21,000 --> 02:33:27,000
I've had LAS personnel say to me, wow, you know, I was really impressed because they've got access to things like

1726
02:33:27,000 --> 02:33:32,000
eye gels and things that even junior members of the LAS aren't authorized on.

1727
02:33:32,000 --> 02:33:39,000
So, but we've got to also look after these people because if they're exposed to that on a daily basis,

1728
02:33:39,000 --> 02:33:44,000
you know, those things that we just need to make sure it's monitored and that supervision

1729
02:33:44,000 --> 02:33:49,000
in that end of the day that they're looked after as well. So we don't get burnout. We don't want burnout.

1730
02:33:49,000 --> 02:33:56,000
Absolutely. I actually just got exposed to an eye gel. I was in Heathrow. Sorry, my dog's barking now.

1731
02:33:56,000 --> 02:34:03,000
I was in Heathrow just waiting to leave in November, come back to the US and the guy had a cardiac arrest on the plane.

1732
02:34:03,000 --> 02:34:07,000
I ended up doing CPR and then fire got there and then ambulance got there.

1733
02:34:07,000 --> 02:34:13,000
But they handed me an eye gel and I've been a medic and or an EMT for almost 20 years now,

1734
02:34:13,000 --> 02:34:19,000
but I wasn't familiar with that. But the cabin. What is it? I don't know what it is. It's an airway.

1735
02:34:19,000 --> 02:34:23,000
Yeah, BLS airway. All right. Yeah. So you're not intubating.

1736
02:34:23,000 --> 02:34:29,000
You're not looking down the actual windpipe. You're just literally slipping it in blind and then, you know, hopefully oxygenating.

1737
02:34:29,000 --> 02:34:34,000
But, you know, so that was yeah. So even even when you're because I don't work in uniform anymore.

1738
02:34:34,000 --> 02:34:39,000
I transitioned out five years ago. But, you know, when people say they're retired or I used to be, I disagree.

1739
02:34:39,000 --> 02:34:44,000
Like you're always a firefighter, always a paramedic, you know, because you never know when you're going to have to help.

1740
02:34:44,000 --> 02:34:48,000
You mentioned knife wounds. I want to throw one more kind of area at you and then we'll wrap up.

1741
02:34:48,000 --> 02:34:55,000
I know we've been talking for a while now. The the knife crime epidemic that seems to be, you know,

1742
02:34:55,000 --> 02:34:59,000
so much worse than I remember in the UK. Now, when I was growing up, there was football hooliganism

1743
02:34:59,000 --> 02:35:07,000
and a lot of deaths and a lot of murders and stuff then. So I'm not pretending that the 70s and 80s were this glorious utopia.

1744
02:35:07,000 --> 02:35:14,000
But what are you seeing as far as that knife crime? And then paralleling that with less and less armed officers?

1745
02:35:14,000 --> 02:35:21,000
What is the danger not only to the civilians, but the police officers responding to some of these?

1746
02:35:21,000 --> 02:35:28,000
I mean, there used to be a you can't really have this conversation without talking about stop and search

1747
02:35:28,000 --> 02:35:35,000
because the two things go together hand in hand. Stop and search has always been a topic.

1748
02:35:35,000 --> 02:35:40,000
When I joined in the 70s, you know, we were told, you know, there's too many young black kids getting searched.

1749
02:35:40,000 --> 02:35:44,000
There's not enough white kids being searched. I always thought that was kind of nonsense, to be honest.

1750
02:35:44,000 --> 02:35:50,000
I'd worked in areas, you know, where there was a large Afro Caribbean population.

1751
02:35:50,000 --> 02:35:55,000
And, yeah, you did a lot of searches because actually in that particular area, you know,

1752
02:35:55,000 --> 02:36:01,000
most of the violent crime or most of the crime where you're going to find knives or whatever were being committed by black kids.

1753
02:36:01,000 --> 02:36:05,000
But equally, if you went out and patrolled, you know, somewhere further south, you know,

1754
02:36:05,000 --> 02:36:11,000
like Croydon or somewhere like that or, you know, Addington, Bromley, then all the kids you stopped were white

1755
02:36:11,000 --> 02:36:13,000
because they were the ones committing the crime in that area.

