If a man with two guns and 60 rounds of ammunition barges his way into a bedroom in the middle of the night, confronts the naked and defenceless occupant and then shoots him dead through the heart, he has surely committed a criminal offence – a murder which must land the gunman in prison for life. However, the uncomfortable reality is that if the man with the gun is a police officer, it is just not that simple.
Sussex police constable Chris Sherwood is the latest in a lengthening line of ‘authorised firearms officers’ who have shot unarmed civilians and emerged without any criminal sanction. In the last ten years, we have discovered, police officers in England and Wales have shot no less than 41 people who turned out not to be carrying a firearm. At least 15 of the victims died. And not one of the police officers who fired those shots has been convicted of any criminal offence. The vast majority were not even prosecuted.
The victims include Harry Stanley, aged 46, shot dead on his way home from the pub after police mistook the table leg he was carrying for a gun; Diarmuid O’Neill, aged 27, the IRA man shot dead in Hammersmith in 1996, unarmed and naked apart from his underpants; and David Ewin, aged 38, shot dead while trying to batter his way out of a parking place in a stolen car. Police officers in England and Wales now shoot people once every seven or eight weeks, and the 41 victims who had no firearms amount to nearly two thirds of their targets over the last ten years.
At first sight, this might look like the most disturbing sequence of corrupt judicial and prosecutorial decisions, effectively a licence for police officers to kill. In reality, it indicates something very different but equally disturbing, not just for potential victims but also for the police officers who may fire at them: our police use of firearms is inherently dangerous. The more we arm the police, the more they will shoot the wrong people. And the law which surrounds this is inadequate and incapable of fixing the blame when things go wrong.
PC Sherwood’s case is classic. The bullet with which he killed Jimmy Ashley in the bedroom of his flat in Hastings, East Sussex in January 1998 turns out to be merely the final shot in a volley of error unleashed by just about every rank in the chain of command in Sussex police. The shooting was investigated by two outside forces – Kent and Hampshire – and the Guardian has seen secret reports from both inquiries.
They found evidence that in the planning or later handling of the incident, crime was committed by the chief constable, his deputy, one of the assistant chief constables, a superintendent, a chief inspector, an inspector and three constables. The evidence was considered strong enough to prosecute only in the case of four of the junior officers. Together, the two inquiries paint a picture of casual disregard for the rules which ringfence the police use of firearms, a picture in which complacency and confusion conspired to jeopardise the lives of members of the public and of junior police officers alike.
It all began on the evening of Wednesday January 7 1998 when a man called Paul Smith was drinking in Cherries bar on the Hastings seafront. A Scotsman accused him (wrongly) of being a grass. Smith left rapidly. The Scotsman followed him, pulled a knife and stabbed him three or four times in the groin. When the police came, they were given two leads: the Scotsman with the knife was known as ‘Tosh’; and he had been pulled off his victim by a friend who had then walked away with him. The friend was a Scouser called Jimmy Ashley.
The Hastings police knew quite a bit about Jimmy Ashley, then aged 39. Over the previous 12 months, an informant had told them several times that Ashley and a few mates from Liverpool were taking over the supply of heroin in the town and using violence to muscle in on other dealers. There were rumours but no hard evidence that they had a gun. In October, Hastings police had set up a covert Observation Point on a house in Western Road where Ashley and two others had moved into three flats. The OP had recorded some suspicious comings and goings, including a car belonging to one of the most notorious crime families in Liverpool, the Ungis, but it had been closed down without result.
Now, in search of ‘Tosh’, on the morning of Thursday January 8, Hastings police reopened the OP on Western Road. Within a week, Jimmy Ashley was dead. By that time, the search for Tosh had wandered far and wide from the rule book as Sussex police officers took to the streets of Hastings with guns, sometimes with authorisation that should not have been granted and sometimes simply without any legal authority at all.
