Police Shooting In Chamonix
Less than 5% of police officers in England and Wales carry guns. Hardly any guns are ever shot, and cases of fatal shootings by police are infinitely fewer. There are only 7,000 firearms officers in the UK out of a force of 140,000. Police officers with guns are rarely seen.To the Americans, or perhaps the French, having a nation policed with men and woman armed with only a baton may seem incredulous.
Which make the police shooting in Chamonix last week seem all the more bizarre. Three men from Lyon were disturbed whilst in the process of robbing a chalet in Chamonix. They fled the scene and the owner’s daughter called the police.
The robbers ignored police instructions to stop and forced their way through a police barricade near the golf course in Les Tines. The police opened fire and shot two bullets into the driver’s side of the vehicle.
Photo courtesy of the Dauphine Libre
All very exciting, I’m sure. But was it really reasonable force by the police? There is only one road that runs out of the valley to Switzerland, and that has a boarder crossing. Surely it couldn’t have been too difficult to follow the vehicle, police helicopters had been deployed, until the car was either stopped at the border or another road block could be set up.
In the UK the police were found not without fault in the shooting of an armed but deranged lawyer, but he was armed. And looking at the bullet holes in the vehicle in Chamonix it certainly doesn’t look like the police were firing warning shots.
So if you see a road block in Chamonix the best advice is to slow down and stop.
