At a midnight briefing in Kentish Town police station in north London, officers are shown a photograph of Danny Downes, a large white man with a wispy beard, who has been linked to a shooting in the area.
Swabs on a bullet casing found at the scene have come back with a match to his DNA.
Intelligence suggests he keeps the gun at home.
In the room are MO19 officers, colleagues of Martyn Blake, the firearms officer who was charged with murder after opening fire on the job.
Blake was acquitted of murdering Chris Kaba last October, but with Wednesday’s police watchdog decision to launch a gross misconduct hearing against Blake, the case still lingers over his unit.
Police officers don’t get paid anything extra for carrying a gun – what they get is the dangerous callouts, and a huge responsibility strapped to their shoulders.
The Kentish town operation, like any shift, is another chance when shots could be fired and split-second risk assessments made in the moment could be scrutinised for months, even years, careers could go on hold with suspended officers publicly named as they go on trial.
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They could end up in prison for the most serious of crimes.
“Why risk it?” many asked themselves during the Blake trial, and at one point, it was reported that up to 300 officers had turned in their firearms permits, allowing them to carry weapons.
The burden of high accountability is what a firearms officer carries with them in their holster, and many would argue, not least the victims’ families of police shootings, that is how it should be; the power to kill in the name of the state must be accompanied by the highest scrutiny.
‘Crush the spirit of good officers’
Some campaigners feel they are under-scrutinised and have a habit of being acquitted for their actions, but, after the Martyn Blake verdict the Met Commissioner, Mark Rowley, said the system for holding police to account was “broken,” adding “the more we crush the spirit of good officers – the less they can fight crime”.
In a statement on Wednesday, Assistant Commissioner Lawrence Taylor said: “We know another lengthy process will fall heavily on the shoulders of NX121 (Blake’s code name) and more widely our firearms officers who continue to bravely and tirelessly police the streets of London every day to protect the public.”
Chris Kaba’s family said they welcomed the IOPC’s decision, adding: “We hope this leads to him being removed from the Met Police. What Martyn Blake did was deeply wrong.”
In the Kentish Town briefing room, plans for the operation are set out: room layouts, entry points, cordons, risk assessments.
Then Derek Caroll, a specialist tactical firearms commander, tells the room why it is proportional that the planned dawn raid to arrest Downes should involve officers who carry guns.
Caroll said: “Clearly, he has used the firearm in a public place, so that’s the reason armed officers have been deployed… the subject these officers are going to go up against has either immediate possession of a firearm or access to a firearm.
“Because there is a gun outstanding there is a potential risk – he has a propensity to fire the weapon.”
The point seems obvious and laboured, but the case of Martyn Blake and other shootings has made it clear that this stuff needs to be spelled out as often as possible.
Sergeant Blake had been on a similar mission to these officers when he shot 23-year-old Chris Kaba.
The death of Kaba in September 2022
He and other officers were involved in stopping an Audi Q8 used in a shooting in Brixton.
Arguably, there are more variables trying to stop a car than in a dawn house raid where suspects are usually asleep.
With car stops, they can see you coming, it’s not always clear who is driving, and the vehicle itself can be used as a weapon.
All of this played out in the attempted hard stop of the Audi Q8 in September 2022.
An unmarked police car was following the vehicle when it turned a corner and Blake’s marked vehicle blocked its path.
Officers didn’t know Kaba was driving the car, and with armed officers now on foot, Kaba tried to ram his way out.
Seconds later, he was shot by a single round through the windscreen.
The police watchdog referred Sergeant Blake to the CPS, and he was charged with murder.
In court, he argued that he had opened fire because it was his genuinely held belief that the driver posed an imminent threat to life and in October last year, the jury found him not guilty.
After the verdict, it emerged that days before he was shot, Chris Kaba himself was alleged to have shot someone in a nightclub, chasing his victim outside, shooting him again.
‘Gung-ho’ behaviour
Equality activist Stafford Scott believes the killing of Chris Kaba is part of a pattern of what he called “gung-ho” behaviour from Metropolitan Police officers against black men.
He feels the hard stop was an unnecessarily “reckless” tactic.
He lists other shooting victims such as Jermaine Baker and Mark Duggan and blames “institutional racism” within the force – pointing to the matching findings of the McPherson report of 1999 and the more recent Lousie Casey Inquiry in 2023, which both made damning conclusions about police racism.
The prosecution in Blake’s case didn’t argue that racism played a part in the shooting, but having watched the trial, Scott says it left many questions.
“What we have again is this notion of ‘honestly held belief’ and that’s why we are going to the European courts because we won’t get justice in this system – ‘honestly held belief’ must be rational,” he says.
“And let’s remember there was all this stuff in the media afterwards about what Chris Kaba did before he was shot, but at the time Martyn Blake shot Chris Kaba he didn’t even know it was Chris Kaba behind the wheel. He didn’t know who it was.”
These arguments, and what happened at the scene, will again be played out in a misconduct hearing, which requires a lower threshold of proof than criminal proceedings and could lead to Blake being sacked from the force.
Like tiptoeing armadillos
In the operation in Kentish Town, for the officers strapping on their Sig MCXs and holstering their Glocks, the last thing they want is to have to use them.
They are trained to only open fire if they believe there is a risk to life, and a large part of their training is also in first aid, be that on victims they find at the scene – or on someone who they have felt compelled to shoot themselves.
It is a surreal scene as these heavily tooled-up officers in helmets and body armour stalk through the everyday scene of a dark council estate then, like tiptoeing armadillos, they quietly shuffle up the stairwell with their forcible entry tool kit.
The door is busted down in seconds to the shouts of “armed police!” and after loud negotiations at gunpoint, the highly overweight figure of Downes is brought out and cuffed in his boxer shorts.
The man is so large, it leads to serious debriefing questions afterwards about what to do if a subject is too big to get out of the door and even taking him downstairs is done by bum shuffle.
“There was a knife in a sheet under one of the beds,” says one of the arresting officers to his commander, “and then the firearm found down the side of the sofa, which is quite readily available to the subject.”
“We got him, no shots fired, and we can be nothing but happy with that,” responds the Commander.
Success is ‘where shots aren’t fired’
Afterwards, Commander Caroll tells Sky News: “It’s a satisfaction getting the gun back – but unfortunately, there’s guns out there and we are doing these jobs very regularly.
“We get a gun off the street. We get the person arrested and as with every firearms operation – every successful firearms operation, for the Met and for the country – is one where shots aren’t fired.”
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Out of 4,000 operations a year, shots are only fired once or twice, but whenever they are, questions will always be asked.
There is a balance between rigorous accountability for the officer, a process of justice for bereaved families and the impact it may have on policing if officers fear their names could become known in criminal networks after they shot a gang member or if someone’s “honestly held belief” is not enough to keep them from jail.
Campaigners and members of Chris Kaba’s family say the Blake verdict shows that officers can kill without consequence – his colleagues say he has already paid a heavy price for doing what he is trained to do.
When they are not on operations to seize guns, MO19 officers patrol London poised to deal with stabbings, shootings and terrorist attacks – there’s little doubt the public wants them to keep doing that.
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Downes, 23, has since pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm with intent to cause fear of harm and possession of a Class B substance.
He is due to be sentenced in June.
