The cowardice of the Chris Kaba case

Since 2010, British police have shot dead 30 people. This works out at an average of around 2.1 people per year. In two consecutive years – 2012-13 and 2013-14 – not a single person was fatally shot by police in the UK. In 2023-24, the last period for which we have full data, it was two; for 2022-23, it was three. Which is to say that incidents where the British police kill people are vanishingly rare. It is highly unusual for the roughly 6,000 licensed firearms officers in England and Wales to use their weapons at all. Over the past decade there have been only 66 incidents where officers have fired their guns at people, even though armed police are deployed to around 18,000 incidents every year.

By way of comparison, about two people per year in the UK are killed by lightning, with 58 confirmed deaths in the 30 years before 2016.