I've never lost any sleep when I've had to take someone's life: Police firearms officers speak openly for the first time



I’ve never lost any sleep over when I’ve had to take someone’s life,’ says Ray, a

25-year veteran of Scotland Yard’s specialist firearms unit, CO19.



‘I don’t want to sound callous but that’s what you’re trained to do. So when it does happen, why would you be surprised?



‘I’m sure there are blokes who get involved in a shooting and find it does affect them. But most will go on to have good careers in the department, and that means that maybe they will be in other incidents where someone gets shot.

Trained to kill: One of the CO19 officers, in shadow to protect his identity. 'The days of the unarmed service are numbered' he says.



‘Psychologically, the first shooting is the barrier. Once you get past that...’ Ray tails off, leaving the sentence unfinished. ‘Ultimately it’s down to your training. The more realistic it is, the less likely you are to be affected.’

How many officers still serving in CO19 had already shot someone dead? Ray pauses, making a mental calculation. ‘I’m not certain but I think the answer is about 17 or 18.’

Last week, as the jury reached its open verdict at the end of the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station on July 22, 2005, by one of Ray’s former colleagues, The Mail on Sunday conducted the first-ever

in-depth interviews with members of the elite CO19 unit.



Over many hours talking with Ray, now retired, and Chris, another recently retired officer who served in CO19 for a decade, we formed an extraordinary picture of the reality of life for the men and women who put themselves in harm’s way in Scotland Yard’s fight against terrorism and organised crime.



An armed police officer patrols outside Stockwell Tube station on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead

Ray and Chris are not their real names: our interviews were conducted on condition of strict anonymity.



Even after retirement, some principal officers are shielded by the equivalent of the witness protection programme: ‘I’ve got someone I call my guardian angel,’ Ray says.



‘Someone who keeps in touch, checks on the family and can provide a bolt hole quickly if the media – or someone with a gun – shows up on the doorstep.’



But instead of the stern, Bond-like figures of popular imagination, we found ourselves with two men who take almost as much pride in their sense of humour, black at times as it is, as they do in their evident professionalism.



‘We’re not steely-eyed dealers of death,’ Chris says. ‘We’re good at what we do but we like to have a laugh.



‘The people I choose to socialise with, the people I choose to work with now, are people I know from working in the unit – because I trust them. But at the same time, most of us are family guys.



‘That’s important: if you look at the guys who go to Afghanistan, they’re out there for months on end with no normality. All hell might break loose in our working day but at the end of it we get to go home. You might be in some s***hole getting shot at but afterwards you can snuggle up to the wife in bed.’



Ray says that, understandably enough, ‘the guys who make a success of this will be very steady blokes’. Nevertheless, the de Menezes shooting, and its long, anguished aftermath, have imposed a heavy burden, to which no one in CO19 was immune.



The Operation Kratos guidelines for dealing with suspected suicide bombers that were in force for the shooting at Stockwell did, Ray says, mark a significant departure from the unit’s normal procedures.



Under Kratos, one officer will hold the suspect’s arms while another fires shots at the subject’s head, aiming specifically for the brain stem – as the policeman who killed de Menezes did, unaware he was shooting an innocent Brazilian electrician.



Ray says: ‘Operation Kratos means you are effectively executing someone on someone else’s say so. For us, the question from the start was, are we going to be backed up? Whenever we shoot someone, you know the kind of headlines we get: things like, “Crazy cop killed our son.”



‘If I shoot someone, I’m a cop. If I get shot myself, I’m a bobby. People don’t much like cops but they love bobbies. That’s how it is when the suspect is armed and dangerous but the fallout from using Kratos against the wrong person has obviously been far worse.



‘Imagine, though, if they hadn’t shot de Menezes but he had been a terrorist and killed an officer. The whole force would have basked in the glory of his sacrifice – not that it would have helped his wife and kids.’



Ray says the public’s expectations of armed units can be unrealistic. ‘A lot of the time, they’re based on the movies, on scenes where the SWAT team goes in silently and all the commands are hand signals given with total efficiency.



‘They forget they’re seeing take ten, and they’re actors, anyway. When we make mistakes, it’s real world. But at the end of the day we’re human and we’re using equipment made by humans’ – such as the radios that failed to work inside the station when de Menezes was killed.

