Militarising the Police: Still a Bad Idea

Good grief, the Metropolitan Police have asked for – and worse, been granted – permission to deploy officers armed with rubber bullets as thousands of revolting students march through London tomorrow. I suppose the Met has always had this power but, this, as Sam Bowman says, is still a terrible idea:

Deploying them now is a worrying step towards a dangerous “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to riot control, and should be reversed.

Despite widespread public perception of them as relatively harmless method of crowd control, rubber bullets are extremely dangerous. In a study of 90 patients suffering from injuries from their use in Northern Ireland, one person died and 17 were permanently disabled or disfigured.

Quite. It’s also worth observing that baton rounds have never been used on the British mainland and, whatever the excesses of past student demonstrations, there’s little evident need for the police to be more heavily-armed tomorrow than they were during previous marches through Whitehall.

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As with the mania for Tasers – which will, sure as eggs is eggs, kill someone soon – so this growing (if still, to be fair, limited) enthusiasm for deploying armed officers will have unfortunate consequences.