1756
02:36:13,000 --> 02:36:22,000
But it's always been topical in areas, you know, with a high ethnic amount of people residing there.

1757
02:36:22,000 --> 02:36:29,000
And but you can back me up on this, Mark. You never saw exotic weaponry.

1758
02:36:29,000 --> 02:36:35,000
And the reason you didn't see exotic weaponry, you know, might have a lock knife or a kitchen knife or something like that,

1759
02:36:35,000 --> 02:36:38,000
was because they knew there was a very good likelihood they were going to get stopped by the police.

1760
02:36:38,000 --> 02:36:41,000
And they weren't going to spend 50 odd quid on a knife.

1761
02:36:41,000 --> 02:36:45,000
They were going to have to throw in a stream or throw in a fence.

1762
02:36:45,000 --> 02:36:57,000
But now they know that stop and search is yet again, it's pinnacled and it's gone down in troughs and peaks and troughs all the way through my lifetime, my adult lifetime.

1763
02:36:57,000 --> 02:37:08,000
And the reality is they've made it so difficult now for police to stop and search that these kids clearly know that they can get away with carrying not just a lock knife,

1764
02:37:08,000 --> 02:37:16,000
not even just a big kitchen knife, but machetes and what they call over here. I mean, there's a specific law now for what we call zombie knives.

1765
02:37:16,000 --> 02:37:19,000
I don't know if you're familiar with them or what you might call them in the States.

1766
02:37:19,000 --> 02:37:24,000
But there are these things that you can get online that look like they come out of a zombie movie.

1767
02:37:24,000 --> 02:37:30,000
You know, they're quite often they're bright green or whatever, but they'll have, you know, teeth on one side.

1768
02:37:30,000 --> 02:37:35,000
And, you know, you're talking about a small sword and they're carrying them with impunity.

1769
02:37:35,000 --> 02:37:43,000
I mean, I live in in South East London. There was an attack on a train in South East London where I used to live actually just last week or the week before.

1770
02:37:43,000 --> 02:37:45,000
And it was absolutely horrendous.

1771
02:37:45,000 --> 02:37:54,000
I mean, this guy is just got a guy pinned down on a train in front of commuters just stabbing the crap out of this this this kid.

1772
02:37:54,000 --> 02:37:58,000
I mean, he might be a rival gang member. He might be just as bad as the person who's doing the stabbing.

1773
02:37:58,000 --> 02:38:02,000
But the reality is, you know, it's a very real part.

1774
02:38:02,000 --> 02:38:06,000
And they're doing it with impunity. They don't care that there's all these witnesses.

1775
02:38:06,000 --> 02:38:10,000
This guy's attempting to murder someone on a train and he's completely, you know, he's got his hood up.

1776
02:38:10,000 --> 02:38:15,000
But other than that, he's completely oblivious to the fact that there's witnesses in the train just doesn't care.

1777
02:38:15,000 --> 02:38:19,000
I think I think for me as well, if you look at that, that was awful.

1778
02:38:19,000 --> 02:38:21,000
It was on a Becketham train, I think. Yeah.

1779
02:38:21,000 --> 02:38:24,000
And, you know, how we would have dealt with that.

1780
02:38:24,000 --> 02:38:31,000
So police officers turned up that because there is this, you know, this sort of, I don't know, it's just happening all over the place.

1781
02:38:31,000 --> 02:38:33,000
And they don't seem to give a shit. These people.

1782
02:38:33,000 --> 02:38:37,000
So when they're confronted by police, you know, our cops are turning up.

1783
02:38:37,000 --> 02:38:41,000
If they're lucky enough to have taser would probably have to taser that person.

1784
02:38:41,000 --> 02:38:46,000
But if he doesn't if he doesn't work, they're going to be facing some.

1785
02:38:46,000 --> 02:38:49,000
I mean, the way that guy was going about it, if you didn't taser him, it didn't work.