These armed operations were run by an incident commander, DCI Kevin French, who had never been trained for the job, on the basis of an intelligence operation run by an intelligence commander, DI Chris Siggs, who had not been trained for his job either. Its tactics for the use of guns were provided by a specialist advisor, PC Steve Crocker, who eventually endorsed an extravagant plan to send 25 armed officers into the flats in Western Road using a ‘rapid intervention’ tactic known as Bermuda – even though PC Crocker and his assault coordinator, Sgt Andy Park, both had been warned specifically by the head of the police National Firearms School in West Mercia that Bermuda was too dangerous to be used in such circumstances.
The Bermuda tactic called for a lone officer to walk into each room in a building, to scan it – thus presenting himself as an easy target to any occupant with a gun – before calling in backup if needed. When Sussex adopted the tactic in 1992, an internal memo warned that “risk factors are high and, as such, it should only be considered as a last resort”. However, a tactic that could conceivably be justified to save a hostage from imminent execution became an approved method of simply arresting suspects. Sussex claimed to have learned this from the RUC in Belfast. The RUC denied it.
This high-risk tactic was then made even riskier by the Hastings officers’ failure to get hold of internal plans of the house in Western Road: there were five flats with six occupants, only four of whom were targets, but the armed officers had little or no idea who was in which flat, let alone in which room; they did not even know where the flats were and drew up contingency plans to have armed officers break into every flat in the building and to deal with any subsequent complaint from innocent people in their beds by giving them an apology. According to Supt Alan Bailey, former head of the police National Firearms School in West Mercia, this ignorance was very dangerous: “This built in a huge risk and gave up every advantage. It almost made inevitable a confrontation between an armed officer and a suspect.”
Supt Colin Burrows of the RUC, who is an official advisor to chief constables on firearms policy, and who reviewed the Hastings operation, said he would never send in armed officers to raid a building occupied by armed suspects unless they had trained as a team “for fast-track decision making in the face of life-threatening danger”. These officers had never practised rapid intervention as a team. Indeed, it turned out that most of them had not trained in rapid intervention even as individuals.
And this was only the thin end of the wedge of error which took Jimmy Ashley’s life. It is clear now that, regardless of these weaknesses in training and tactics, the truth is that the raid on Western Road should never have been launched in the first place. The whole misbegotten incident happened only because of two alarming failures, first of intelligence, and then of command. It was, in the words of Assistant Chief Constable Barbara Wilding, who led the Kent inquiry into the incident, “a complete corporate failure”.
In the seven days that followed the stabbing at Cherries bar, Hastings officers had received a drip-feed of intelligence. They had identified ‘Tosh’ as Thomas McCrudden and linked him to three different addresses as well as a car found parked in the city centre. Although they had dispatched armed officers in pursuit of all these leads, they had come away empty-handed and so, on Wednesday January 14 1998, at about five in the afternoon, they decided to go for the big one.
They asked their deputy chief constable, Mark Jordan, to allow them to send 25 armed officers into the flats in Western Road. They said they had three objectives: to retrieve a kilo of cocaine which had just been delivered to Ashley and his fellow dealers; to seize a firearm which they kept there; to arrest Tosh McCrudden. They were wrong on all three. Inside the flats, there was no cocaine, no firearm and no Tosh. Worse than that, the Kent inquiry concluded, three Hastings officers – detectives Burton, French and Siggs – knew this and lied about their intelligence in order to persuade their deputy chief constable to authorise the raid.
Specifically, Kent found that they told the deputy that earlier that afternoon a detective from the Regional Crime Squad had warned them that a car carrying drugs was on its way to Western Road, and that they had seen Jimmy Ashley and his friends taking three boxes into the flat ‘in a suspicious way’. In truth, however, the RCS detective had said nothing of the kind; he had simply asked Hastings police to look out for two suspect cars at two addresses in the town, neither of which was Western Road. And the three boxes, in any event, had been taken into the flats before either of these cars could possibly have arrived there. The Hastings officers also told the deputy chief constable that Ashley had a gun in the flat, even though there was nothing but rumour to support the claim; and that there was ‘a strong possibility’ that Tosh McCrudden was there, which was an exaggeration of a tentative report from the OP of an unidentified man entering the building.
