Got to love arm chair quarterbacks. I’m sure all of you critics would have reacted perfectly under the circumstances and done exactly the right thing. :dubious:
Personally I think I’ll wait for more facts before I fry the cops on this.
-XT
Does this statement mean that they haven’t been buried yet?
That their ghosts are on the loose??
That their zombies are on the loose???
Four known suicide bombers on the loose? I gotta think their are four pretty good places to start looking.
Any word on whether or not they said something along the lines of “Freeze, police officers!”, or something like that?
Is this a whoosh? I’m fairly sure they are talking about the 4 bozo’s who tried to set off suicide bombs but botched the job…so I suppose you’d call them ‘attempted suicide bombers’, or perhaps ‘not so smart bombs’.
-XT
This is one of those awful ‘cold-pit-in-your-stomach’ type things.
Terrorists must be rubbing their hands with glee - after such a stoic reaction to the first bombing, now the perception can be one of fear, panic and mayhem… especially when some guy gets nailed five times in the head for looking swarthy and wearing a funny coat.
We are right where they want us to be. Bastards.
They didn’t just think he was a “terrorist”, though, one who plants bombs and softly and silently vanishes away: those terrorising London are suicide bombers, who will detonate themselves before, during or after capture - this guy’s behaviour had given them every reason to think he was cut from the same cloth, and the multiple headshots were quite deliberately intended to kill him instantly - no bloodied twitching hands scrabbling for detonators, in other words. As far as they knew, and as his actions seemed to confirm, he needed to be killed as dead as possible as fast as possible. They made the wrong call, as it happened, but in the circumstances I think they were right to make it.
Not really a whoosh, not really a nitpick- just that “suicide bombers on the loose” sticks out to me as a strange sounding phrase without qualifying it with “attempted”.
While some of you are getting your panties all in a twist over the British law enforcement reaction to strange behavior in the subway, I’ll reserve my pittings for the islamic fundies.
If the news I heard is correct, the victim/perp was an illegal alien from Brazil,who couldn’t understand English. If he wasn’t doing anything illegal there wouldn’t be any reason to run or appear suspicious.
Btw, kudos to the London Police and Scotland Yard for their overall handling of this latest crisis.
Can someone explain why it would ever be necessary for a trained firearms expert to shoot a subdued suspect five times at point-blank range?
If the guy is already on the deck with a pile of policemen on top of him, I just can’t see why more than two shots would be necessary to deal with even the most severe threat. Of course, I don’t have all the evidence and I’m not a police officer etc. etc. but FIVE shots? I take this as an indication that at least one of the officers in question had gone over the edge.
The way I’ve heard it explained is that, although he was down, and so couldn’t escape, there is no way to be sure a suspect is unable to trigger a device (if he has one) other than destroying his brain stem. Don’t know how true that is though.
The guy had lived and worked quite legally in England for at least 3 years and spoke excellent English.
I’ll admit that a blog entry from someone who knew the victim isn’t the most ironclad of cites, but:
In the following BBC page, the victim’s cousin is quoted as saying that:
I would imagine that the shooting was a very difficult decision for the police officer to make. Compared to, say, the NYPD or the LAPD, UK policemen are not generally known for killing civilians (the exceptions apparently being when suspected terrorism is involved and the stakes are higher), which is part of the reason why this is such a big news story.
So far there is no evidence that police officers identified themselves. They were in plain clothes, had followed him down a street and onto a bus. If they didn’t identify themselves no wonder he panicked when one or more civilians pulled a gun on him. If they did (and there is no evidence they didn’t either) and he ran, then sorry, he bought it upon himself.
To recap, that behaviour being:
- being brown,
- being from the wrong block of flats, and
- being scared of guns wielded by men in Stockwell.
Now, have you been to Brixton/Stockwell? It’s not exactly Harlem, but let me tell you, if four guys start chasing me around there, I’m going to fucking run like the clappers, and that’s even if they’re not obviously toting lethal weapons. Knightsbridge it ain’t, and if some random guy points a gun at you and says “stop”, the natural reaction is not “certainly, officer.” As tagos points out, this all rather hinges on whether they clearly identified themselves as cops, to which I’d only add: clearly and believably, which comes back to the whole question of what you sensibly do when being chased by guys in civvies with guns in a nasty area of London.