1786
02:38:49,000 --> 02:38:53,000
He's going to stab you and you are going to get seriously hurt as a police officer.

1787
02:38:53,000 --> 02:38:56,000
We don't have a firearm to resort to ordinarily.

1788
02:38:56,000 --> 02:39:00,000
Our cops, you know, in other countries, you know, if there's two of you, one would cover with a firearm.

1789
02:39:00,000 --> 02:39:04,000
The other one with a taser probably. But I mean, I've done if you've seen that footage.

1790
02:39:04,000 --> 02:39:08,000
But if I'd have been there with a handgun, he would have been shot with insects.

1791
02:39:08,000 --> 02:39:12,000
100 percent. Physically, you know, attempting to kill someone in front of you.

1792
02:39:12,000 --> 02:39:15,000
So you could never the taser would never work with that guy.

1793
02:39:15,000 --> 02:39:18,000
He would have been out. He would have been on your stabbing your head, wouldn't he?

1794
02:39:18,000 --> 02:39:20,000
Before, you know, you could rely on it working, could you?

1795
02:39:20,000 --> 02:39:27,000
That's the problem. You know, so, you know, I mean, yes, it is a very, it's a very real problem.

1796
02:39:27,000 --> 02:39:35,000
A very real problem. And unfortunately, you know, there's been periods in time where, you know,

1797
02:39:35,000 --> 02:39:41,000
the relevant communities have got behind policing to try and resolve it because it's their kids that are dying.

1798
02:39:41,000 --> 02:39:46,000
But unfortunately, you still see you see a search, you know, all over YouTube,

1799
02:39:46,000 --> 02:39:51,000
you'll see British cops doing a stop in the street and there's an angry crowd saying, leave him alone.

1800
02:39:51,000 --> 02:39:54,000
He's only he's only a kid. We you know, why are you searching him?

1801
02:39:54,000 --> 02:39:57,000
And I think that's one of the things that really concerns me about social media.

1802
02:39:57,000 --> 02:40:01,000
This I've got what you call it now. I know you have a similar thing in the States

1803
02:40:01,000 --> 02:40:06,000
where you're actually getting people going out deliberately confronting police about every little thing.

1804
02:40:06,000 --> 02:40:12,000
You know, it might be, you know, the way they parked or the fact that having a coffee on duty or, you know,

1805
02:40:12,000 --> 02:40:17,000
you know, there's a big thing in the UK right now where they're filming police station entrances

1806
02:40:17,000 --> 02:40:21,000
or or military establishments because they know they're going to get stopped

1807
02:40:21,000 --> 02:40:28,000
just so they can humiliate the officer and, you know, get likes on YouTube.

1808
02:40:28,000 --> 02:40:30,000
You know, it's it's a crazy situation.

1809
02:40:30,000 --> 02:40:35,000
You know what? They're the people, these people that are doing this for their own self, bloody whatever.

1810
02:40:35,000 --> 02:40:39,000
If they walk down the road and get mugged or they have a heart attack or whatever like that,

1811
02:40:39,000 --> 02:40:44,000
they'd be screaming out for an ambulance. They'd be screaming out for a police officer to support them.

1812
02:40:44,000 --> 02:40:48,000
You know, if their car burst into flames, they want to fire service as well.

1813
02:40:48,000 --> 02:40:52,000
These people want these people to help them when and yet they go out their way to do that.

1814
02:40:52,000 --> 02:40:54,000
That's what they do. I mean, they've got nothing better to do in their lives.

1815
02:40:54,000 --> 02:40:59,000
They just sat fucked up in the head that they do things like that. It's infuriating.

1816
02:40:59,000 --> 02:41:05,000
It makes me honestly I look at stuff like I just think I give up.

1817
02:41:05,000 --> 02:41:10,000
What is there for any of us? You know, you can go down the street here, you know, kids are getting stabbed,

1818
02:41:10,000 --> 02:41:13,000
you know, innocent kids are getting caught up and stuff.

1819
02:41:13,000 --> 02:41:18,000
It's become a fashion thing over here as well. So you're you're are you familiar with the expression road man?