It has to be said that, with yesterday’s collapse of the Crown case in Wolverhampton, the three Sussex officers who were accused of this dishonesty have been given no chance to put their side of the story. They have always denied any dishonesty. Sussex police sources say that if the trial of the three officers had gone ahead, they would have shown that Kent police ignored an informant report which suggested that Ashley and his friends were regularly receiving a consignment of cocaine on Wednesday evenings; and that they were simply doing their best to interpret all the intelligence they had received. Kent hotly deny ignoring any lead. However, while there is dispute about whether the Sussex officers were honest in their intelligence report, there is no dispute that they were wrong.
This manipulation or misreading of intelligence could not have produced such lethal results if there had not also been a catastrophic failure of command. The deputy chief constable of Sussex, Mark Jordan, now faces disciplinary charges of neglect first, because he failed to ask the questions which would have exposed the flaws in this intelligence, but second, and most important, because experts on firearms and the law told Kent that, even if all the intelligence from the Hastings officers had been correct, Mark Jordan should not have authorised the use of firearms. Indeed, Kent found, the whole operation was arguably unlawful.
Two days earlier, the Hastings officers had obtained a search warrant for the house in Western Road. It was technically defective because it failed to specify which of the flats was to be searched, and it was wrongly granted because it was obtained under the Misuse of Drugs Act when there was no evidence that there were drugs in the flat. Indeed, there were no drugs there. They also sought permission to arrest Ashley and his friends in the street: the problem with that is that, although there was plenty of unconfirmed rumour about them, the police had no evidence of their committing any crime at all, and so the arrest would have been unlawful. But, most important, the experts said that Sussex police had no need to use armed officers at any stage.
Two experts on police firearms reviewed the final armed raid for the Kent inquiry. Supt Bailey of the National Firearms School said there was no need for firearms to arrest Tosh McCrudden, who had never been known to use a gun; if they really believed there was a gun in the flats, that was a very good reason not to go in there but to make the arrest on the street; there was no reason to arrest the others in the flats; and, even if they believed there was a kilo of cocaine in there, that did not justify the dangers of using firearms. “No reasonable tactical advisor would have advised the operation,” he concluded. “It was not necessary from a police point of view.” Supt Colin Burrows of the RUC, who drafted the firearms guidelines for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said bluntly: “The strategic objectives in this case do not meet the requirements of the ACPO guidelines.”
It turns out that the seven days following the stabbing at Cherries were littered with similarly slack leadership. Officers had earlier been given a 48-hour authority to use guns to arrest Tosh McCrudden in the street; and a further 24-hour authority to arrest him with guns near the car he was thought to have been using. Both authorities were granted by assistant chief constables on the basis that McCrudden was “possibly armed with a firearm”; he was not, and there was simply no evidence to suggest that he would be. But, much more serious, it is now clear that on several occasions that week, heavily armed Sussex officers were sent out into the streets of Hastings with no legal authority at all.
On two occasions, there was only a minimal chance that these officers would encounter a member of the public, but in one case, on the morning of Wednesday January 14, half a dozen officers with pistols and Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns set up an ambush at the post office on London Road, Hastings in broad day light as customers came and went, quite unaware of the danger. The officers were waiting for McCrudden to collect his giro – and they had been given no legal right to carry guns there. “It’s a scandal,” according to one source in the Kent inquiry, “quite unforgiveable.” Fortunately, the officers were called away to another job before a friend of McCrudden’s turned up to collect the giro.
So it was that under the supervision of inadequately trained commanders, 25 inadequately trained officers were instructed to use a notoriously dangerous tactic to storm a building for which they had no internal plans in order to execute an operation which was built on false intelligence and launched without proper support from the law or the guidelines. And, as the operation unfolded, things got worse.
