Let’s remind ourselves yet again what the police are for

Policemen are there to catch a criminal after he commits a crime or, better still, to prevent a crime before it’s committed. What they do matters considerably more than how they do it, though, as the case of George Asare highlights, how they do it may sometimes take on an inordinate significance.

The papers describe Asare as a 25-year-old university graduate, though they don’t specify what he read at university. Presumably it wasn’t knife-wielding, though, considering the kind of courses now available at our institutions of higher learning, I wouldn’t be unduly surprised if it were. One way or the other, he has somehow acquired the requisite expertise in this discipline.

This Mr Asare demonstrated on 19 February, when he first tried to break into someone’s car and then kept the summoned PCs at bay with ‘a large bladed weapon’, one of several knives he allegedly had on him. Our police being unarmed, something about which the British are ill-advisedly sanctimonious, the constables had to retreat and call for armed support. Luckily, this time the support arrived before anyone was slashed or stabbed to death.

Armed officers then shot Asare four times with live rounds. They also hit him with a 50,000-volt Taser gun. If, as they claim, they had used the Taser before firing real bullets, then perhaps the efficacy of this weapon needs to be reviewed. If, however, as some witnesses and Asare’s parents claim, the Taser was fired when the knifeman lay wounded on the ground, then it may have been a bit of an overkill – or at least that’s what some papers are claiming.

The assumption is that the four rounds that hit Asare rendered him helpless. That isn’t always the case. Some assailants may be adrenalised enough to present a danger even after they are shot with fatal consequences. That’s why people who know about guns differentiate between killing power and stopping power. A .22 calibre bullet, for example, may eventually kill a man, but it may not stop him from wreaking untold damage before he dies.

I don’t know from what range the police marksmen shot Asare, or what weapons they used. The range was probably quite close, for he didn’t have any firearms with which to keep the police at a great distance. If that’s so, then the four rounds that hit Asare’s abdomen, leg, groin and hand, were clearly low-velocity and small-calibre, and they weren’t fired with intent to kill. Had it been otherwise, Asare would now be dead, rather than undergoing treatment in the psychiatric ward of the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley. It’s also conceivable that he hadn’t been rendered safe, and the police felt that some Taser treatment was called for to protect them from the ‘large bladed weapon.’

I find it hard to believe that trained police officers were so psychotically enraged as to Taser a helpless man as he was writhing in a puddle of his own blood. Had they done so, it’s they and not just Asare who ought to be undergoing psychiatric treatment. They aren’t and he is, so perhaps we should keep things in perspective.

The perspective of Asare’s parents is rather narrow, if hardly unfamiliar. His mother, Elizabeth Benin, said, ‘Why wasn’t there a stand-off? I want to know why the police did not try to talk to George.’

I can try to answer this question by suggesting that Miss Benin herself try to talk nicely to a knife-waving madman. I once tried to do so, many years ago, and I still have a scar to prove it. (On the plus side, the scar acts as a weather service that’s rather more reliable in predicting precipitation than any meteorologist I know.) Moreover, I’m sure that, before blasting off, the police must have told her son to drop his weapons. That’s about the extent of the chitchat one expects under such circumstances – PCs don’t like being stabbed any more than the rest of us.

‘George is… a good person but he was not well, I don’t understand why they had to shoot him. I just thank God that he was not killed.’ So do I. And neither do I question that, in his lucid moments, Asare is a good person. The trouble was that the police were summoned when he wasn’t in one of his lucid moments, as proved by the ‘large bladed weapon’ he was wielding in a threatening manner. The weapon, incidentally, wasn’t something he grabbed unthinkingly: the action took place in the street, and some aforethought had to be involved.

The armed officers will undergo an internal police investigation to determine whether or not they followed proper procedure. I strongly suspect they did – and just as strongly that the left-of-centre newspapers and likeminded pressure groups will claim they didn’t. After all, according to them, our police officers are all sadistic, racist and homophobic thugs looking for innocent victims to brutalise.

All I can suggest is that, when next time those chaps are facing a crazed knifeman, they call a social worker. That’ll enable them to learn the literal, rather than figurative, meaning of a bleeding heart. Those of us who are less affected by liberal afflatus will call armed officers – and pray that they arrive in time.

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