1820
02:41:18,000 --> 02:41:29,000
No, educate me. So road man basically means I don't name some nicknames for gang members in the States.

1821
02:41:29,000 --> 02:41:34,000
You know, I mean, like the different types like Crips and Bloods and MS-13.

1822
02:41:34,000 --> 02:41:38,000
Well, yeah, it's not really Crips and Bloods. It's it's it's more of a description of street.

1823
02:41:38,000 --> 02:41:44,000
Like a G or kind of some slang almost like a hoodie or yeah.

1824
02:41:44,000 --> 02:41:51,000
So road man is the latest kind of thing. And you'll see kids of all of all Hughes sort of adopt this style.

1825
02:41:51,000 --> 02:42:01,000
Now, basically, it's like, you know, high street sports goods store, you know, baseball caps, tracksuits.

1826
02:42:01,000 --> 02:42:09,000
But hoods up, always hoods up, you know, on a hoodie and invariably now, even if it's the middle of August, wearing a balaclava,

1827
02:42:09,000 --> 02:42:14,000
like a full face, like ski mask, like armed robbery, like armed robbers.

1828
02:42:14,000 --> 02:42:19,000
And they wear that all the time. And, you know, and it's clearly to intimidate.

1829
02:42:19,000 --> 02:42:23,000
I mean, back in the day, they'd have been arrested for going equipped to steal, wouldn't they?

1830
02:42:23,000 --> 02:42:25,000
But now, yeah, but it's a fashion.

1831
02:42:25,000 --> 02:42:34,000
And it's such an extent that one of the big high street sports stores are actually putting kids on their big advert boards,

1832
02:42:34,000 --> 02:42:42,000
wearing balaclavas with hoods up and basically the exact profile of somebody that's cutting around with a zombie knife stuck down the trousers.

1833
02:42:42,000 --> 02:42:45,000
I mean, I don't know. I don't know how they actually hide those knives.

1834
02:42:45,000 --> 02:42:51,000
You see them being searched and it's like it's like a cartoon, you know, where it just keeps coming out of their trousers, you know,

1835
02:42:51,000 --> 02:43:00,000
I don't know how they walk properly. And you see some of the battles, you know, when it's captured on CCTV and stuff and it ends up, you know, on social media or whatever.

1836
02:43:00,000 --> 02:43:04,000
I mean, they're full blown, you know, sword fights in the street.

1837
02:43:04,000 --> 02:43:08,000
What is it that they're actually fighting over? Like you said, these are children.

1838
02:43:08,000 --> 02:43:12,000
And again, going back to the root of so many of the problems that are causing danger.

1839
02:43:12,000 --> 02:43:18,000
I think there's a danger with this. It's like you'll hear this all the time. You'll hear, you know, why are they stopping these children?

1840
02:43:18,000 --> 02:43:27,000
Well, I'll tell you why they're stopping these children. It's 13 year olds, 14 year olds, because it's 13 and 14 year olds that are killing each other, you know, 16, 17, 18 year olds.

1841
02:43:27,000 --> 02:43:33,000
I mean, but a lot of it's a lot of it's turf. A lot of it's my gang versus your gang.

1842
02:43:33,000 --> 02:43:55,000
A lot of these gangs are affiliated to different types of music, you know, music videos, and they'll they'll challenge another gang from another neighboring area with a rap, you know, threatening violence or, you know, whatever, using their street language.

1843
02:43:55,000 --> 02:44:04,000
And yeah, you know, it's become it's become a sort of an acceptable look to walk down the street with a balaclava.

1844
02:44:04,000 --> 02:44:06,000
It's a lifestyle, isn't it?

1845
02:44:06,000 --> 02:44:09,000
Yeah, it is. Exactly what it is.

1846
02:44:09,000 --> 02:44:15,000
That's their lifestyle. Do they grow out of it? I don't know. You know, maybe they don't. Do they live to grow out of it?

1847
02:44:15,000 --> 02:44:20,000
Well, they haven't grown out of wearing their trousers down by their knees, have they? That's a fashion that's never gone away, is it?

