[base2]

I think you would be interested in how fast someone can move in with a knife. Anyways, you give them space and they bolt away and stab or take hostage the next person they encounter. There are so many what ifs in these situations then end badly that you don't even want to let it get to that point.

If "lunging" was the only thing knife welding psychos could do the world would be much nicer place.

[pjc50]

UK police routinely deal with this by talking the person down, use of TASER, or baton strike. http://www.quora.com/How-do-British-police-officers-manage-t...

(There used to be an excellent police blogger who talked about doing this from firsthand experience, but he was de-anonymised and his blog taken down).

[cmdkeen]

As a former UK police officer I can assure you that if armed police officers came across someone with a drawn knife at least one firearm would be aimed at them. One of my officer safety trainers was a qualified close protection officer (i.e. bodygaurd) who ran through one of their scenarios whereby someone with a knife faces off across the diagonal length of a basketball court sized room with someone with a holstered gun. Even trained officers can't reliably get a shot off if that person starts sprinting towards them.

Believe me no-one wants to try and tackle a knife wielding suspect with a baton, at that point you're using defensive tactics and your partner will use their CS/PAVA to try and disable them.

Fortunately, in the UK, the vast majority of people with knives aren't actively homicidal at the point at which the police turn up.

Nightjack was amazing, the Times is in my permanent bad books for their nonsensical justification for outing him. He thoroughly deserved the Orwell prize that he won for his blogging.

[hga]

This is something that we legally armed US citizens train in, along of course with our police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

For others reading this, there are a lot of good videos on the net showing examples of it.

[base2]

I can remember the proper name for them but it's along the line of Armed Emergency Response Teams. Watching tapes and a short training exercise the amount of trigger discipline and weapons handling is amazing.

[cmdkeen]

Armed Response Vehicles (ARVs) are the mainstay of British armed policing, outside of London they are pretty rare and often fall back to traffic policing duties.

The qualfiied officers are Authorised Firearms Officers who will also stand up the equivalent of SWAT teams as needed for each constabulary.

London has Specialist Firearms Officers as well who are a standing set of SWAT type teams. Several have written some very good books about their experiences, Steve Collins especially.

The main thing in the UK is that armed officers who discharge their weapon, let alone kill someone, face extremely rigorous scrutiny by an external agency. This combined with no specific legal protections means that a police officer shooting their weapon is very rare, it happens a handful of times across the UK each year.

[mc32]

I think I helps when the odds are low that suspects will be carrying firearms. In north America the odds are much higher that police will have a confrontation with armed suspects --and of course NaM police have greater legal protection when discharging a weapon.

[PJDK]

For the curious, someone rescued the archive and put it up here http://nightjackarchive.blogspot.co.uk/

[base2]

UK police get stabbed a lot too but they have much better armor.

Yes, talking people down works in every situation.

Not to say that guns work every time but if someone has the intent to get all staby It's time to go lethal.

I think it would be eye opening for everyone to get a taste of how things can go wrong in police situations themselves.

[mc32]

In some situations that is a concern (hostages, bystanders) but my understanding is SOP means getting bystanders out of the way ASAP and dealing with the disturbed person. It's not like the police are six feet from them, they typically have a good cushion of space (and should take more) and take every chance to deescalate --throw fishing net at them, whatever, but use lethal force as last resort, not at the first lunge.