Ex-police marksman who was cleared of murder calls for ‘better understanding’ of officers who use lethal force

Tony Long is a member of a small, exclusive club he’d rather not belong to.

He’s one of four police marksmen who have stood trial for murder after shooting dead a suspect.

The most recent was Martyn Blake who was cleared today of murdering Chris Kaba in south London in September 2022.

I asked Mr Long a question he has been asked many times: how does a firearms officer feel after killing someone?

“Me personally, a sort of emptiness,” he replied. “Feeling a sort of guilt, but not feeling guilty, if that makes sense.

“You know, for me and for all of us, really, I suppose, taking human life isn’t something you take casually, not unless you’re a psychopath. And I also felt anger.”

The former police marksman, now 67 and long-retired, has vivid memories of shooting dead Azelle Rodney, a suspected gang member who officers thought was on his way to commit an armed robbery in north London in 2005.

Police stopped the car he was in and Mr Long shot him six times because he feared 24-year-old Rodney’s movements meant he was reaching for a gun.

“I had to sit at the scene for ages and I watched my colleagues trying to do first aid on the young man that I’d shot,” Mr Long said.

“And then eventually an ambulance arrived and said; ‘He’s gone’, which we knew, but we have to try. And they covered him up with a blanket.

“Of course, it’s a crime scene now, so I had to just sit there and look at this red blanket, and the more I looked, the more angry I got.”

Mr Long had to wait 10 years to stand trial, subject first to a long investigation and a public inquiry which had concluded he wasn’t legally justified in opening fire.

In court, he was acquitted by the jury.

Since 1990, police in England and Wales have shot and killed 83 people.

Before Mr Long’s trial, an officer was tried and acquitted of murdering David Ewin in southwest London in 1995, a verdict delivered after two previous juries had failed to make a decision.

Another officer was tried and acquitted of murdering James Ashley in East Sussex in 1998. Four other Sussex officers were cleared on lesser charges.

In 2021, PC Benjamin Monk was jailed for eight years for manslaughter over the death of former Aston Villa footballer Dalian Atkinson, who was tasered multiple times and kicked in the head. The officer was cleared of murder.

Mr Atkinson was involved in a stand-off with police after suffering a mental breakdown.

In a long career with the Metropolitan Police, Mr Long had been commended seven times. He had previously shot dead two other suspects but had faced no criminal or disciplinary action.

“It’s impossible to be a police officer for too long nowadays without having to get in a violent confrontation with people,” he said.

“We actually know the reality of real life conflict. But the people that are judging you they don’t understand that. And they go, well, you said this and now you’re saying this or your colleague doesn’t say that.”

Mr Long followed the trial of Blake over the death of Mr Kaba who was stopped while driving a car thought to have been linked with a shooting incident the night before.

The prosecution had accused Blake, in statements to police, of giving false or exaggerated accounts of what happened and his responses.

Mr Long said: “You and I could be literally feet apart. We could be shoulder to shoulder, and I would see a need to shoot somebody. But you wouldn’t have seen it just because of, you know, a foot difference in angle and your recollection won’t be the same because when you’re in a high threat situation, there’s all sorts of chemicals released into the body that mess with your normal daily cognitive way of dealing with things and understanding things.

“If you’ve not been in that position and you’re judging purely on what you’ve seen on a body-worn camera in the comfort of (a) little studio and rewinding it, then playing it forward and then freeze framing it, you may think you understand what went on, and in real terms you might have a better understanding of what actually happened and the people that were there.”

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has called for more legal protection for officers who use lethal force, but it’s not clear to Mr Long how that would work.

He said: “We ask those police officers to look after us. And if we train them to use these varying degrees of force, ending up potentially with lethal force, then I think we should be, not cutting them some slack, but we should have a better understanding. And you can’t just automatically say, well, that police officer shot someone and then go, well, charged with murder.”