1848
02:44:20,000 --> 02:44:32,000
It's like every time flares come back, I wore flares. I went I went to a nightclub once where they were doing a 70s like revival night, and they nearly didn't let me in because I wasn't wearing flares.

1849
02:44:32,000 --> 02:44:41,000
And I said, mate, I'm in the mid 40s. I went through the whole the 70s. But you know, flares come and go, don't they?

1850
02:44:41,000 --> 02:44:48,000
But when people wear flares for about a year and then they go, this is ridiculous. I look like a complete melt and they take them off.

1851
02:44:48,000 --> 02:44:54,000
But that wearing you wearing your jeans so that you can see all of your underpants, that's never gone away, is it?

1852
02:44:54,000 --> 02:44:56,000
That fashion is here forever.

1853
02:44:56,000 --> 02:45:00,000
I like watching the pursuits when they're running from someone with the jeans like that.

1854
02:45:00,000 --> 02:45:08,000
Doesn't matter what you look like, what your skin color is, just anatomically, it is a bad choice when you're trying to run from someone.

1855
02:45:08,000 --> 02:45:10,000
The thing is, you know, there's a lot of good kids out there as well.

1856
02:45:10,000 --> 02:45:15,000
There's a lot of good people out there. And sometimes we can be a bit stereotypical people and things like that.

1857
02:45:15,000 --> 02:45:23,000
We've got to be careful of that. But I think we all have a good gut instinct as cops, ex-cops or whatever we do in emergency services of a good and a bad.

1858
02:45:23,000 --> 02:45:27,000
And but I think there are, yeah, there's a lot of decent people out there.

1859
02:45:27,000 --> 02:45:35,000
I think what concerns me is that, you know, yeah, I'm sure there are decent kids amongst them who are just trying to be cool and all the rest of it.

1860
02:45:35,000 --> 02:45:43,000
But when you are basing your fashion, I suppose the same could be said for skinheads in the 70s and the 80s.

1861
02:45:43,000 --> 02:45:51,000
Yeah, mots, lockers. I had a crombie and loafers and what's it, but it didn't mean I was going to go out mugging people.

1862
02:45:51,000 --> 02:45:59,000
But when you're walking around with a balaclava on and a hoodie, it just seems wrong.

1863
02:45:59,000 --> 02:46:03,000
People think that's better than being law abiding.

1864
02:46:03,000 --> 02:46:09,000
Yeah. So one more proactive question, then we'll go to where we can find each of you guys.

1865
02:46:09,000 --> 02:46:19,000
You're king for a day. You get all all the funds, all the tactical decisions as far as everything from mental health counseling to policing.

1866
02:46:19,000 --> 02:46:25,000
How do we reverse this growing trend of violence in the children on the streets of the UK?

1867
02:46:25,000 --> 02:46:37,000
If I had all the money, I would open more youth centers where we get them where we get them interested in stuff, car mechanics, whatever people want to do.

1868
02:46:37,000 --> 02:46:46,000
More drug rehabilitation centers. So we get people controlled and things like that and give them some support and but engage with young people.

1869
02:46:46,000 --> 02:46:51,000
Proactive. Yeah. Brilliant.

1870
02:46:51,000 --> 02:46:55,000
You just stole the words out of my mouth in terms of youth.

1871
02:46:55,000 --> 02:46:59,000
Definitely. There needs to be more for kids to do.

1872
02:46:59,000 --> 02:47:08,000
But the other end of the scale, you know, if you know, people are getting pathetic sentences for carrying these knives, well, the prisons are full.

1873
02:47:08,000 --> 02:47:20,000
Well, I'll tell you what, then let's get some more of those barges made up of shipping containers in a disused harbor that used to hold 400 ships and now holds, you know, rubber dinghy and an old broken yacht.

1874
02:47:20,000 --> 02:47:23,000
And we'll stick them there. You know, I don't care.

1875
02:47:23,000 --> 02:47:30,000
If there aren't enough prisons, make some more and people should know if these kids that were cutting around with these knives knew that they weren't going to get slap on the wrist.

