Police Shootings

There has been many shootings by Police and I wish to go over some that I remember.  One was the shooting of Michael Calvey, during an armed robbery.  Calvey was confonted by an armed detective, who shot him.  During the trial of the other robbers involved, the detective said that if Calvey had opened fire, he would have been cut in half.  The detective was later promoted to Inspector from Sergeant.  I remember Linda Calvey, after the trial, responding to the question by a news reporter about her husband brandishing a firearm.  "He would not have used it" she stated.  Later, a friend summed up Calvey as the man who was first out with the raffle tickets if somebody needed help.  He also had no problem waving a sawn-off shotgun about.  Linda Calvey was also involved with another man to die, called Cook.  She went down for his death and became known as a "Black Widow."

     A few years after the Calvey shooting, another blagger went down to a Police bullet.  This was Tony Ash, a villain well into his fifties, and a photo of the death scene showed Ash covered over, wearing a white jacket that really made him stand out.  One of the Arif Brothers was shot and wounded during a robbery in which another member of the gang, Ken Baker was fatally wounded.  It was wondered why one of the Arif family got involved in the robbery.  They were probably the biggest crime family in London in the seventies and did not need to.  Views included that they were dinosaurs who could not stop themselves, and that they wanted to show that they were still at the top.

    During the seventies, the armed robbers were the elite of criminals, in that they had the nerve to carry a gun and run into a bank, or lay a trap for a security van, something essentially that most gangsters did not have the nerve for.  They dressed more flashily than the conservative sixties look, and listened to rock music and modern music in their cars, rather than the crooners that were popular with gangsters in the sixties. 

    One shooting that was national was the shooting of a senior Police Officer in Blackpool.  It was in 1971, and some London villains travelled to Blackpool to rob a jewellry store.  However, things did not go according to plan, and they fled, pursued by a couple of Police Officers.  Superintendent Gerald Richardson closed in on Freddie Sewell who shot him dead.  Sewell escaped and this set off a nationwide hunt, that eventually brought him into custody.  Convicted for the murder, Sewell went to prison for a very long time.