Mark Gobell
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Joined: 24 Jul 2006
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 Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 2:42 pm Post subject: The conviction of the Met puts us all in greater danger |
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| Martin Kettle - Guardian Cif wrote: | The conviction of the Met puts us all in greater danger
It is not Ian Blair but the law that is an ass - especially if it prevents police officers firing at real suicide bombers
Martin Kettle
Saturday November 3, 2007
The Guardian
There is no easy answer to the question of whether Sir Ian Blair should resign as London's police chief. Anyone who pretends otherwise is kidding. There are serious arguments for him to fall on his sword. But there are also serious arguments for him to stay where he is. On balance the case for him remaining commissioner is much stronger. Yet it would be idle to say this without reservations.
The main argument for Blair to go is simple. He is the head of a police force that killed an innocent man under a firearms policy he authorised and controlled. To me, the circumstances in which Jean Charles de Menezes was gunned down by Blair's officers are less important than the fact that it happened at all. Police forces should not kill innocent people, period.
Yet when they do, justice demands that those who did the killing must be held to account. Most of all, this applies to those who pulled the trigger. But police chiefs must accept their share of responsibility too. As the man in charge, the buck stops with Blair. Of course he should consider his position. I would be utterly amazed if he has not done so.
This responsibility applies with special force over police shootings. Yes, some police shootings are not merely justified by their circumstances but are also acts of high courage. Far too many, however, are neither of these things. Though rare, the death of De Menezes was not a one-off. Fifteen people have been killed by British police shooters since 2002. Nor was this the most egregious case in recent memory. Remember the indefensible fate of Steven Waldorf (who survived) or John Shorthouse a generation ago.
There are established patterns in all police forces of reckless shooting, excessive firing, insufficient training, poor supervision and inadequate accountability. We have to enforce a higher standard than in the past, and the most important police officer in the land must observe it.
So why then say he should not resign? Surely because, more than anything else, this was such an extreme emergency. The police genuinely thought De Menezes was a suicide bomber. They were wrong. Yet, on the day of his death, every one of the officers in the capital was hunting for four bombers who had failed to blow themselves up on the underground the previous day. The police were at full stretch, in real danger, and bore a massive responsibility to the public. It ended horribly wrongly for De Menezes. Yet those who reserve the entirety of their indignation for the tragic Brazilian are not looking at this situation objectively.
What about this week's finding of guilt against the Metropolitan Police under the health and safety laws? Surely Blair should accept responsibility for that? It would be dishonest not to admit this is a serious question. I admit to feeling, even when the law is a complete ass, that bosses ought to step up to the plate if their organisations are found guilty. But I accept it with the utmost reluctance in this case - and I passionately hope the Met appeals and wins.
You see, I want to be protected from the suicide bombers. I'm a hundred per cent in favour of peaceful prevention if humanly possible. But I don't care how indignant the bomber feels. If it comes down to the bomber's life or mine, I want the bomber to be stopped every time, and by force if necessary. Ken Livingstone is wholly correct to say that health and safety legislation was never drawn up for such extreme situations as this. And the law is not just an ass but an outright threat to liberty if this week's judgment means a future armed officer is afraid to fire at a real suicide bomber in similar circumstances.
Be clear that this is now a real possibility. That is why the conviction of the Met this week was bad news not good news. The tyranny of the insurance-driven risk assessment culture - which ironically the commissioner would now be negligent to ignore - means you and I will be less well-protected in future by the police than we were in July 2005. This week's judgment tells those who try to save us to hold back. It leaves us collectively in the same position as the boy who was allowed to drown the other day because a police community support officer judged himself unqualified to plunge in to rescue him. This law is monstrously inappropriate to all the emergency services. Londoners are at much greater risk after this ruling.
In my view the good policing of London is ultimately more important to British justice than the De Menezes case. Blair can sometimes be a bit foolish. But he is answerable and accountable to the public in ways that few of his predecessors ever were. He is also, overall, the most important commissioner London has had since Robert Mark in the 1970s. Blair's neighbourhood policing strategy is the best thing that has happened to policing in modern times - and it is producing results for communities. Those who are trying to push Blair out are doing no favours to anyone except his enemies in the police and the press, who want to turn back the clock
What happened to De Menezes was awful. Yet, awful as it was, it was not as big an outrage as the bombers had in mind. Even the judge this week said it was an isolated breach in extraordinary circumstances. Yes, the police have occasionally got it wrong again in the aftermath - not least in the adversarial forum of the court. Maybe Blair should have gone to Stockwell soon after the killing and knelt in contrition, Willy Brandt-style, at the makeshift shrine that grew up outside the tube station. Maybe he still should.
Yet how many apologies will be enough? There must be a point when repeatedly going over a relatively isolated disaster like the Stockwell shooting must stop. Maybe that point has not quite arrived. But it is increasingly unclear whose interest beyond those of the conspiracy theorists and the victimologists is served by the process, especially when the costs may be underwritten by a Brazilian government that should put its own house in order - police in Rio state have killed 961 Brazilians in 2007 alone - before ours. Maybe it is tactless to remind readers that public opinion supports the shoot-to-kill-to-protect policy. But it is true. And it is another reason why it is in the interests of the public as well as the state for this debate, not Blair, to move on.
martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk |
You can add your comments to the list of dissenting voices here
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The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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| Posted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 5:25 pm Post subject: |
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The indefatigable apologist for state sanctioned murder, David Aaronovitch bounces back yet again.