It was shortly before one o’clock in the morning on Thursday January 15 when the 25 officers from the Special Operations Unit filed through the armoury at Sussex police headquarters in Lewes, about 45 minutes west of Hastings. They wore night clothing known as ‘blacks’ with body armour, and helmets with built-in radio ear pieces. Each of them was issued was a pistol, a sub-machine gun and 60 rounds of ammunition. They were about to take part in the biggest armed operation in the history of Sussex police.
At ten past one, they gathered in the main SOU office to be briefed. Insp Jim Taylor, head of the SOU, showed them pictures of McCrudden, Ashley, and two of Ashley’s friends and passed on what he had been told about them: that Tosh McCrudden was in the flats (incorrect) and that he had a history of violence with knives (correct); that there was a gun in the flats (incorrect); that Ashley was wanted in Eastbourne for shooting a man in the stomach (incorrect); that he had been convicted of attempted murder (incorrect, although he had served two years for manslaughter). In an operation that had already been undermined by error, the 25 officers were now being sent into the darkness with a grossly exaggerated account of the threat they were facing.
One of the least experienced of those listening was PC Chris Sherwood, then aged 30. Although he had been an authorised firearms officer for nearly five years, he had never fired a shot in an operation, and he was one of those who had never been trained in the rapid intervention which they were about to undertake. He had been a policeman for two years before he applied to become an AFO “because it looked interesting and it had a good shift pattern” – there was no extra pay. The briefing ended, the teams set off by road to Hastings, where they were told that the lights were out in Western Road. If all went well, they might yet take their suspects by surprise. But it didn’t go well.
By 4.10 that morning, Chris Sherwood was standing in a long line of armed men in an alley beside the house in Western Road, trying to look inconspicuous despite the security lamp which bathed them in light every time its sensor detected one of them moving. Two officers had gone ahead with a front door key; now they reported back bad news. The two top flats, including the one in which Ashley was thought to be living, had a communal door on the landing. Nobody had told them that: it would take twice as long to break down that door as well as the doors to the flats inside.
At about 4.15, ten men, including Chris Sherwood, were called forward up to the top landing. It was far too small for such a crowd, and the armed officers spilled down the stairs towards the landing below, where more armed officers were gathered. Sherwood was right at the back of his group, the tenth of ten men. They waited. The stairs were narrow. One of the two officers who had come in ahead of them was trying to twist his way down past them; part of his rig dragged over the iron railing of the staircase, and they all flinched at the give-away sound. Up on the top landing, PC Evans moved towards the communal door with his hand-held battering ram. PC Roskilly stepped back to let him through, knocked over an ironing board with an appalling clatter, a dog began to bark in one of the flats, it was all going wrong, PC Roskilly radioed urgently for permission to start, the assault co-ordinator called ‘Strike’, and PC Evans attacked the communal door.
At the back of the line, Chris Sherwood was nervous. As he said later in his statement: “Although I felt confident I could carry out my role, I was conscious of the tension that had built up with the realisation of the danger and the very real threat to life that lay ahead.” The line of men moved forward up the stairs.
In the bedroom of his flat, Jimmy Ashley was still asleep, but his girlfriend, Caroline Courtland-Smith, then aged 19, was wide awake, first disturbed by the barking dog and now alarmed by the cacophony of shouting and crashing outside the flat. She shook Jimmy Ashley awake. By this time, the first five officers were through the communal door, turning right, away from Ashley’s flat; the second five-man team were lost on the landing unable to find the door to Ashley’s flat because the communal door had swung back to conceal it.
Now, Jimmy Ashley was stumbling naked out of bed, looking out of the window in search of the noise. The first man from Sherwood’s team of five had finally opened the door of the flat and stepped back; the other four were in Ashley’s hallway now, each man taking a door – kitchen, bathroom, sitting room, bedroom. The last man got the last room: Chris Sherwood, who less than a minute earlier had been the tenth of ten men, was now right at the front of the queue, separated from Jimmy Ashley by two inches of unlocked door. Ashley was walking round the foot of the bed, heading for the same door. The room was dark. Chris Sherwood raised his Heckler and Koch to his left shoulder, turned on the torch on top of the barrel and pushed open the door. What happened next took between one and three seconds.
