A TEXAN patrol officer who became the first foreigner to join the British police is to resign after three years because he says policing is too dangerous here compared with America.

Ben Johnson, a 6ft 4in former paratrooper nicknamed Slim, has written to his chief constable asking to carry a Glock 17 handgun on his routine beat in Reading.

He said officers are dying unnecessarily because they are less well equipped and trained to protect themselves and the public than their American counterparts.

“The risks required to be taken by unarmed and poorly trained British police are too great for me to continue being a police officer and I will be resigning my commission in a few weeks,” said Johnson.

“I am tired of my colleagues dying when, if they were better trained and equipped, they would have a fighting chance of survival.”

Johnson’s decision was prompted by the murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, a mother of three children and two step-children, who was shot during a robbery in Bradford last month. He said her death demonstrated the lack of training and equipment given to British police.

“Beshenivsky did the one thing that officers in America are trained not to do. She walked up to the front entrance of a business during an alarm call. If the incident had happened in America, she would never have done that. She would almost certainly have been alive today.”

Last week Johnson wrote to Sara Thornton, acting chief constable of Thames Valley police, asking to be armed on patrol. “If the chief authorises me to carry a pistol, then I will not be resigning,” he said. “But that is an impossibility. I now have the choice of continuing in a dangerous job, ill-trained and ill-equipped, or leaving the profession I have loved.”

Johnson, 34, served as a paratrooper in the American army before joining the police department in Garland, a Dallas suburb. Like other officers he carried a Glock 22 pistol as a sidearm, supported by a 12-bore shotgun and an AR15 semi-automatic rifle in his patrol car. In America he routinely confronted armed criminals and received 10 commendations for his bravery.

He came to Britain three years ago to live with his fiancée Louise, an IT consultant. He was able to join the Thames Valley force because of a change in regulations that lifted the bar on foreigners.

The couple are now married and Johnson has taken a short career break to look after their 18-month-old daughter Catherine. He said fatherhood had changed his perspective. “It would not be fair [to my family] to continue in a job that is being made more dangerous by a refusal to modernise,” he said.

It was an incident earlier this year that first caused Johnson to consider handing in his warrant card. He was on plainclothes CID duty when he was called to the Royal Berkshire hospital in Reading to interview a victim of domestic violence.

A woman had jumped out of a first-floor window to escape her violent boyfriend, paralysing her from the waist down. The boyfriend, a member of a drug gang, was already wanted by the police for attempted murder, after shooting someone in the back of the head in London.

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