He gets paid to write this stuff you know !
| Quote: | Who really killed de Menezes?
Don't blame the police or the Government for terrorism
David Aaronovitch
A couple of years ago I did my second stint of jury service at a Central London court. We ended up hearing a case in which a middle-class couple were terrorised one evening by a man who had decided, wrongly, that they were connected with an earlier argument he’d lost with someone else entirely. There was a lot of punching, threatening and door-smashing involved, and the woman was still so scared that she testified from behind a screen so that the accused wouldn’t see her face. “I don’t like her,” said one of my fellow jurors. “Stuck-up. Brought it on herself.”
I was reminded of this moment when reading Sean O’Neill’s comment in this paper last week, that while everyone in Britain now knew who Jean Charles de Menezes was, few of those most vociferously calling for action against the Metropolitan Police, were likely to recall more than one or two names — if that — of the victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings, which happened 15 days earlier. The police end up with a fine of £175,000, condemnation for having permitted “an unwarranted risk to the public” and a barrage of calls from newspapers and politicians for the head of Sir Ian Blair. Those who beguiled the bombers from inadequacy into mass murderousness remain unpunished and unpunishable.
We are in a strange condition not to have noticed that the two main criticisms of the Met in the de Menezes case are — more or less — incompatible. The one case is that, for whatever reason, the officers involved acted with appalling and undue violence, as a result of which an ordinary member of the public was left with seven dum-dum bullets inside him, and there but for the grace of God die we. The other is that the police, believing Mr de Menezes to be a 21/7 bomber returning to public transport to fulfil the jihadi duty that he’d flunked the day before, allowed him to board a bus and then a train, without intercepting him.
You can try and evade the choice, but it is really one or the other. Either, as on 9/11, you neglect to make the presumption that hijacked planes may be flown into buildings and therefore don’t scramble your fighters quickly with explicit orders to shoot down passenger aircraft that fail to respond, or — as under the terms of Operation Kratos — you shoot first and discover the bombs, or the absence of them, afterwards. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, was right when he criticised last week’s verdict: “Mistakes are always going to happen in wars or situations like this.”
Factfile: revelations from the de Menezes trial
Information about the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, on July 22, 2005, that has emerged during the trial
That’s why the man who really caused the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was not the policeman who put the bullets in the poor Brazilian’s head but an Ethiopian called Hussein Osman. It was Osman who, one day earlier, had tried to blow up a train full of passengers at Shepherd’s Bush, Osman who was linked to the block of flats in Stockwell where Mr de Menezes lived, and Osman whom the police thought they were following. No matter how one tries to skirt around this point, had Osman not existed, or else been content with allowing his fellow citizens to exist in peace, Jean Charles de Menezes would still be alive.
Osman had come to Britain in the late 1990s from Italy, telling the authorities that he was from Somalia. He liked to go to Speaker’s Corner, where he would regale his listeners with militant Islam, but at some point the religiosity turned into something more dangerous. And according to the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, speaking yesterday, there are 2,000 known individuals in Britain who would be Osmans if they could be, constituting the “most immediate and acute peacetime threat” in the past 90 years.
As of this spring, 17 people were subjected to anti-terrorist control orders (it was 22, but a number absconded). This made it all the more interesting that Peter Kosminsky, the dramatist, in last week’s Channel 4 drama, Britz, chose to explain a Muslim character’s transition from normality to bomber in terms of a friend’s suicide while under a control order.
Kosminsky’s objective was to show that the measures we might take to curb terrorism were themselves the cause of terror. In a postscript the female bomber’s posthumous testimony, after she has taken out an amphitheatre’s worth of music-loving Londoners, tells us: “You are not innocent, OK? As long as you keep electing this government . . . as long as you sit on your hands while they pass these laws which you know are wrong, you are not innocent!”
The author claimed that he was doing a service to the friends and relatives of those killed on 7/7 by trying to prevent more atrocities, “and the first step is to try to understand how it could have happened in the first place”.
“British Muslims,” he went on, “are infuriated by a foreign policy that appears to be an attack on Muslims worldwide — a new Crusade — and a shockingly large series of security measures which seem to be aimed solely at them.”
But where did Kosminsky’s explanation come from? Certainly not from the trials of those convicted of terrorist offences, or from the testimony beyond the grave of those who have committed atrocities. Muktar Ibrahim was the main man in Hussein Osman’s conspiracy. An Eritrean, he came to Britain aged 12, was convicted of indecent assault at 15, of robbery at 17 and of gang violence the following year. Then he got religion at the hands of Abu Hamza and Abdullah el-Faisal. In 2003 he went to Sudan — and on his return boasted that he was now a jihadi. Nothing to do with anti-terror laws, but far more to do with ego and an apocalyptic ideology, in which mass murder is sanctified. And Ibrahim is not untypical. So why wasn’t Kosminsky’s bomber like Ibrahim? Because then it wouldn’t be our fault.
But can one imagine a Kosminsky film in which a middle-class Londoner, driven mad by the terrorist murder of a fellow Underground passenger, becomes an anti-Muslim vigilante, blowing up a Muslim school, and has the last word? Or a BNP activist enraged by immigration? There is something as perverse going on here as there was in that juror’s mind. The people responsible for terrorism are not the police, not the Government, but the terrorists. They have a say, they have the vote, but they choose murder. To suggest otherwise is not just treacherous, it’s untrue. |
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The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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