Senior officers at Greater Manchester police met within hours of the killings on Wednesday and agreed that a plan to cut firearms officer posts should not go ahead, the Manchester Evening News reported.
Officers told the newspaper that no decision had officially been made but it is understood that they will reverse plans to lose 25 posts from the force’s firearms unit and 50 officers from its traffic division as part of government cuts.
In November, figures showed that the number of authorised police firearms officers in England and Wales had fallen by 760 since 2009, to 4,986. It comes amid an increasingly worrying terror climate. The UK’s threat level is rated “severe”, which means that security forces believe that an attack is highly likely.
Senior officers have also warned about the threat posed by hundreds of radicalised British youths returning from Syria.
November’s figures, obtained by the industry website Police Oracle under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that 22 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales had reduced the number of firearms officer posts in the past five years.
