Bullet got the wrong bloke
For a few hours on the 22nd of July, Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist suspect. What he wasn't was a capital-S Suspect; he wasn't 'known to the police', as we used to say. (Or rather, he wasn't the known person the police thought he was - apparently he was mistaken for Osman Hussain.) What if he had been?
Following last night's appalling revelations, much attention has focused on the police's apparent failure to verify that de Menezes was the Suspect they were after. What if they had done? What if it had been Osman Hussain who was shot?
Consider:
So it's hard to see any legal - or rational - justification for the shooting; and this would still be the case if they'd got the right bloke. To quote myself at greater length,
The charge that Ian Blair, like his namesake, is a liar has gained some traction lately. The possibility I'm considering here is that he's a gambler: that he saw the July 21st bombings - and the Stockwell operation - as a chance to massively extend the effective power of the Metropolitan Police, and to do so without endangering its support in the political class and the media. I don't know if the gamble would have paid off; I'm glad we never found out.
Following last night's appalling revelations, much attention has focused on the police's apparent failure to verify that de Menezes was the Suspect they were after. What if they had done? What if it had been Osman Hussain who was shot?
Consider:
I heard shouting which included the word ‘police’ and turned to face the male in the denim jacket. He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 [firearms] officers … I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side. I then pushed him back onto the seat where he had been previously sitting … I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage.The male in the denim jacket was (self-evidently) not about to detonate any explosives: officers had no reason to suppose that their lives, or the lives of the tube passengers, were in danger. (As I wrote back here,"was de Menezes, in his denim jacket, seen as a low enough risk to be watched on the bus rather than being intercepted, and rugby-tackled on the tube train rather than being shot from a distance?") He could, when he approached the firearms officers, have been intending to go for a knife or a gun - but pinning his arms to his sides and pushing him back into his seat handily dealt with that possibility.
So it's hard to see any legal - or rational - justification for the shooting; and this would still be the case if they'd got the right bloke. To quote myself at greater length,
was de Menezes, in his denim jacket, seen as a low enough risk to be watched on the bus rather than being intercepted, and rugby-tackled on the tube train rather than being shot from a distance? But if so, why was he killed? Not, surely, because he had been misidentified as one of the July 21st bombers - this would be summary justice pure and simple.What I wonder about, after last night's news stories, is: what if it had been Osman Hussain wearing that denim jacket and forced back into that seat on the tube train - what would be the mood of the country now? Would a leak from the Police Complaints Commission have been front page news? Would we be hearing calls for multiple resignations? Or would an act of summary justice - an extra-judicial execution in broad daylight, a truly appalling precedent - have been accepted? Would we now be being encouraged to hail the Metropolitan Police for its resolute stance against terror and its willingness to take the fight to the enemy? (They might cut a few corners here and there, but what's the odd dead terrorist to you or to me?)
The charge that Ian Blair, like his namesake, is a liar has gained some traction lately. The possibility I'm considering here is that he's a gambler: that he saw the July 21st bombings - and the Stockwell operation - as a chance to massively extend the effective power of the Metropolitan Police, and to do so without endangering its support in the political class and the media. I don't know if the gamble would have paid off; I'm glad we never found out.
posted by Phil at 2:15 pm
13 Comments:
Well said, the wrongness of the shooting if it had been a terrorist needed saying. Add that to the wrongness of criticising other forces for not shooting suspects. But it is the cover up that will do the most damage to Ian Blair
Sorry, Phil, but I can't agree with almost any of what you say. The crux, it seems to me, is your assertions that "The male in the denim jacket was (self-evidently) not about to detonate any explosives: officers had no reason to suppose that their lives, or the lives of the tube passengers, were in danger." Both statements seem to me "self-evidently" wrong. Even if you accept the account in the mysteriously leaked document as true and accurate (and there's no reason whatever to do so), it remains the case that the surveillance team did believe that Menezes was one of the failed suicide bombers of the previous day, for a number of reasons that have yet to be shown to have been unwarranted: that he might well have been about to make another attempt at a suicide bombing: and that if at any time his behaviour (such as running onto a tube train, which everyone agrees he did) had suggested that he was about to detonate a bomb, he should be stopped, even if necessary by killing him (and there could have been no other way). The action of the author of the leaked document in trying to pinion him was incredibly foolhardy and could well have set off the explosion, had Menezes actually been a bomber. I have no doubt at all that the police officer who shot him did believe that he was about to detonate a bomb and that he acted with extraordinary courage in running up to him, putting himself in imminent danger of being blown up, instead of holding back and hoping that nothing would happen. But in any case all this speculation is well out of order when we have so few facts to go on. It's really much too early to start talking about the need for heads to roll (anyway an unfortunate metaphor in the circumstances).
