In Scotland, U.S. Police Learn How to Avoid Deadly Force

The United States and Britain are bound by a common language and a shared history, and their law enforcement agencies have been close partners for generations.

 
But a difference long curious to Americans stands out: Most British police officers are unarmed, a distinction particularly pronounced here in Scotland, where 98 percent of the country’s officers do not carry guns. Rather than escalating a situation with weapons, easing it through talk is an essential policing tool, and is what brought a delegation of top American police officials to this town 30 miles northeast of Glasgow.
 
Forty minutes into a Scottish police commander’s lecture on the art of firearms-free policing, American law enforcement leaders took turns talking. One after another, their questions sounded like collective head-scratching.
 
“Do you have a large percentage of officers that get hurt with this policing model?” asked Theresa Shortell, an assistant chief of the New York Police Department and the commanding officer of its training academy, where several hundred officers graduate each year.