Legitimacy Under Two Roofs: Citizen Complaints Against Counter-Terrorism and Firearms Command Policing Compared

This paper compares citizen complaints against two specialist Metropolitan Police Service commands: the Counter-Terrorism Command (SO15, 2017–19, n = 455 allegations) and Specialist Firearms Command (MO19, 2020–24, n = 1,264 allegations), coded against the same legitimation-expectation framework using the same complaints database. Unlawfulness was the dominant complaint category in both commands, and both showed a marked ‘power few’ concentration of complaints among a small number of officers. Appeal rates differed significantly between commands (38.9% vs 23.3%, p < 0.001), as did the mix of complaint categories (p < 0.001), though effect sizes were small. A novel within-command finding shows MO19 appeal rates vary significantly by complaint category (p = 0.006), concentrated in lower appeals for procedural-injustice complaints. Because the two datasets span non-overlapping periods, differences cannot be attributed to command type independent of era. The paper proposes achievable recommendations for aligning complaint-handling practice across specialist commands.