1876
02:47:30,000 --> 02:47:34,000
They will get five years minimum sentence just for carrying it.

1877
02:47:34,000 --> 02:47:37,000
Absolutely. Absolutely. They will carry it.

1878
02:47:37,000 --> 02:47:41,000
So that would be one of my fundamental massive deterrent massive.

1879
02:47:41,000 --> 02:47:45,000
And having gone to a prison recently to visit someone there.

1880
02:47:45,000 --> 02:47:53,000
It ain't a pleasant place to be where anyone thinks you ain't pleasant. We need to build more of them and get more people in there if that's the case and then it will stop it.

1881
02:47:53,000 --> 02:47:59,000
Yeah, absolutely. Or just look at, you know, what sends people there in the first place and address that stem the leak.

1882
02:47:59,000 --> 02:48:05,000
Yeah, get more interest. More for kids. I live in a village. It's nothing from the do here.

1883
02:48:05,000 --> 02:48:12,000
There's nothing there's nothing for me. You know, and then, you know, people moan and go on about manging around the street corners because there's nowhere for them to go.

1884
02:48:12,000 --> 02:48:26,000
You know, but if you if you had a dirt track at the bottom of the back here and they could build some motors and go around in a private track and get these young lads and lasses involved in stuff they want to do, you'd see completely different people, completely different people.

1885
02:48:26,000 --> 02:48:29,000
But boxing.

1886
02:48:29,000 --> 02:48:31,000
Yeah, boxing. Yeah.

1887
02:48:31,000 --> 02:48:43,000
That sort of stuff. Martial arts. Absolutely, Tony. Fitness. Get them in and then it goes back to what we're talking about, James, about mental health, well-being, eating, dieting, things. Yeah, people, they suddenly get a lot of boxing.

1888
02:48:43,000 --> 02:48:54,000
It makes me feel good. I look better. Things like that. All those kinds of things that creates a better person. We know that from boxing anyway and martial arts.

1889
02:48:54,000 --> 02:49:02,000
Absolutely. Well, it has been an amazing conversation. Mark, before I let you go, tell everyone where they can find the PFOA and learn more about it.

1890
02:49:02,000 --> 02:49:18,000
Well, we've got a website www.pfoa.co.uk and that explains everything about what we do and it's got phone numbers on their contacts and if officers are allowed or, you know, firearms officers are involved in armed police and they can join via the website as well.

1891
02:49:18,000 --> 02:49:24,000
Beautiful. And Tony, where are the best places to find you and your book?

1892
02:49:24,000 --> 02:49:35,000
Amazon, I'm guessing, for the book. I mean, it was published in 2015. I still occasionally see it when I'm just about to board a plane somewhere in W. H. Smith. So it's still about.

1893
02:49:35,000 --> 02:49:52,000
And actually that brings us on to a little bit of a rival podcast because Mark has decided that the PFOA should have its own podcast and I'll be hosting it. So we've we've interviewed our first person, our first customer and that will be coming out shortly.

1894
02:49:52,000 --> 02:49:57,000
And we're going to interview you, James. That'd be amazing. Yeah, good idea.

1895
02:49:57,000 --> 02:50:06,000
I'll put James down for doing one. That'd be great to have you on there, James. Honestly. Thank you. Well, for people listening, where can they find yours?

1896
02:50:06,000 --> 02:50:13,000
Well, it's going to be on YouTube and it's going to be called Top Cover PFOA Podcast.

1897
02:50:13,000 --> 02:50:18,000
We're not as sophisticated as you, James, getting it rigged up from over there.

1898
02:50:18,000 --> 02:50:20,000
I've had a little bit more time though.

1899
02:50:20,000 --> 02:50:30,000
But James, seriously, thanks for inviting us and what you're doing is great because it does help get the word out there and gives people an alternative view.

1900
02:50:30,000 --> 02:50:34,000
But thanks for the invite. I really appreciated it.

1901
02:50:34,000 --> 02:50:51,000
And let us know when you're coming back to Blight.