I have tried to spell out these arguments against an over-hasty condemnation of the police, even on a provisional basis, in a post on my own blog.
Sorry to disagree! Of course you may turn out to have been right if the facts as revealed by the report of the IPCC inquiry prove to be as you think likely. I merely suggest that we should all suspend judgement until we know what actually happened, rather than rush into premature and quite possibly unjust conclusions, especially in view of the likely damage that the current campaign against Sir Ian Blair and the police is likely to do to the all-important effort to prevent another terrorist atrocity.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
Brian,
I used to have an irritatingly thorough work colleague who won arguments by, in effect, getting his teeth in and worrying them into submission; his catchphrase was "I'm not convinced."
He wasn't much fun to talk to and I'm wary of emulating him. But... I'm not convinced.
Even if you accept the account in the mysteriously leaked document as true and accurate (and there's no reason whatever to do so)
This is odd, for a start. That account isn't some "well-er-basically" vox pop taken from a passer-by in a state of shock; it appears to be the debriefing of a police (Army?) surveillance officer appearing before a committee with quasi-official standing. I think the presumption that the account is truthful and accurate is reasonable - more so than the opposite, anyway.
the surveillance team did believe that Menezes was one of the failed suicide bombers of the previous day, for a number of reasons that have yet to be shown to have been unwarranted: that he might well have been about to make another attempt at a suicide bombing: and that if at any time his behaviour (such as running onto a tube train, which everyone agrees he did) had suggested that he was about to detonate a bomb, he should be stopped, even if necessary by killing him (and there could have been no other way). The action of the author of the leaked document in trying to pinion him was incredibly foolhardy and could well have set off the explosion, had Menezes actually been a bomber. I have no doubt at all that the police officer who shot him did believe that he was about to detonate a bomb
This argument seems to rest on the assumption that de Menezes could have been concealing a suicide bomb under his denim jacket: "he could have been concealing explosives under a denim jacket as well as under a padded coat", as you write in your blog entry. But this is unsustainable. Anyone hiding enough explosive to blow himself up under a thin jacket would have the same bulky silhouette as someone wearing a padded jacket. But De Menezes didn't have this shape; I can state this quite confidently, because nobody has suggested that he was wearing several layers of winter clothes under his jacket (or that he was heavily overweight). Nobody with the opportunity to watch De Menezes at close range for more than a few minutes could have thought they were looking at an impending suicide bomber - which perhaps explains the apparent foolhardiness of the watcher who tackled him.
What are we left with? Only three scenarios, I believe:
1. A cold-blooded execution carried out in retribution for the July 21st bombing attempts and in revenge for July 7th. More the style of Brazil's own police than ours (Mark Steyn, surprisingly, had quite a good line on this).
2. An operation to apprehend de Menezes (wrongly believed to be one of the July 21st bombers, but correctly believed not to be carrying explosive on the 22nd) which went wrong at the point of handoff from surveillance to firearms teams: perhaps the latter was instructed to 'stop' de Menezes and assumed that they were dealing with a potential suicide bomber, who could only be stopped by killing him. (It's worth noting here that Cressida Dick is on record as saying that she intended the suspect to be brought in alive.)
3. An operation where all concerned thoroughly lost their heads, seeing a prime suspect where none was and then seeing explosives where none were. (Although this doesn't explain the pinioning of de Menezes - or, for that matter, the decision to let him continue his bus journey.)
I'm currently leaning more towards 2. than 1. I wouldn't dismiss 3., but it's a looser fit to what we know than either of the nastier scenarios. Any scenario more charitable than 3. I'd find very hard to accept.