Sherwood took one step forward into the room, scanned the darkness with his torch, caught sight of the face and upper torso of a man, recognised the face from the photo at the briefing: the attempted-murder man, the shoots-people-in-the-stomach man, armed and dangerous. The man was moving fast towards him. His hands were coming up out of the darkness. “In that instant,” Sherwood said later, “I thought I was going to be shot and killed. I thought a gun was being levelled at me, ready to be fired. I reacted instinctively to the threat, fearing for my life. I pulled the trigger and fired.”
Jimmy Ashley was less than two foot away when the bullet pierced his chest, ricocheted down off his collar bone and flew through his heart. He coughed a spray of blood on Sherwood, crumpled, coughed a little more blood onto the wall and fell to the floor. Caroline was screaming. Someone turned on the light, and it was then that Chris Sherwood discovered that the armed and dangerous man was unarmed and naked. And dead.
When all the particular detail of this raid is set aside, what happened here is essentially identical to what happens in most police shootings: there is a moment of confrontation between an armed officer and a target, which is also a confrontation between perception and reality. If the officer perceives a threat, he will shoot. If he is wrong, an innocent person gets shot. Or he may guess the other way. So he doesn’t shoot. In which case, if he is wrong, he is the one who gets shot. There is no middle ground.
In the 41 cases which we have found where targets of police shooting turned out to have no firearm, 14 of them were carrying replica guns, a complete merging of misperception and reality. No police officer in the heat of confrontation can tell the difference. The same logic applies to the 14 other cases where targets were carrying other weapons – air pistol, gas gun, knife, hatchet. How real is the threat? You have between one and three seconds to decide. Get it wrong, and the wrong person dies. Maybe you. Of the remaining 13 cases, six were accidental discharges (five of those shot being police officers), and the remaining seven are the most disturbing of all, where the target had no weapon at all, just like Jimmy Ashley. And yet, in each case, the officer perceived them as a threat and was, therefore, just like Chris Sherwood, deemed to be firing in self-defence.
It happened most notoriously in the case of Steven Waldorf, who was sitting in a traffic jam in Earls Court, central London, in January 1983, when detectives shot him five times and pistol-whipped him. Why? Because they were hunting an armed and dangerous man called David Martin who had shot a police officer and escaped from custody; they had been watching the home of Martin’s former girlfriend, who was now going out with Waldorf, who happened to look rather like David Martin, who came out of her house and got into her car and ran into a traffic jam where, as the armed officers approached to make their arrest, he turned suddenly and reached behind him in the car. In reality, this was just Steven Waldorf reaching for his briefcase. But what the officers saw was David Martin reaching for a gun, because he had seen them closing in. If they were right, they had one or two seconds before they were shot. So they shot first. The then Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, told Parliament: “Nothing like it must happen again.”
The great truth about armed police which the politicians have never understood is that if we give guns to our police officers, they will use them; and if they use them, then from time to time, as a matter of certainty, they will shoot the wrong people. If they had not had guns, the police would have shot none of those 41 people. Jimmy Ashley, Harry Stanley, Diarmuid O’Neill, Steven Waldorf, all of them could have been handled without bloodshed. It is the same story all over the world: wherever law officers carry guns, they make fatal errors.
That night in Hastings, Chris Sherwood spent a minute or two with his hand clamped over the hole in Jimmy Ashley’s chest, hopelessly trying to turn back time. He was led away in shock. Caroline Courtland-Smith was taken away to the police station where she sat with her mother and tried to describe what had happened. The armed officers arrested three men in two of the other flats, soon found out that none of them was Tosh McCrudden, and released them all without charge. (McCrudden was eventually arrested elsewhere and got five and a half years for the Cherries stabbing.) There was a flurry of excitement when a gun was found under a sofa in the sitting room, but it turned out to be a gasgun, not the real thing. And there was no kilo of cocaine.
