Episode Details

Most of the world arms its police as standard. A shrinking handful — Ireland, the UK, Norway, New Zealand — still send officers onto the street without firearms. But even those forces quietly maintain armed response units on standby. In this episode, we unpack the history of unarmed policing, from Robert Peel's London bobbies to the Garda's founding as a deliberate rejection of colonial occupation, and ask whether the model still works when organized crime and terrorism have changed the threat landscape. Is it a principled ideal, or a system that offloads risk onto front-line officers?