THE shooting of police call centre handler Keith Tilbury would be laughable if the police incompetence was not so shocking.

Our police force, the men and women charged with protecting us, had such a slack system of dealing with ammunition that live and blank bullets were rolling around inside an old chocolate tin.

And then a firearms instructor loads a bullet into a .44 Magnum – infamously Dirty Harry’s gun of choice – and points it at someone.

You’d tell a 12-year-old off for doing something like that, let alone a professional, experienced police officer supposedly trained in the use of lethal weaponry.

Pc David Micklethwaite can count himself extremely fortunate that he has only been fined £8,000.

We suspect that anyone other than a police officer would have been charged with grievious bodily harm by the Crown Prosecution Service, rather than be prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive.

What he did was not just criminal. It was criminally inept.

The police tell us that lessons have been learned and they are now rated as a model force by an independent review, so that’s all right then.

What lesson needed to be learned?

Shooting your own staff, albeit accidentally, is not something you should have to be told not to do.

You should just know.

If you had asked Thames Valley Police how safe their firearms procedures were the day before this shooting they would have assured us nothing could go wrong.

But look what did.

And so whatever they tell us today, this remains a serious blemish on the force’s credibility – one it will not be able to cover up for many years.