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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Britons debate a post-9/11 police policy that led to the killing of an innocent man.
Sep 7, 2005 | When London's Metropolitan police force announced that it had fatally shot a suspected suicide bomber at the Stockwell tube station on July 22, 15 days after the terrorist attacks that killed 53 people in the city and one day after four more suicide bombers failed to detonate themselves and escaped without killing anyone, the overwhelming reaction of the city's residents, it's safe to say, was joy and relief. But within 24 hours it became apparent to police commissioner Sir Ian Blair that police had killed an innocent man, 
a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes. Until the shooting of de Menezes, few British citizens were aware that there are now, under a policy instituted in 2001 by the Association of Chief Police Officers and Lord John Stevens, the former police commissioner, hundreds of armed plainclothes policemen on the streets of London who are permitted to shoot dead, without any warning, anyone whom they suspect to be a suicide bomber.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a series of police leaks established the false story that de Menezes had been acting suspiciously, even if he was the victim of mistaken identity. But the disinformation did not come just from police briefings. Civilian eyewitnesses to the shooting told journalists he had been wearing a heavy jacket and had run when challenged, details that now are in question.
Then Blair's predecessor, Stevens, wrote a column in Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, in which he explained -- with what seems extraordinary relish -- that policemen are now trained to shoot suspected suicide bombers repeatedly in the head, following Israeli advice sought after 9/11. Anything less might leave them capable of detonating their devices.
Stevens wrote: "We are living in unique times of unique evil, at war with an enemy of unspeakable brutality, and I have no doubt that now, more than ever, the principle is right despite the chance, tragically, of error ... It would be a huge mistake for anyone to even consider rescinding it."
The traditional principle that Britain's police should be unarmed, and usually are, is one that all parties pay lip service to and most voters seem to support. The total Met force of 31,000 has only about 2,000 officers allowed to carry firearms (with 440 of these further trained as specialists). So the implications of the police policy as described by Stevens took some time to sink in. But the incident has raised questions about the future of British civil liberties, exposing fault lines not simply between left and right, or police and public, but within the police force itself.
The assumption on which the policy rests is that the police's suspicions will always be justified; and at moments of crisis, this is what everyone wants to believe.
The normally scrupulous Daily Telegraph reported that "the officers had become concerned that their target was carrying a bomb not in a rucksack or holdall -- he was carrying neither -- but beneath the bulky, dark jacket he was wearing despite the warm weather ... The man, of Asian appearance and in his 20s, walked into Stockwell Tube station and went to buy a ticket. At about 10am, a senior officer gave the order for his armed men to challenge the suspect.
"Instead of giving himself up, the man panicked, vaulted the ticket barrier and sprinted down the escalator to a platform where a train was already waiting with its carriage doors open. Several armed officers were in pursuit and, according to witnesses, the suspect stumbled as he tried to get into one of the carriages. By the time he half-ran, half-fell onto the train, three officers, at least one of them holding a low-velocity pistol, pounced on him, shooting him five times in the head."
It was not until three weeks later that a leak of documents from the investigation into the killing established that almost every detail of this account was false. De Menezes was not "of Asian appearance" -- nor, incidentally, was the man the police were really hunting, a Somali. The senior officer involved "who gave his men orders" was a woman. De Menezes did not run through the station but paused to pick up a free newspaper, and used his season ticket to pass through the turnstiles normally. He did not run until the train came in. He did not fall over until a police officer grabbed him and held his arms, immobilizing him. At this point another police officer shot him in the head -- not five, but seven times. Some of these details are still contested, but a photograph of his body shows quite clearly what may be the most important fact: He was not wearing a heavy top that might have suggested or concealed a bomb, but a pale-blue denim jacket.
By the time these details emerged the four presumed suicide bombers had all been caught and arrested, without a shot's being fired. No one seriously believes Britain has seen its last bomb, but the next ones won't come for a while. So while the fear is over, for the moment, the leaked documents have produced a furious debate on all aspects of the police's tactics.
Although the debate contains elements of a left-right split, it has more to with a struggle over the soul of the police force and thus of the future of Britain's struggle against terrorism. The right-wing press carried a number of articles suggesting that it was absurd to criticize policemen who shot anyone they thought was a terrorist. The Daily Express, owned by a man who made his fortune in porn, and which has carried, since the bombings, a Union Jack and "Britain defiant" on its masthead, ran the front-page headline: "It Was Just a Tragic Mistake: Why the Police Should NEVER Face Murder Charges Over Shot Brazilian." Murdoch's Sun ran an eloquent column by its star columnist defending "the poor bloody infantry" and asking what would have been said had de Menezes really been a suicide bomber and not been shot.
But the most interesting reaction came from the most influential right-wing paper in the country, the Daily Mail, which has demanded the resignation of commissioner Blair, rather than the policemen who actually shot de Menezes. The Mail hates Blair, whom it considers too liberal and "politically correct." An Oxford graduate who worries about logos and symbolism, Blair has tried to stamp out racism in the police force. The Mail, with a largely suburban readership, is prone to campaigns against London policemen: Its previous target was Brian Paddick, the most senior openly gay policeman in the capital, who was in charge of Brixton when he ordered his force to concentrate on hard drugs, not on cannabis.
