Bullets on Bra/brook Street

Dealing as they must with all manner of rogues and reprobates, British bobbies figure they have at least one thing going for them: they never carry firearms in the course of ordinary duty. The theory is that thugs are less inclined to pack a gun themselves if they know the cops will not shoot. Though only 24 British policemen have been killed in the last 55 years, the tacit truce between cops and crooks is occasionally shattered--as in the fatal shooting of three policemen last week on a London street.

Cruising down Braybrook Street in a West London middle-class neighborhood in their unmarked car, the three cops pulled up beside a pale-blue Vanguard parked at the curb. Detective Sergeant Christopher T. Head, 30, a plainclothesman, got out to question the four young toughs in the car--possibly wondering what they were doing near Wormwood Scrubs Prison. That might never be known. As neighborhood children gaped, the men in the Vanguard pulled out pistols, shot down Head, then his partner, Temporary Detective Constable David Wombwell, 25, as he rushed to help. Still in the squad car, Constable Geoffrey Fox, 41, gunned his engine in a desperate attempt to run down the killers; a bullet through the windshield stopped him dead. Before the Vanguard roared off, said a witness, one black-bearded hood coolly "got into the police car and drove over one of the men on the road."

At week's end, London police were mounting a massive dragnet to track down the killers--and issuing tear gas and revolvers to the searchers. Whether the pistols would do much good was another question. Police Federation General Secretary Arthur Evans complained that, because of the old anti-gun tradition, "you could count on the fingers of one hand police trained in the use of firearms."

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