GMP Tactical Firearms Unit go Rogue A Law unto themselves.

GMP Tactical Firearms Unit go Rogue
A Law unto themselves.

Justice Watch Editorial Exclusive on Antony Grainger Inquiry. by dai dream

Great Manchester Police Tactical Firearms Unit (TFU) seems to be an independent body from any police force including Greater Manchester Police, during the Anthony Grainger Public Inquiry we have learned that these gang of thugs with firearms are a law unto themselves.

After a killing of an innocent unarmed man Anthony Grainger by a Police Officer in a pre planned operation in Cheshire on 3 March 2012 a Public Inquiry was launched in 2017. Justice Watch admins have been attending the court proceedings where details of how the police work and operate has become clear.

For years the Tactical Firearms Unit in Manchester has been a rogue unit, it was so bad in 2011 that Greater Manchester Police had to rush in a replacement for the Head of the Firearms Training Unit because the current head at the time was badly running the department resulting in dramatic failures. The transfer was so quick that there was no official hand over of positions, no passing down information. It seemed that there was no prier oversight to the running of this Unit, this is a quote from Marcus Williams in relation to taking over the job
“There was none of that, sir. It was all stuff we had to discover ourselves, if you like, by trial and error”

You would think this so called Elite Armed Unit would be well trained, drilled and qualified for their employment within GMP. However the way the qualification system works is that once you have initially qualified for that position you have to undertake regular training courses in order to maintain that employment BUT the result of these courses do not come into effect till a year on, in some cases two years. So we now have unqualified armed offices that have failed their training courses and still in employment putting the public in great danger, sadly this was the case with Anthony Grainger.

Incompetent Firearm Officers

The Fire Arms Unit Officers where unable to fill in simple standard log books and record their duties correctly, they where simply not operational competent if they can't be trusted with putting paper to pen then surly they can not be trusted with finger on a trigger. Marcus Williams the new leader of the TFU in court replied to the question “there was difficulties and vulnerabilities in the unit. Would that be fair?” his answer was “ That is generous, sir, yes”.

Weeks before the TFU killed Anthony Grainger there was firearm officers who had been employed on that day of the shooting or involved in Operation Shire that were not operational competence since they had only recently failed their training courses.

Y19 who was the tactical advisor on the night Anthony was killed was unqualified to do so because he had not passed a recent MAST Tactical Advice course and he should not have been employed on that operation.

X9 The CS Gas Canister Grenade Launcher failed his MAST training course on the 4th November 2011.

X7 The Bronze Commander who was in the same car as the killer Q9 failed his course in February 2012, in fact he was kicked off the course because he was a danger to other officers on the exercise . A course that the Fire Arms Unit arranged for themselves with the MET without any contact to GMP luckly for Manchester there was not a terrorist attack because we could have ended up with most of the Armed Unit down in London doing a MET training course.

Z15 had to leave his course in February 2012 cause of safety reasons, he broke several breaches of safety protocol and would have been suspended if it was not a MET course but a GMP course.

Q9 the Killer had 12 separate complaints against him for Assaulting members of the public and was still considered to be safe with a gun.

I'm sure it was not a coincidence that a training exercise was carried out days after the shooting of Anthony Grainger, was this because Q9 and X7 decided to go against GMP TFU tactical guidelines that evening.

Training Records

Training courses was not properly recorded on the Efire System at the TFU so no one really knows if did they any actually training and what that training was, obviously their logbooks are useless to us.

For the Anthony Grainger IPCC investigation the IPCC was going to ask about previous training records of those officers employed on that night when Antony was killed however those records where nowhere to be found, Marcus Williams spoke to Mike Lawlor about this and got him to cosigned in his log book which was very unusual and just a coincidence that Mike Lawlor destroyed his notebook soon after the incident.

No License

Marcus Williams became the head of the Unit in 2011 replacing the incompetent Chief Firearm Instructor Dave Clark, when he took over the firearms training unit it didn't have a full training license because they shot and killed one of their own in an excersice two years before. PC Terry died during a firearms training exercise on 9 June 2008 involving GMP's Tactical Firearms Unit for a gun shot wound.
It took them 4 years of inspections and compliance's for Unit to get back their full training license.

Changes in Policy

After they had got back their Licence the Unit was unaware of any national curriculum training changes that came into effect on June 2011 until one of their Firearm Officers stumbled upon it on when attending a function on the 30th of April 2012, over a year on. This resulted in their Unit reducing their Officers that where qualified to give Tact Advice from 11 down to 6 officers.

Gun Porn

Despite new leadership 2011 the Unit was still under no control hence why they had to remove three officers from the firearms unit for taking mobile phone pictures of them posing in sexual explicit positions in full uniform with what could have been as far we we know a loaded Shotgun, the same type of firearm that killed PC Ian Terry in an exercise.

CS GAS Canisters

It was the TFU that decided they wanted the CS Gas Canister Grenades for their Unit so they basically search google found an American suppler and purchased them without any testing what so ever. In fact there was an incident where they had found out they the suppler had issued them a wrong dosage breaking more Government Policies.

They had to Consult the Secretary of State and carry out technical and medical evaluations of new weapon systems
and the procedures to be adopted for those evaluations, the TFU decided this was not a new weapon but we know now it was. There was no technical evaluation, no carcinogenicity tests, no Toxicology tests, no Medical assessment, no Operational and performance trails.

A survey was carried out early this year and nearly half of Met police officers want more firearms specialists because of so called terrorism, are we really following America and their culture of Police fatal shooting on unarmed members of the public? In the great USA you are almost 60 times more likely to have a police officer kill you than to be killed by a terrorist.