Shooting first, asking question (much) later
Not much to add right now to the de Menezes verdict that hasn’t been already said by Beau, Jamie, Alex and particularly Septicisle.
I’ll just say that there’s something badly wrong when a public investigation into the shooting of a man by police in public has to be orchestrated via the back door of health and safety legislation.
Also, I know I’m naive and not terribly worldly wise on such matters but aren’t organisations and companies human constructs? They’re created and controlled by human beings. Humans perform the input to the organisation, they consume its outputs and are involved in every step of the process in between.
When something goes wrong, say for instance, an innocent man is shot in the head seven times and then smeared variously as a terrorist, drug dealer and rapist, how is it nobody’s fault? How can you blame an organisation as if it suddenly gained sentience and moral agency? When people stand up and say ‘It wasn’t me, it was the organisation’, isn’t that a tacit admission that something is broken, radical changes must be made or that, in the face of logic and common sense, the organisation has broken free of control of its human masters? The latter seems to be the fashionable excuse in an age of personal irresponsibility whether it be to do with train crashes, corporate manslaughter or hired guns like Blackwater.
It seems to me that the de Menezes verdict is being interpreted by some as if New Scotland Yard had risen off its foundations like some kind of crazy Japanese robot, went striding down to Stockwell and robbed a man of his life. Are we talking some kind of cybernetic sick building syndrome here? Or, rather, the simple fact of nobody having the balls to take responsibility for the 19 ‘catastrophic’ errors that killed an innocent man?
Posted on November 2nd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
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Filed under T.W.A.T., The home front |
Someone needs to be held accountable. A fine as a punishment is ridiculous, given that the only people it punishes are the public, and will do nothing to force change.
Blair still taking his bonus?
[...] to comment on yesterday’s verdict, but the excellent Obsolete speaks my mind. Also see Chicken Yoghurt, and this from Beau Bo [...]
I would point out that organisational culture does kill; the aviation industry learnt this the hard way in the 1970s. But still, it doesn’t exempt individuals from responsibility; how can you change the organisation without changing the individuals?
Anyway, I’ve pulled the original post and totally revised it.
It’s always the converging of multiple factors which is to blame, each in itself, e.g. the Tenerife double crash.
We live in an age of good and eeevil, after all. When some Al-Qaida hitsquad knocks off some tourists or demolishes towerblocks in Manhattan, they have to be held morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. But when WE invade Iraq, killed 100s of thousands, trash their nation and strangle their oil industry, US/UK cannot be held responsible because we are acting out of the best intentions, in good faith, if you will.
So when de Menezes is executed in broad daylight, before witnesses, well of course we can`t have police officers held morally responsible for their actions - that would be playing the blame game, and anyway the police were working under extremely stressful conditions, blah blah blah…I heard the execrable Jackie Smith make this wafer-thin excuse on BBC News 24 today and I almost threw my breakfast at the tv. Almost.
New Labour and their underlings are a loathsome crew, so divorced from decent human empathy that they display no remorse, no guilt and no shame.
Why is no-one with power challenging some of the statements the police seem to regard as axiomatic.
Split second decision - 29 minutes is a ’split second’?!
Unprecedented - we never had bombers before? the met admit they got their tactics from the Israelis so they must have dealt with suicide bombers before so how can it be unprecedented.
Acted like a suicide bomber - if it was unprecedented how could he act like somebody when there was no precedent to act like. Was the Brazilian the only one that got back on a bus when Brixton station was closed, if someone is doing a bear-hug on you from behind would only suicide bombers allow their arms to go downwards towards their waist. He was acting nervous like a suicide bomber - like lots of other Londoners who had to use the tube a day after some failed bombings and found stations closed by security alerts.
Then there is ‘where was the bomb’. 7/7 the used rucksacks. 21/7 they used rucksacks but one day later on 22/7 he had a special charge moulded to his body shape?!. He was suspected of being a suicide bomber from the previous day so he expected to be dead already. After the bomb failed to kill him the day before he obviously went home, sourced some completely different type of explosive, a detonator plus a firing mechanism, fabricated it overnight, decided a target, took a crowded bus to it, took a rational decision on a secondary target when the initial one was unavailable and took a crowded bus again to it and then with the whole police farce in London looking for bombers calmly walked past a uniformed police presence in Stockwell tube station (whilst acting nervously) before sitting (whilst wearing a shaped body charge) in a tube carriage. It has taken me less than 29 minutes to write that and I would come to the decision there is more than a hint of reasonable doubt before I sentenced a man to death.
As for cressida (I’m a) dick (head) not issuing the ‘kill’ order, She repeatedly refused to allow the surveillance squads to apprehend him because they were not firearms officers. She then issued a stop him order to be enacted by firearms officers who had been trained to blow a suicide bombers brains out without giving the suicide bomber a chance to detonate the bomb. What did she expect the firearms squad to do, get out their truncheons and handcuffs and try and arrest him?
The police version stretches credibility more than a new labour manifesto.
If I, or another member of the public, had got on a tube that morning and being vigilant (as the police asked) saw a non-fair skinned person wearing a rucksack and standing near people on a tube carriage and come to the (wrong) conclusion that this was a suicide bomber and then attacked him, killed him, the carried on attacking him enough times to kill him 6 times over would I be let off with a fine less than 0.02% of my annual income (about £0.03).
Safely protected in the control room the police were high paid, supposedly well trained and experienced officers and yet they behaved like headless chickens in a blind panic seemingly suspending all rational judgment and executed an innocent man and the result is promotion rather than prison.
They are either liars, murderers or criminally incompetent and a far cry from the brave superheroes putting their lives on the line every minute of the day against impossible odds and unimaginable evil that they like to portray themselves as.
Since a lot of arseholes like Martin Kettle (see Alex’s piece on same) are arguing the saloon-bar case that “this will make it harder to defend ourselves against terrorism”, “what if he had been a suicide bomber” and so on, perhaps it’s worth observing that if you want a situation where the police have a free hand to shoot suspects on the streets, you can in fact have it. It’s called “martial law” and in cases of genuine national emergency it is possible to declare it. If it had been declared then it would have been the responsibility of everybody to stay off the streets and if they had not done so they would have had to face the consequences.
If you do not, however, consider martial law is appropriate then you are of necessity saying that the emergency is not such that extreme measures are required and that the rule of law applies as normal. Therefore there has to be accountability and there cannot be impunity for execution on suspicion.
You really do have to pick one or the other. But either police forces are accountable or they are not. If they are then they cannot have a blank cheque on the grounds of suspicion.