source: IRR News
published: 14 January 2016
The Home Office is currently reviewing legal protection for police officers who shoot to kill as well as considering whether to transfer the lead role in fighting terrorism from Scotland Yard to the National Crime Agency.
And a review of the rules on the use of lethal force is underway in France, where, in a separate move, President Hollande has asked parliament to approve changes to the French constitution, to deprive French-born dual nationals convicted of terrorist offences of their citizenship and to allow the indefinite renewal of the state of emergency.
Policing by consent, articulated as such, may be a British policing concept, emerging as it did as a philosophy (its practice is another matter) from Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 ‘Bill for Improving the Police in and Near the Metropolis’ which was followed by instructions to the newly-formed Metropolitan police to act as ‘servants and guardians of the public and to treat all citizens with civility and respect’.
Nonetheless, and certainly since the second world war, European states (outside the southern European countries where dictatorship continued until the mid-1970s) were sensitive to the demand that civilian police forces should abide by democratic principles.
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