I am aware that, in extremis, the cops should be able to act with lethal force to protect the public at large. This is going to involve making close calls on whether someone is a bomber or not. The complaint here is that the result of deciding that someone is a bomber is so severe that the criteria for calling someone a bomber should be a bit more stringent than the three above. From the reports I’ve heard, it was an entire building under surveillance, not a single flat. If the police are going to chase anyone coming out of an entire building using non-uniformed officers, and shoot anyone who runs, then they are putting everyone in that building in mortal danger. Either the surveillance needs to be tighter, or the isolation of the building needs to be more stringent, but you simply can’t assume that everyone who comes out of building X, and is scared by being chased, is a terrorist. Certainly not if you’re going to shoot him repeatedly in the head.
If you’re going to talk about natural reactions and all, that’s fine. But it applies to the cops as well. They’re people too. They’re as pumped as anyone else, and just as prone to having their cortexes trumped by their reptilian brains. In my opinion, neither side of this issue has the moral high ground. There’s plenty of woulda-shoulda-coulda to go around for everybody. No one knows what might have happened had the guy been a terrorist and the cops hesitant. This might likely be a pitting of careless and neglegent law enforcement failing to intercept a preventable disaster. Taking a side on this is like taking a side between the car and the tree when a guy runs off the road.
Actually, witnesses say the guy tripped and fell as he ran into the subway car, and the cops shot him as he went down, thinking he would detonate a bomb.
Absolutely; it’s a horrible situation, and that’s why I’ve been careful not to indict the specific policemen involved. They’ve been given a policy, and once you assume in your own mind that someone is a bomber, you’ve got very little choice if they run on to a tube train. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to take issue with the policy and tactics that put these police in this unenviable situation, and to question whether the methods being used are posing an unreasonable threat to innocent people.
It’s not about the “moral high ground”, or “taking sides”; it’s about ensuring that the general public is as safe as possible. This requires considering the danger posed by police action as well as that posed by terrorists, as this incident so tragically proves. Yes, he could have been a bomber, and this could be a thread about a failure to apprehend a genuine threat. But it isn’t, and we need to assess whether the actions taken were appropriate. Given the apparently scant criteria that convicted and ultimately killed this innocent man, I have to believe it’s within our ability to police more intelligently.
But questioning whether things could be done differently is akin to asking whether better street lighting might have prevented the crash in the first place. And this, to my mind, is essential.
:wally Sorry, missed post 13 on my skim, caught it after posting…
Unfortunately, protection of the general public and protection of the individual are incompatible. In the US, police are charged with protecting the general public but are under no obligation to protect individuals. (See Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1, 4, D.C. 1981, regarding the “fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen”). My point is that no matter what plan you put in place, if it is designed for protection of the public at large, then some individual or another is sooner or later going to suffer from it. And when that happens, you’ll find yourself right back in the spot of formulating some new plan that will inevitably have the same result.
I think if the scenario played out as was described then the police absolutely did the right thing.
- The guy left a block of flats under surveilance as part of an antiterrorist operation.
- He was wearing a bulky jacket on a hot day.
- When challenged by armed police officers he did not stop.
- Instead he fled onto a crowded train carriage.
At this point merely wrestling the guy to the ground doesn’t cut the mustard, the arresting officer has every reason to suspect that this guy has a suicide bomb and is about to detonate it killing everyone on the carriage and not incidentally the officer in question. To be honest if the above version of the story is correct I think the said officer acted with incredible courage and presence of mind.
I hasten to add I don’t think it was the guys fault either, he was from a hot country where people chasing after you with guns aren’t nessacrily the police and he probably didn’t understand english well enough to understand what was being screamed at him, even if he had people do stupid things when they are scared. If you want to blame anybody for this blame the people who are trying to blow up subway trains.
This doesn’t mean that there doesn’t need to be an investigation to determine whether he was challenged properly and to try and determine any way we can try and stop this happening again.