High visibility

A cursory glance at most news websites and almost every picture seems to feature luminous yellow police jackets.

Sounds like we had our own MetPD Blue this morning with armed plain clothes officers chasing a suspect, possibly complete with suspect belt, down onto a tube platform and cornering him on a train before "unloading five shots into him" if one eyewitness is to be believed.

We're constantly bombarded with action thrillers, gritty police dramas so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even the simplest of descriptions conjurs up an almost movie-like scene: I can almost hear the hard edged jazzy soundtrack and see the camera pans. Sure we're used to uniformed police in the Square Mile, at Heathrow and on guard at Westminster but never a dynamic, plain-clothed, automatic pistol-drawn chase down into the capital's underground arteries. It's probably the most disturbing scene that carriage of people will ever see.

I return home this evening having again been detached from events in the leafy Hampshire countryside and am fully expecting another strong visible police presence at stations. Again, it's hard to put into words how commanding and aggressive the response has been from the Met & British Transport Police: not at all the image needed or displayed on a 'normal day' which makes it even more impressive.