Disappointingly, I don't really disagree with anything you say. I'm not asserting that the leaked document is inaccurate, only pointing out that it's just one of several eye-witness accounts, which on past form will vary substantially from one another simply because of the fundamental unreliability of human observation and memory. Moreover there may have been key events in the story which the author of the leaked document didn't witness and wasn't aware of, so his account isn't necessarily complete. I'm really making the fairly obvious point that it's unsafe to rely on a single uncorroborated account of what happened, and that until we see the full story in the eventual report of the IPCC, we should all stop speculating and reserve judgement.
Equally, I agree that any of your three possible scenarios could turn out to be correct: but for the same reasons as those for which we should reserve judgement on the culpability or lack of it of the Met and Sir I Blair, we should surely stop constructing possible scenarios (and then placing bets on which is the likeliest) until we know a great many more of the facts.
You implicitly dismiss the fourth possible scenario -- that the surveillance team or teams, and their controller, Gold Commander Cressida Dick, genuinely and reasonably believed that on the available evidence Menezes was one of the attempted suicide bombers of the day before and that he was probably on his way to the tube station to try again: they interpreted his behaviour as probable confirmation of this: and they interpreted their instruction from Ms Dick to stop him getting onto the tube as an instruction to stop him detonating a bomb on the tube, in the only way possible, namely the way expressly authorised by approved policy. If they did honestly (and not unreasonably) believe all this, the absence of a visible bulge of sufficient size and shape under the denim jacket would hardly have made the difference between either taking pre-emptive action, or doing nothing and hoping for the best. You argue, cogently, that the fourth scenario should be dismissed as implausible, and you may very well be proved right to have dismissed it when we know more of what actually happened. All I can say is that, to coin a phrase, "I'm not convinced" (!).
Let's now wait and see.
There's more on all this on my blog and associated comments.
Brian
A man is dead and he was executed. He was shot, then later shot many more times. That is a very serious issue. What matters most, is what we do.
The cctv camera was working, but the tape the police took away was returned blank.
Quite frankly, quite a lot of people should have been arrested by now. If you disagree with that statement, then if I am concerned for my safety by a policeman walking passed with a gun, it is clearly ok for me to execute him.
Lets not hear this police word. It doesn't matter who you are. You drive a car, you make split second decisions all the time, and you are accountable for them.
The only person suspended so far was the person who was telling the truth.
Sir Ian Blair has even had the gaul to try to cover up a cover up and what he said following the shooting was disgraceful as a human being let alone as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent, clearly Sir Ian Blair was not. He should be suspended, he did far worse than the person who told leaked the truth.
Dave
It doesn't actually matter whether the person shot was guilty or not. He did not have a bomb, the commissioner would have known this, he certainly had a duty to.
Foul play could not be more obvious, there is a trail of evidence. The police officers responsible for the shooting and the commissioner should be arrested, charged, and due process should follow.
It should be for a court to decide the guilt or innocence of these people. If justice is thwarted by the police themselves, what have we come to?
Dave
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stat - the deleted comments were spam. They were obviously generated automatically & had no purpose except putting a URL where somebody might click on it - the text had nothing to do with this topic, or anything else on this blog. I'm intending to write a post about this later.
(I don't know any more about 'dark forces' which may (or may not) be at work in this case than you do, incidentally.)
Leaving aside the event itself, Blair's attempt to delay an independent investigation into something which he knew (by then) to have been an almighty cock-up provides a very good reason why he should go now, whatever the outcome of the investigation itself.
In his later defence of this stance, he also attempted (consciously?) to mislead the public about the nature of the IPCC investigation in his statements. I've gone into detail about this in comments on Little Red Soccerballs and Brian B's blog, linked to elsewhere in this thread.
Chris W
PS - Phil I agree with you about the salience of the 'what if he had been a terrorist' issue, and will give you some depressing confirmation of the likely attitude next time I see you.
Chris W
A lot of mud is being thrown at Sir Ian Blair, here and elsewhere, over his initial opposition to the transfer of the investigation of the Stockwell tube shooting from the police to the IPCC. Some are even calling for his resignation on this issue alone. Those who advance this criticism in reasoned and sensible terms may like to glance at my attempt in another place to set out an alternative view of the Commissioner's opposition to the transfer of the investigation to the IPCC. (Others won't be persuaded and might as well stay away.)
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
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