There are two conclusions from all this. The first is that our officers are armed too often. The spotlight that has been thrown on one week in the arming of Sussex police has exposed an alarming corporate failure with officers carrying firearms in a way that appears to breach the guidelines. Sussex insist they have been traduced. They say just about every force in the country uses a tactic like Bermuda; and they add defiantly that Sussex will continue to use it, and not only as a last resort. They deny using firearms without proper authority and say it all depends on how you read the guidelines. They say their training is no worse than that of other forces. The reasonable conclusion is that there is no reason to suppose that other forces would emerge any better if they were subjected to the same scrutiny. But there is no effective scrutiny of the police use of firearms.
When we tried to find out how many people had been shot by police, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the Association of Chief Police Officers said they had no idea; the Police Complaints Authority said they had some files but nobody had collated the informaton; and the Home Office told us they knew the answer and then supplied us with grossly inaccurate figures (cutting the number shot over the last ten years from 67 to 44). Nobody could tell us how many of the victims had been armed. Each force looks after its own incidents. Nobody in the centre is watching. And with increasing speed, in the absence of proper scrutiny, more and more police officers are going armed.
The official figures show that the number of occasions on which police officers have been deployed with guns has just about trebled in the last decade, from 3,722 in 1991 to 10,928 in 1998/9. This official figure understates the truth, because it excludes the teams of officers who now carry guns routinely under ’standing authority’. This list has grown longer and includes not only VIP bodyguards but also the Anti Terrorist Branch, the Flying Squad and fleets of Armed Response Vehicles. And yet the figures on the number of ’standing authority’ guns are kept secret on the contentious grounds that it would ‘compromise police effectiveness’ to release them.
British politicians offer two defences for this trend. First, they say, the police have had to match the firepower of the criminals they face. The reality, however, is that historically British police have armed themselves in advance of their criminal opponents. They are now also taking on roles, such as armed raids on houses, which were once the preserve of the army. Second, they say, that even if there are more officers with guns, it is still rare for them actually to shoot them. The official figures suggest that that is true – the Metropolitan Police, for example, who are easily the most heavily armed in the country, record an average of about five shots per year. The problem, however, lies in the 41 targets who turn out to have no firearms and also with the finding of Supt Colin Burrows of the RUC who studied a sequence of firearms incidents and discovered that 56% of shots fired by police missed their target.
Senior officers who followed the Hastings case believe we are at a crossroads where the issues need to be pulled out in to the public domain so that they are no longer decided behind the closed doors of the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers. They argue that we can make two fundamental reforms to reduce the number of ‘wrong’ shootings. First, we can cut right back on the number of deployments and insist that police should never carry firearms in order to seize evidence (such as a kilo of cocaine) but only where there is a direct threat to life. Second, they say, we need to explore the potential of non-lethal means of disabling dangerous opponents, such as TASER electronic stun guns or pepper sprays, so that an error is not fatal.
The second conclusion is that if a system is failing, it is dishonest to fasten the blame on one junior individual: it makes no more sense to hold Chris Sherwood solely responsible for the death of Jimmy Ashley than to blame the train driver for the crash that is caused by structural faults in the rail network. Sherwood’s acquittal reflects that. The officer who pulls the trigger always should be liable to prosecution. There may well be a case in the future where an officer maliciously shoots a target, but if the truth is that he was betrayed by corporate failure and/or deceived by his perception, it cannot be right to send him to prison for life.
Yet there is a naked and unarmed man in the background here. Who is to blame for that? In so far as it continues to pretend that the responsibility rests with the officer who pulled the trigger, the justice system is incapable of pinning the blame where it belongs. On this occasion, the Crown Prosecution Service did try to punish three middle-ranking officers for ‘misfeasance’, an archaic common law charge which collapsed before their trial could begin. And that is the end of that. The rate at which our officers are armed, the law which controls them, the systems which are supposed to supervise them are all left untouched. Jimmy Ashley is dead. Forty others are needlessly dead or wounded. And yet for all official purposes, there is nothing wrong.
Additional research by Max Houghton
