The suggestions are that copying Israeli guidelines they don’t have to ID themselves because that gives the bomber a chance to explode. They can fire if they are almost certain that a bomber is about to commit an act. In no way does this seem to be the case. I cannot accept that police can shoot someone without identifying themselves unless the evidence is utterly overwhelming. I’d rather take my chances with bombers than see innocent civilians shot on jumpy suspicion. In this case they had the man pinned down and no evidence apart from him living in the same building and him running from apparently unidentified gunmen.
These officers and their superiors certainly have a case to answer but I have a feeling the blame lies with the intelligence the officers on the ground were given that led them to a false assessment of the certainty of the threat. and people should be held accountable for that and guidelines changed.
Well, if I was in London these days, I would certainly be alert to the fact that the police have a habit of shooting first and asking questions later, being British as they are. I would also be very aware that thugs in groups are on the street armed and might at anytime start yelling at me and waving guns around and I should indeed panic and flee because everyone knows what a ‘gun’ culture there is in England. Heck, just come to the SDMB and they’ll all tell you about all the crazy Brits running around in an uncontrolled manner and how they are always worried about killer squads of gangsters and hoodlums who are packing guns and shooting wily nilly in the streets.
I would never think to stop and be very careful to show my hands, jeez, just think, hundreds of people around and they are going to blow me away in London, guys with guns… That is so a worry over there ya know. Just ask the guys on the SDMB. ( That is the usual stuff to be afraid of, none of that British stiff upper lip when thing’s get tough, none of that famous English calm in adversity, just a mindless panic and flight. Why of course the problem is all about way the police are doing it. How could ever think anything different? )
Get a grip guys, you lambaste the US Airforce for over reacting and yet you want to be able to act like ‘guinea hens’ and put it all off on the police.
]i] :L: Can we say. “Total lack of personal responsibility” rears it’s ugly head? … sure we can, ::: *
You’d do that, and I’d do that, and if he’d done that he’d still be alive. If we want to share out the blame pie I agree he deserves a slice. He grew up in Brazil - maybe he acquired the wrong reflexes.
Having said that, if you identify someone as a suspect suicide bomber and put them under surveillance by armed police, you are putting them in the cross hairs, quite literally. It’s not asking too much for decent background checks to be carried out.
How much digging would have been required to eliminate this guy as a suspect? An hour on the telephone? Local council records and/or utility companies gets you his name, and possibly his bank details and/or credit card details. Phone records show a bunch of calls to and from Brazil, and a bit more work shows he’s been phoning his family there. Brazil isn’t exactly a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.
We don’t know the timing of course, and it’s entirely possible that a lot of bad luck got together at once on this guy, but we do need to investigate the chain of events that led to this and see if it could have been avoided.
On another matter, you seem to have some kind of problem with certain British stereotypes. Your points might be more effective if you cut back on the sneering. Tends to piss people off even when you’re right.
You have no fucking idea what your fight or flight reflex will make you do without conscious decision making coming into action in the situation that guy was in.
Is it possible that there isn’t a right answer to this? Why does it have to be the police were wrong or the police were right?
I’m pretty firmly convinced that in any society with a large number of people, and threats like the ones we face today, some innocent people will be sacrificed in a good faith attempt to save a larger number of people. It doesn’t mean you don’t investigate it to ensure it really was a good faith attempt, or that it was well reasoned. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a tragedy. But it also doesn’t mean that in the grand scheme, it won’t happen by almost the necessity of large numbers.
It’s almost as if the purported response from some is because he was found to have not had a bomb, the action was unjustified. I think that is clearly erroneous logic.
No - the erroneous logic is to think armed police who don’t identify themselves as such can shoot a pinned down man at point blank range who had done nothing wrong beyond living in the wrong place fleeing from unidentified gunmen. You know as well as I do that under those circumstances you act on instinct and that instinct is as likely to be ‘run away’.
If they did identify themselves then fine. I absolutely deny the right of armed police to shoot someone without first identifying themselves unless the evidence of a threat is overwhelming. In this case there was no evidence he was a threat and from eye-witness accounts he was pinned down.
