When the police are armed, mistakes will lead to innocent people getting shot  Even with the special selection measures and intensive training given to firearms officers, mistakes sometimes occur, and innocent people are shot. This can happen either by mistake because the armed officers are acting on inaccurate information, or because they are bystanders caught in the cross-fire of a shoot-out. Arming all police officers would mean ditching the current stringent selection methods for who is armed, and would inevitably result in less training being provided, so mistakes would become much more common and more people would be wounded or killed. Such as the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York in 1999, or the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes at Stockwell underground station in 2005. [1] Squires and Kennison, in their 2010 book, detail a number of case studies of mistaken police shootings, further details can be found on the IPCC Inquiry reports website. [2]  [1] The New York Times, ‘Amadou Diallo’,  , accessed 20 September 2011  [2] P. Squires and P Kennison 2010 Shooting to Kill: Policing, Firearms and armed response. Oxford, Wiley/Blackwell.