Just after Nicolette Ghirxi was found fatally stabbed in her Swatar home in the early hours of Monday morning, police were locked in a dangerous showdown with her ex-partner, Edward Johnston, on the pitch-dark St Julians’ shoreline.

The negotiation ended in tragedy after Johnston repeatedly refused to drop a gun that he had pointed at his own head and give himself up. Several hours into the negotiation, Johnston turned the gun on police officers and lurched towards a police officer, seemingly about to fire the gun.

The police officers reacted instantly, shooting Johnston three times and killing him.

Police commissioner Angelo Gafa later told a press conference that the police had opened fire because their lives appeared to be in “imminent danger”. It would later emerge that the gun was a replica, something the police would have been hard-pressed to determine in the dead of night.

“Even in daylight it would have been difficult to determine if [the gun] was real until it was inspected,” Gafa said.

The incident raises several questions about how police are allowed to act in cases like this when faced with a situation where their lives may be in peril.

Do the police frequently open fire?

No, this appears to be exceedingly rare.

Media reports of instances in which police fired a gun are few and far between, and thankfully, seldom end in tragedy.

Recent data on how many times police opened fire does not appear to be publicly available. The most recent public data appears to date back to the 1990s when parliament was told that the police only fired shots on a handful of occasions each year.

But there seems to be little reason to believe that much has changed over the years, although two fatal incidents were recorded in the following decade.

In May 2007, Sebastian Borg was gunned down by police in Qormi when two officers shot him five times as he attempted to slash at them with a penknife.

Borg, who reportedly suffered from mental health problems and had recently been discharged from Mount Carmel Hospital, was killed instantly.

Five years earlier, Meloud Ghmaa Ashor Salem, a Libyan national, was shot dead while holding Giovanni Camilleri, a 72-year-old Maltese man hostage at knifepoint on a Luqa rooftop.

Circled by police, Salem was shot and killed on the spot just as he appeared set to plunge the knife into Camilleri’s back.

Several other instances of police shootouts have been recorded over the years, thankfully none of them fatal, from a 1995 shooting involving plainclothes policemen ending in a handsome payout for the victim to a dramatic Mellieħa shootout in late 2021 in which officers fired 56 shots at a getaway car.

When can a police officer fire their gun?

The law is clear – only as a last resort and in “exceptional circumstances”.

The 2017 Police Act, which governs the police force, says that “the use of force is a remedy of last resort” that should only come into play “when it is evident that all other remedies would be of no avail”.

The law goes on to say that when judging whether the use of a gun or weapon was justified, courts need to consider whether it was “inevitable to preserve the life of a police officer or others, or to avert an imminent danger of widespread violence”.

What do police guidelines say?

These principles are highlighted in the police’s internal standard operating procedures on the use of firearms, drafted in 2022 and tweaked over the following nine months. These guidelines were repeatedly mentioned by Gafa in a press conference held on Monday.

The guidelines, first established in 1995, are believed to have been revised several times over the years, including in 2012 by former police commissioner John Rizzo.

That the guidelines were revised again under Gafa’s watch is no surprise – the topic of the police’s use of force is particularly close to his heart and was the subject of his 2008 Masters degree dissertation.

The SOPs broadly follow international guidelines on the subject, frequently quoting chapter and verse from the United Nations regulations on the use of firearms by law enforcement.

They say that officers can only fire their gun when they have a “reasonable belief” that their target “poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person”.

It follows, the SOPs say, that an officer can’t fire towards a target that is attempting to flee, nor can a gun be used against “an individual offering no resistance”.

Ultimately, an officer can only fire at a person “in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury”, when trying to prevent a “serious crime involving a grave threat to life”, and when “strictly unavoidable to protect life”.

The SOPs don't give a narrow definition of this "imminent threat". They don't say that a police officer needs to be shot at first before they fire back, but instead, leave that sensitive judgement in the hands of the police officer under threat.

But, the SOPs say, when they do need to resort to firing their guns, officers must “minimise damage and injury, and respect and preserve human life”.

Officers are also “strictly prohibited” from firing any warning shots whatsoever since these are deemed to be “haphazard and a breach of procedure”.

What happens after shots are fired?

A police officer using their gun while on duty automatically triggers an internal review, regardless of whether anybody is injured or killed in the incident, or whether the gunshot was fired intentionally or accidentally.

The police’s firearm review panel is chaired by a police superintendent, with at least two other inspectors helping out. 

The panel is tasked with determining whether the use of the gun was reasonable, proportionate and justified.