Just on practical grounds I’d say it’s good to avoid these deaths. For every innocent muslim killed you can be damn sure a hundred new terrorist recruits would sprout. Look at the huge surge in IRA Volunteers after Bloody Sunday.
Allowing fear and paranoia to drive us to deny our own values just plays into the hands of our enemies.
I think you just restated what I said was problematic reasoning. The fact that it turned out he had done nothing wrong cannot in itself be the answer for whether the police action was wrong. If the guy had pounds of explosives taped to his chest, those cops are heros. If the cops had not shot the guy in the head after pinning him down, and the guy had detonated a bomb killing hundreds, those cops were negligent for not following proper procedure.
This is the crux of the issue, I think. Reasonable people can disagree whether he appeared to be a threat, and the level of that threat. I think some would disagree with your statement regarding, “No evidence he was a threat.”
Yes, much like for every innocent Christian killed, there’s a hundred new terrorist recruits ready to set off bombs in Tehran . . . wait, why doesn’t that happen?
Fuck no, that’s not enough. They didn’t keep him locked in a basement, beat him savagely, and behead him. Come on, with these piss-ant little offenses, we’re never going to be able to live up to our reputation of, “No better than the terrorists.”
I mean, there could at least be a fatwah from the Church of England demanding that all Muslims be removed from the sacred Christian lands of Europe and North America, lest the terrible fires of Jesus rain down and wash them away in the blood of martyrs or something.
You asked why one should expect that the killing of innocent Muslems would result in increased terrorism, and suggested that Christians didn’t engage in extra-legal killings in revenge for the terrorist acts of Muslems. You are wrong. There is revenge violence. No, it’s not by mainstream groups, but the initial terroist acts aren’t by mainstream groups either. If you look at the murder of Kamal Butt and excuse it because it’s not quite as depraved an act as the subway bombings, then you, my friend, are a fucking moron, and a thoroughly depraved individual yourself.
De Menezes was not wearing a “black bomber jacket”, but a denim jacket. It was about 17C and his clothing would not be out of the ordinary*
He did not vault the ticket barrier, as claimed. He used a travelcard to pass through the station in the normal way
His family believe the reason he started running was that he heard a train in the station. Something Londoners do every day
The newspaper also claims that, because of the type of gun they were carrying, some of the so-called “police” were actually members of the SAS. And we all know what mad buggers they are. They definitely have a “shoot to kill” policy.
8 bullets seems like overkill for the SAS to be honest. Those guys are trained for efficient killing.
More and more of the things that were accepted as ‘fact’ in the immediate aftermath of the shooting have now been cast into doubt:
It seems that De Menezes was not wearing the ‘bulky coat’ originally given as cause for suspicion. He may not have vaulted the ticket barrier as first claimed (the witness who reported this has withdrawn the claim and now says the man he saw jumping the ticket barrier was probably one of the cops). We don’t know whether any warning was shouted, but do know that operational guidelines stated that warnings should not be given as that would alert the ‘suicide bomber’.
Starting to sound more and more like the suspicious behaviour consisted of living in the same appartment block as a suspect, being moderately dark skinned and running towards the platform when his train had just pulled in…
beat police are not armed (there are armed police at airports, on protection duty and on call)
‘The Metropolitan Police Service first introduced ‘Armed Response Vehicles’ to the streets of London in 1991.
These vehicles are crewed by uniformed officers who have been selected and trained to stabilise and control armed incidents, stop and search suspects, their vehicles and to search premises for armed suspects.
These officers are the first ‘Armed officers’ to arrive on the scene and in serious cases can call for the support of specialist firearms teams.’
‘Under Operation Kratos a senior officer is on standby 24 hours a day to authorise the deployment of special armed squads, who will track and if needs be, shoot dead suspected suicide bombers.’
there will be an independent inquiry into the use of lethal force
‘The IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) has taken over the investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell on Friday 22 July.’
It is certainly regrettable if an innocent civilian has been killed by the police. However it is clear to me that there is a serious attempt to balance civil liberties against dealing with terrorists who give no warning before bombing civilians.
