The move is significant because it represents a convergence between police and military tactics. An incident of the gravity of the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, which was dealt with by the SAS, might in future be dealt with by the police.
The Met stepped up its armed response capabilities after the July 7 bomb attacks in London.
The three helicopters, costing £3m apiece, will each carry a squad of six. The first two will be in operation by the end of the year and the third in 2007. They are being equipped with abseiling equipment that will allow four men to descend simultaneously out of a hovering helicopter.
The Met’s machines will have the full panoply of law enforcement kit — including Nitesun searchlights, the Skyshout public address system, gyro-stabilised cameras, winches and heat-seeking sensors. It will cost about £1,500 an hour to keep the helicopters airborne, excluding the cost of the crew.
As well as transporting armed response teams, the helicopters will also be used for the more conventional police work of helping to track down offenders and assist police on the ground.
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Digital cameras with thermal imaging will be able to spot suspects hiding on the ground from a height of 2,500ft, reducing the disturbance suffered by residents from existing helicopters.
The machines will be based at the Met’s air support unit in Loughton, Essex, which is a five-minute flight from central London. They will be added to an existing fleet of three smaller AS 355N Twin Squirrel helicopters.
Andy Hailwood, a former firearms officer, said the police needed to upgrade their equipment to the standards of the military in order to combat more ruthless criminals: “You are dealing with Turkish Cypriot gangs and eastern European gangs who come from a completely different culture.
“They don’t have the same value of life; they are armed with automatic weapons and even anti-personnel grenades.”
The introduction of more aggressive police tactics is likely to create concern after recent controversies over innocent members of the public who have mistakenly been shot.
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Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said the police risked straying beyond their remit of keeping communities safe. “Britain’s police are revered around the world because of our great tradition of consent-based policing,” she said.
“The military, which is specifically governed by rules of war, has a vastly different mandate than the police who make our communities safe. These lines must not be blurred.”
Crispin Black, a former government intelligence analyst, described the move towards military-style policing as inevitable. “Britain has a traditionally non-military style policing, which is being chipped away at all the time because of the challenges they face,” he said.
“Things are happening much faster now and the threat is much higher, so inevitably they are being pushed towards a more militaristic approach.”