Nevertheless, after Stockwell the support from the Yard’s hierarchy, especially the then commissioner Sir Ian Blair, was exemplary. ‘Blair was unpopular with some rank-and-file officers,’ Ray says, ‘but not with the SFO [specialist firearms officer] teams.

‘Down the years, most senior management have tried to pretend we don’t exist. We’re the absolute opposite of the image they’re trying to portray of the caring, community police service.



‘Blair was different. He used to come down to our operating base and he saw what we do.’ Once, Ray adds, the commissioner was due to be on holiday at

a time when the Crown Prosecution Service was expected to announce whether any officer would face criminal charges over the de Menezes death.



‘He took the home and mobile phone numbers of all the officers who had been on that team away with him. He wanted to be kept abreast of the blokes’ domestic situations and so on and, if need be, he wanted to be able to ring them to provide support.’



Ray scotches a rumour about the shooting that has been doing the rounds in London for months – that the team at Stockwell included soldiers from the SAS.



‘Sometimes we exercise with them and in the past they have come out with us to see how we do things and share expertise. But when they have it’s been under the very strict rule: they’re observers and cannot carry weapons.’

Chris says: ‘The public thinks that when someone gets shot it’s a terrible thing. Well, it is but you need to set that against the number of operations when no one gets shot.’



Each year, CO19 will be deployed around 1,000 times but in many years kills no one.



‘In ten years I must have gone on 2,000 operations and never fired once,’ he says. He recalls a time when a man bore down on him with a huge, curved machete.



‘It would have been the easiest thing for him to have lost his life but there was something about his body language that made me convinced he would drop it, and he did.’



About ten per cent of the Met’s 31,000 officers are licensed to carry firearms, spread across various specialist squads – the Royal and Diplomatic Protection Group and the Airport Division, for example.



‘That’s got to drive you bonkers, hasn’t it?’ says Chris, ‘strolling across the concourse with an MP5 rifle, from Costa Coffee to Boots, day after day.’



Ray adds: ‘We jokingly call Diplomatic Protection the “door protection group”. Some of them are top blokes but ultimately the reason there’s a fat guy with an MP5 outside the Colombian embassy is that if we took him away, the Colombians would take away the platoon of soldiers and the armoured Humvee outside the British embassy in Bogota.’



But the SFOs of CO19 are the elite of the elite. Even the 400 officers who work on the ‘entry level’ armed response vehicle (ARV) teams on permanent armed patrol come further down the pecking order in terms of training, skills and experience. Ray says the ARVs play a vital role.



They deal with sudden emergencies but because the SFOs are usually acting on specific intelligence the chances of confronting an armed suspect are greater.



There are far fewer SFOs – about 70 – all of whom must already have had years of experience on an ARV, and they then face an 18-week training course where the demands are relentless.



It starts to bite in week two when would-be recruits find themselves roused in the middle of the night to take part in demanding exercises when the last has barely finished.



The Met, Chris says, gave up doing psychometric tests for SFOs in the Eighties because this style of training was more effective.

‘The idea is to send them out after an hour’s sleep to see if they can keep their sense of humour when they’re already exhausted. There are times in this job when you end up not going home for a week, just throwing your sleeping bag on the floor and grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep.



‘When you’re on your chinstrap [dog-tired] you can’t hide your true nature. Sometimes you end up sitting around for hours. And sometimes you end up sitting around in a hide, not being able to talk for hours, too.



‘You can get quiet periods. But you might also get a period where you’re run ragged for weeks.’



After their experience on the ARVs, would-be SFOs know what to expect and sometimes the course pass rate is well over 50 per cent. Other times, Chris says, it is as low as ten. ‘You do get the occasional w****r who slips through. But not many and they don’t last long.’



For an SFO, training doesn’t stop with the course. They will complete several months of continuation training every year, often for specific planned operations.



It’s not enough, says Ray, just to be able to hit a target on the firing range. SFOs need to be able to shoot straight in poor light, from moving vehicles, or in buildings they’ve just abseiled into – while being shot at.



Key to this is ‘simunition’ – weapons identical to operational models that fire rounds of soap, not bullets. ‘It will draw blood and it’s bloody painful,’ Ray says, ‘and it means training can be extremely realistic. But it won’t kill you. Using simunition means you can be shooting at people who are shooting back.’



