Shoot to Kill: Police Accountability, Firearms and Fatal Force. By Maurice Punch (Bristol: Policy Press, 2010, 264pp. 19.99)

Abstract

Maurice Punch’s Shoot to Kill: Police Accountability, Firearms and Fatal Force is an incisive contribution to the debate on the far-reaching changes to armed policing in the twenty-first century. Although several pages of the book are devoted to developments in the Netherlands and the United States, Shoot to Kill focuses on dilemmas faced by the traditionally unarmed police services of England and Wales, as exposed by the Operation Kratos shoot-to-kill counter-suicide terrorism strategy and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station, London, on 22 July 2005. Punch’s strength is that, rather than taking a principled position against police killings, he takes the police at their word—that use of fatal force is only used in the last resort in the interest of public safety—and then carefully examines whether this claim stands up to scrutiny. Punch traces the development of the police’s approach to firearms through five phases—hazardous amateurism; armed denial; semi-armed with national provision; almost professional; Stockwell and beyond—and compares police and security force practice in a number of well-reported cases to show the existence of two principal paradigms governing the use of firearms. The restraint paradigm is embedded in minimum-force policing principles on the premise that the threat of force is normally sufficient to ensure compliance and failing which the police will only resort to the degree of force that is reasonably necessary in the circumstances. Police fatal shootings of James Ashley (1998), Harry Stanley (1999) and Mark Saunders (2008) are examples of the restraint paradigm. Although mistakes were made in these cases, police did not set out with the intention to take life and death could have been avoided if they had acted differently. The military paradigm, in contrast, conforms to a ‘shoot-to-eliminate’ policy in which operatives are often involved in close-quarter combat and continue firing their weapons until all suspects have been killed. Special Air Services (SAS) operations to release hostages in the Iranian Embassy Siege (London, 1980) and the shooting of three Irish Republican Army suspects (Gibraltar, 1988) are examples of the military paradigm.