This is also how it's done traditionally in Ireland, the regular police aren't armed but there is a "Special Branch" of detectives, usually plain clothes in unmarked cars.

Recently they've been sneakily expanding the use of armed police though. In Dublin, I see more and more cars marked "Armed Response Unit" which have regular cops with guns. And just last week a detective was shot and killed with his own gun while doing a traffic stop. There's been a massive PR blitz about how good a guy this cop was, but zero discussion about why the duties of armed police have now been extended to include road traffic policing. I suspect it's planned to arm more and more of them and I wouldn't be surprised if the British followed the same slippery slope.

Yeah, that is something that always puzzled me. German police is armed, always. Seeing unarmed police always strikes me as strange.

Have to agree, so, that a gun not carried cannot be used.

Just out of curiosity, is police violence and discrimination a problem in Ireland? Outside of Northern Ireland, off course.

Not particularly, Irleand is a relatively homogeneous country. There has been an uptick in the last few years in drug gang related murders due to a feud between two pretty brutal drug cartels (the leader of one now controls an international cartel from Dubai and rather outrageously is the promoter behind the Tyson Fury Vs Anthony Joshua heavyweight boxing fight). I think this has probably lead to an increase in gun carrying by Gardai (Irish police service).

Thanks! Very interesting bit of information regarding the cartrlys and the Fury vs. Joshua fight.

In 2018 and 2019, there were over 30,000 assaults on police officers in UK.[1] In 2017 and 2018, there were over 110,000 assults on police officers in US. You can't just adopt this in the US, policing is more dangerous in the US.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2017 https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2018

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

As of 2020, the US population is ~327000000. The UK population is 63000000 [Source: Wikipedia]

Now, do some division. That's ~1 assault on a LEO per 2990 people in the US and ~1 assault on a LEO per 2100 people in the UK.

So assaults on LEO per capita are 26% greater in the UK.

Of course, it is also important to look at the number of LEOs in each state (in the sense of country, not US state).

From [0] there are ~686000 LEO in the US, or 1 per 479 people. From [1], there are ~123000 LEO in the UK, or 1 per 512 people.

So there are 6% fewer LEO per capita in the UK than the US, but the assaults on LEOs happen 26% more often per capita.

So how is it more dangerous in the US again?

[Edit: forgot sources! my bad.]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enf... Actually, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect... suggests 808,000 LEO in the US, which makes the per-capita LEO even higher in the US. Population data is hard.

[1] https://fullfact.org/crime/police-numbers/

I know simple math, thank you. As I pointed out in the other reply, the rate of assult to US police, who are armed and more hostile to you is only about 25% lower than UK police where the majority of them don't carry a firearm. Actually we don't know the proseuction rate so we don't even know it's that lower.

The US population is more than 4x bigger than the UK, and seems to also have more police per capita, so those numbers would imply that policing is safer in the US. (Which I don't quite believe; more likely those assault numbers are incomparable or just wrong).

I wanted to point out that the rate of assult to US police, who are armed and more hostile to you is only about 25% lower than UK police where the majority of them don't carry a firearm.

Has anyone done any deep analysis of this kind of thing.

Of those assaults, what impact did the police officer's gun have on the situation?

You can imagine an example where the gun is an asset - for example if the officer encounters an ongoing potentially deadly assault and then can shoot the perpetrator.

But I feel like more often the gun is a liability, an unarmed person is held at gunpoint and becomes violent - the police officer is left with the option of shooting the person or letting them get away. If they were using a batton/cs spray/taser (options available to regular British police) they then have many more options available to them.

The stats I'm looking at say there are ~65m people in the UK and ~330m in the US. So about 5x the number of people. If that's true (5x people) and the assault stats are true (3.6x assaults), then policing more dangerous in the UK.

(this feels off to me.. am I doing my math wrong?)

Those figures don't look like they're adjusted for population. US pop is about 5x UK's.