Now the riots following the shooting of Mark Duggan down London way are long-over, I’ve been thinking about the impunity of the police who murdered him. I could accept that in the heat of the moment an armed police officer might get a bit twitchy and accidentally shoot someone, I could even admit the possibility that the independent eye witness who saw the police force Duggan to the floor and only then shoot him repeatedly in the head were wrong, fine.
I could, that is, if it weren’t a regular thing. If it was a one of, even an armed police officer could perhaps be forgiven for shooting someone wrongfully, after an appropriate jail term. The trouble is that it happens on a regular basis, and that the police engage in what seems to be a conscious effort to enact a cover-up and obscure the damning fact of their guilt.
For example, the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, killed at Stockwell station after the alleged attempted suicide bombings the previous day in 2005. Given the context I could see a copper getting a bit trigger happy. Perhaps that interpretation would be stronger if he hadn’t been held on the ground and had eight bullets pumped into him, but even so.
The most alarming thing is what happened thereafter. The police announced, through the head of the force himself, that “Speedy” de Menezes had run away from officers and disobeyed an order to stop. This was a lie. More intriguingly, someone claiming to be an eyewitness was broadcast on a phone-in show claiming he was wearing a big padded jacket with wires coming out of it. Reports that he was carrying a black ball with “BOMB” written on it and a burning fuse remained unconfirmed. This “eyewitness” was also lying, preempting the police statements on the same issue, as if to lend the police credibility. The CCTV is freely available on youtube (although the police intitially claimed the CCTV was malfunctioning) and shows him wearing no padded jacket, and even the official story no longer involves him running, disobeying orders, wearing suspicious clothing or doing anything else suspicious at all. He was simply catching a train, having been followed from home by two armed surveillance officers who were never outside a radius of a few yards centred on his position. Then a gang of armed government thugs stormed into the station, vaulted the turnstiles, grabbed and restrained an innocent man and blew his brains out.
An inquest jury was ordered not to find that he was unlawfully killed, the Met was eventually fined on the grounds that repeatedly shooting an innocent man in the head is a violation of Health and Safety Executive guidelines. Of course, lone before then the damage was done with the immediate aftermath of the killing being full of government and police lies about the circumstances.
The man in direct command of all the above was, of course, Andy Hayman, now employed by Times Newspapers and known to have been taking money from Murdoch’s rags for quite some time, but somehow he still escapes the lengthy prison sentence he so deserves.
Mohammad Abdul Kahar was lucky enough to survive his brush with the fuzz. His house was raided because the police had supposedly received a tip-off. He was shot in the shoulder. “Accidentally”. Stories were immediately circulated by the police that the poor lad had tried to grab the policeman’s gun, which was a lie, which had caused it to go off. Eventually he had to be released just because he was totally innocent. The police made a half-arsed apology and, on the very same day, arrested him again on the ground that his computer was full of child porn. So he was on the front page of the national newspapers accused of being a paedophile terrorist. He wasn’t, it was all lies.
The case came before a court and was immediately dropped due to lack of evidence, in that there was no evidence at all. The next day’s headlines were not “Paedophile terrorist cleared of all charges”, nor “Senior police arrested over wrongful arrest, libel, shooting innocent man”. Most papers didn’t even notice his being cleared.
Now the police may, I suppose, have had “no choice”, as the then-Commissioner claimed, but to launch the raid and act on information received. Even the itchy trigger finger might really have been an accident, although messing about with guns in such a way that you end up nearly killing someone is stil something that ought to land you in jail, but the rest wasn’t. It wasn’t an accident to blame the victim for being shot by telling lies about him going for the rozzer’s gun. It wasn’t an accident to tell the papers that he had a huge cache of industrial-strength child pr0n, arrest him for it and only drop the case when it came before the court.
I could list a lot more police murders, men shot in the back for having a chair leg in a bag, men shot in their beds because the police went into the wrong house, all summary executions with no warning and for no legal reason and with absolute impunity for the uniformed assassin. But those weren’t normally high-profile enough to accrue a cloud of lies from the police spokesmen.
That’s the really disturbing thing about it, after all, the fact that they spread these lies, and that they do it quickly enough an in such an organised fashion that it’s obviously an instutitionalised thing. Perverting the course of justice, we used to call it in my day.
Of course it happens in cases where no-one gets shot, too.
There’s Mohammad Hamid, who was convicted of terrorist offences and given an indefinite sentence so that he can’t be released until, as the judge put it, he changes his beliefs. The evidence against him was that he had been camping, allegedly terrorist training, and that on another occasion he’d going paintballing, which was also characterised as training for the jihad, even though it was paid for by the BBC as part of a documentary called “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”. He also allegedly said, according to a police bug, that the deaths in the 77 bombings were “not even breakfast for me in this country”, which was enough to potentially cost him life in prison. Or there was Khalid Khaliq, who was in possession of “terrorist material”, according to the police, which turned out to have been published by the American government.
Obviously Met corruption has been in the news lately because of the Murdoch scandal, revealing that they take bribes, breach the Data Protection Act, murder the odd trouble maker, and so on. But they’ve appointed a new man to run the place, Sir Paul, who defrauded money from the tax payer during his relocation from Ulster a few years back. A new broom sweeping clean.
A few small steps toward remediation:
The Met should be broken up into smaller forces, all the staff above the level of district commander should be laid off, being some of the most disgraced, overpaid and useless of all so-called public servants. The number of guns in police hands should be drastically reduced. Any policeman caught lying should be immediately and lengthily imprisoned. An entirely new force should be formed from the handful of honest police it may be possible to find, tasked specifically with putting as many police behind bars as possible.