Games 'may need foreign police'

bbc

Foreign armed police may be needed for the 2012 London Olympics because there are not enough British officers trained to use firearms.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told a Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) meeting it may be too expensive to train British policemen.

About 6,000 out of 140,000 officers in England and Wales are trained in guns.

The Met Police spokesman said it may need help in some specialist areas of policing but no decision had been made.

The met have just said they May require the assistant of outside help for the olympics security because its cheaper then training officers with Guns. whats your views on this and what do you think of britain going and asking other countries if they can lend their armed security forces.

its not final but its on the table

On the face of it, it might be cheaper...

But it'll be a legal nightmare, especially if one of the foreign police officers has to fire their weapon. You probably already know that every time an armed police officer fires a shot whilst on an operation (regardless of whether anyone was hit by it), it is looked into after the op is over (and in serious cases, i.e. if someone has been shot, the Independent Police Complains Commission takes over). I'm not sure how it'd work if a foreign police officer had to fire.

I wonder how many fire arms officers we're short by, anyway, and how much it'd cost to train them... surely that can be made up in the next five years? Training a police officer to use a gun isn't just a two week affair like the Olympics (which is costing billions)... once they've learned how to use them, they can be redeployed pretty much until they retire. Also, just because they're trained doesn't mean they have to be carrying a gun once the Olympics is over. They can go back to normal police duties and act as 'reserve' fire arms officers should there be another major event or serious emergency.

And is the cost of this potential requirement included in the current cost estimate or can we expext another statement (or ten) on the cost of the 2012 games.

5 years and we can train enough officers to cover this requirement. I would suggest using the army in some cases but we will still be in Iraq!!

Have we done any planning for the Games?

Make the foreign cops 'Specials' or second them the way they always do with foreign visiting exchange cops; then allocate them in small groups with British cops in the team.
There's no mystery to this, it's done fairly regularly right now.
Problem solved.

But the central point in all of this Olympics business is we're doing them.

That's it.

The debate on that is over.

We got them & we're doing them & we can all sit around bitching about the fact that they cost a lot of money to put on & do & all that
but
at the end of it all we're still doing them and that's the end of it.

One can take a short-term view and pretend, very wrongly IMO, that they will give nothing back to our communities
or
we can take a more reasonable, longer term & more objective view and see that they do tend to add value to the places that hold them after they are gone.

Of course there has been huge amounts of planning for the games.....but certain sections of our press opportunistically love to pretend there has not been and like all massive undertakings it's impossible to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' to everybody's satisfaction (particularly several years out from them starting).