The product of this process is an almost entirely male unit where the average age is about 40 and the ethos, both men stress, is ‘the opposite of gung-ho and macho’. Ray says only three women have served on the SFO teams to date, all with distinction.



Earlier this year, members of CO19 were dismayed by media claims that one of their number, a long-serving member who had been involved in four fatal shootings, was nicknamed ‘killer’.



The officer in question had been paid £5,000 in compensation because Commander Susan Akers, the head of the Department of Professional Standards, who was the senior investigating officer overseeing the inquiry into the last of these shootings, had described him as ‘the Met’s serial killer’.



Ray says that many officers in the unit were convinced that the story and other sensitive information was leaked to the Press as part of a concerted effort to blacken the unit’s name while the de Menezes inquest was in progress.



‘I can’t think of anyone in the unit who’s ever had a warlike nickname,’ Ray says. He gives some examples: a red-bearded officer who was known as The Cat, not because of his lightning reflexes but ‘because he looked like he’d been eating a ginger cat when someone hit him in the face with a spade’. Another was known as Blister – ‘because he came out whenever the hard work was finished’.



Americans, he notes, are different. ‘Some of us once did some training with a Mid-western SWAT training team.



They all had nicknames like Terminator and Eagle. The most ridiculous thing is that they were all bodybuilders with bulging muscles and showing off their unit’s shark tattoo – despite the fact they were living a thousand miles from the sea.’

SFOs sometimes find their colleagues from other parts of the Met amusing, too. Inevitably, they often work with the Flying Squad, the modern-day Sweeney that still focuses on armed robbery. ‘Some of those guys, they’re still living the dream,’ Ray says.



‘You notice it most at the briefing before a job takes place. They just don’t speak in recognisable English. It’s more like a mixture of cockney rhyming slang and Flying Squad patois – a bit like Life On Mars really.



They’ll tell you, “When you get on the plot [area of operations] there may be a pair of nostrils [a sawn-off shotgun]. Try not to slaughter it [don’t compromise the job] but if you do bump into some faces just cheese roll ’em [ignore them].”’



SFOs take an intense pride in their team’s resourcefulness and adaptability. It is, both men say, more than the equal of any similar unit in the world. ‘That’s why, in the end, it’s not as stressful as you might think,’ Ray says.



‘If someone works in an office and is stressed, often he or she has no way of releasing it. We’re working with people we really enjoy working with and we do get ways of releasing it.



‘When you take out an armed drug dealer and you have to use a bit of cunning and at the end he’s lying on the floor trussed up with a wet patch on his trousers – that’s a buzz. We call it “runaway giggling”.



‘Of course, if you make one mistake, that’s it. Sometimes SFOs get hurt: We’ve had officers shot on operations but we get more injuries in training – a lot of glass and blast injuries from the pyrotechnics we sometimes use to put doors and windows in.



But being shot is God’s way of telling you you’ve made a tactical error. Much better to shoot the bad guy before he shoots you.’



Making training realistic means ‘there are no surprises out there,’ Ray says. At the same time, the experience of being an SFO in armed combat remains, for most of us, difficult to grasp.



‘People who haven’t been in harm’s way, who haven’t been in armed confrontations, won’t know this. But the reality is like a car crash – like when you suddenly lose concentration and find yourself heading toward a bus.



The human mind fills in the gaps and perceptions of time, space and sound are distorted.



‘I can remember being in situations when whole sentences formed in my mind at a speed at which I could never have spoken them, in the gap between shot three and shot four.



Or a bullet that passed six inches from my ear – and I thought, “Who’s that shooting up on the next floor? It was so quiet.”’



However, Ray and Chris are both convinced that throughout the police service such experiences are becoming more common. ‘In many areas of London now, there’s not a possibility that an officer will be confronted by an armed suspect, but a probability,’ says Chris.



A year or so ago, four officers were chatting in the street when a car pulled up and a man ‘hosed them’ with a submachine gun, firing all 32 rounds.



Miraculously, no one was killed or seriously injured but, says Chris, ‘this was amazing: a bloke fired an automatic at unarmed police officers and it didn’t even get in the papers’.



Ray says: ‘The risks are getting too high. Morally, the days of the unarmed service are numbered.’



For a moment, the mood feels sombre. Then the humour returns. Ray quips: ‘Of course, I accept there are many officers who wouldn’t want to be armed. There’s also some others I wouldn’t give a gun to in a million years.’

