For those saying “he’s not even brown” - note that on the day of the shooting, a lot of eyewitnesses were describing an ‘Asian-looking man’ etc. Seems that they were inadvertently profiling, and it’s plausible the police did exactly the same. They were waiting for an Asian man to emerge from a particular doorway, and took this to be him (he actually lived in the flat above the one under surveillance)
although, as pointed out above, and easily determined from the picture; menezes is not brown. but the earliest reports of this incident - coming from the police, described him as dark-skinned, then asian; possibly one of the bombers, then an associate of… but then britain’s elite anti-terrorist marksmen can’t tell the difference between a table leg and a shotgun, either.
and i guess it would be hypocritical to maintain that the u.sians “shoot first & ask questions later” policy will lead to “disatrous consequences” any longer.
That’s okay. Here in the U.S.A. , New York City police officers don’t have to worry about being prosecuted at all for firing 41 bullets into a man who had the temerity to weild a loaded wallet at them. ( 19 bullets struck his body, including shots fired after he was prone on the floor. )
These bold heroes took the time to re-load their weapons. You know. To make sure they did the job right. And stuff. So, don’t feel too badly that British cops cannot tell a table leg from a shotgun. Over here, apparently wallets look just like loaded guns.
Who knew? :rolleyes:
As someone who A)rides the NYC Subways sometimes and B) has been known to actually make the dangerous terrorist gesture of wearing a bulky winter coat in the…um…wintertime- WHILE CARRYING A LARGE SHOULDER BAG- I suspect my life will be in danger from here on out. Perhaps I need to find a 100% clear Vinyl bag capable of carrying the roughly 20 lbs of stuff I currently have in my favorite shoulder bag. That way, I run the risk of actually being alive when I reach my station.
God help us all.
Cartooniverse
No GusNSpot, that is NOT an alternate ending to this tragedy. The alternate ending is that the police let him go and… nothing, no bomb, no deaths, nothing, because he was NOT a terrorist.
You can bet that if some guys in plainclothes started chasing me, I’d run. If they pulled out guns, I’d run faster.
Yeah, that’s exactly what we were getting at. Good job on figuring that out. Must be nice to have reading comprehension that is so high, you can read what isn’t even there.
How about they not shoot the brains out of a person that they have just tackled for starters. They could simply hold his arms and check him for a bomb before they shoot him. Does that sound about right?
All the subject needs to to to trigger a bomb is to touch two electrical wires together, possibly taped to his thumb and pinkie, possibly to his big toe and the inside top of an oversized shoe. Holding his hands will only mean you are close to the blast. Skydiving photographers use thumb switches to activate helmet mounted cameras in freefall, with the control cable running inside their jumpsuite sleeve.
If the subject is running towards a likely target, (train or crowd) not just away (down an alleyway), if he is coming from a building under surveillance already known to house likely bombers, if he is wearing clothing that is not only highly unseasonal, but also capable of hiding an explosive belt, (not a muscle shirt and thong in December), and finally if he refuses to obey orders to stop from visibly armed police officers, then the only way to be sure that he will not detonate explosives is to destroy his brainstem by shooting him several times in the lower middle of the head. Period. That’s a lot of ifs before the first shot is fired. This wasn’t a random thing.
Has anyone here stopped for a moment and considered how much courage it took for this officer to go chase what he was reasonably certain was a fanatic willing to die carrying an explosive device, and hope somehow that he could take him out before the bomb going off? This is not some bored good old boy getting his jollies bustin’ caps at a [insert racial epthet here]. This is a man running down a tunnel thinking that there is a high probability that he will be killed, and willing to risk that, to save a bunch of strangers, some of whom will likely call him a jackbooted racist facist thug afterwards, not say thank you.
That officer has cojones of steel, and I salute him. His deed was, and still is, heroic.
That the dead man was innocent is a terrible tragedy, caused by a series of multiple compounding unfortunate coincidences, and some poor choices on his part. Just as though he had died in a traffic accident.
agch, sorry for all the typos above. I should know better than use Quick Reply after 11 pm.
No, that the man was innocent is unforgivable. What it means is that the police need to ensure they act on better information. If a building has more than one flat, they should know this, and they should know the appearance and background of any other tenants living in that building.
It is true, it was an accident. But there needs, absolutely MUST be, a change in procedure to ensure that it never happens again.
To me this illustrates the difficulty of plainclothes police making arrests. Somehow there needs to be a method of insuring that the person being confronted and chases knows that it is the police who are after him.
We don’t know the details, and might never know them, but the investigation should bring them out. Unfortunately, the dead guy can’t testify as to what he thought. Whether or not he knew who was chasing him.
I have trouble believing that an ordinary electrician would have run away had he know who was after him.
I have some trouble believing an ordinary electrician would have run had he not known who was chasing him. After all, he knew he was in a public place in London and not on the backstreets of Sao Paolo.
[Lee Ruston, 32, who was on the platform, said that he did not hear any of the three shout “police” or anything like it. Mr Ruston, a construction company director, said that he saw two of the officers put on their blue baseball caps marked “police” but that the frightened electrician could not have seen that happen because he had his back to the officers and was running with his head down.
Mr Ruston remembers one of the Scotland Yard team screaming into a radio as they were running. Mr Ruston thought the man that they were chasing “looked Asian” as he tumbled on to a waiting Northern Line train.
Less than a minute later Mr Menezes was pinned to the floor of the carriage by two men while a third officer fired five shots into the base of his skull.
Again, Mr Ruston says that no verbal warning was given.](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707480,00.html)
When is the last time you heard of criminals chasing someone in public (this means “witnesses”) brandishing weapons?
One thing still bothers me: what exactly constitutes a winter coat in London? A heavy jean jacket? a puffy leather 8 ball coat?
Well, that’s entirely possible. There really isn’t much to go on for a debate. We really don’t know what happened.
When would you figure that the people following you with guns drawn were automatically police? He may have just thought that with two terrorist bombings and him looking asian that he was going to be a hate crime statistic. Maybe he thought that they were terrorists and this was going to turn into a hostage crisis. Maybe he thought he was going to get shot and was scared so he decided to run.
I’m really not seeing how this can be the victims fault. Three guys in regular clothes follow you to the subway station, draw weapons, and start chasing you. I think panic is a pretty reasonable reaction.
One article I read says Jean Charles de Menenez was recently mugged…
He was illegal, which is why he ran. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4713753.stm.
The BBC have reported that at the dead man’s inquest it was revealed that he was shot eight times, including seven to the head. His family have also denied that his work permit had expired. They said that he had just returned from a trip to Brazil and the UK immigration authorities had allowed him back into the country.
There is also this quote from the BBC:- Over the past year there have been an increased number of immigration checks at Tube stations - a policy widely reported in Brazilian papers in London. So that could be an explanation for why he tried to flee from the police.