Whitewashing the police

Posted by Andrew Adams on September 25, 2008
Filed Under Crime, Politics, Society |

In my previous post I highlighted the damning contradiction in the account of the police’s actions given by the coroner in his opening statement to the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Now I don’t claim that Nick Cohen (or anyone else for that matter) reads Mutantblog but he certainly has no time for the kind of sentiments I expressed and is keen to turn the spotlight from the police onto those who condemn their actions. (Thanks to Aaronovitch Watch). The arguments he makes are essentially a rehash of those which have consistently been made over the last three years by those who defend the police, and we will no doubt hear them again during the course of the inquest, so it is worth addressing them.

Firstly, we have this hoary old cliché -

I don’t want to defend the Met’s mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later. If they didn’t, and a terrorist detonated a bomb on the Tube, they would be denounced by the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes.

Now I would actually agree that if the police are in a situation where they have a reasonable belief that a would be suicide bomber is about to detonate a bomb then they may have no alternative but to use lethal force. The problem here though is that there were absolutely no reasonable grounds for them to believe this. De Menezes was followed all the way from his house to the tube station and at no time was he positively identified as the suspected suicide bomber, nor is there any evidence that his behaviour was in any way suspicious or that there was anything about his appearance which suggested he may be concealing a bomb. I might find it credible that the firearms officers who actually pulled the trigger may have been so badly briefed by those in charge of the operation that they did believe they were dealing with an actual suicide bomber but that doesn’t absolve the Met as a whole from responsibility, it just moves it further up the command chain.

Secondly, there is the argument that by scruitinising the actions of the police we are somehow deflecting responsibility from the terrorists.

They found it much easier to concentrate on the faults of the Met which, after all, can be held to account by politicians, judges, coroners and journalists than confront the uncontrollable psychosis of religious fascism.

David Aaronovitch goes even further -

the man who really caused the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was not the policeman who put the bullets in the poor Brazilian’s head but an Ethiopian called Hussein Osman.

But surely the police’s actions should be judged on their own merits and to do so does not in any way mean that we are excusing or mitigating the actions of the terrorists. One can condemn the actions of the police and be fundamentally opposed to the terrorists, and that does not suggest any moral equivalance between them. There are at least two reasons I can see why people are tending to dwell on the actions of the police rather than the terrorists. Firstly, most of us feel it goes without saying that actions of the terrorists were evil - no-one is pretending otherwise. At the time of the 7/7 bombings my wife was working at Edgware Road and could easily have been on the tube train which was blown up there so I certainly don’t need convincing. I think it’s mainly though the sense of lingering injustice - that those responsible have not properly faced the consequences of their actions and they should be made to do so.
Of course the terrorists were responsible for the circumstances in which the police were operating but precisely because of those circumstances they had a dedicated team of highly trained and specialised officers both on the ground and in the control room and because the threat of terrorism was real we should surely expect them to act in a highly professional manner. That doesn’t mean they can ever be infalible - of course mistakes will sometimes be made, but the death of JCDM wasn’t due to a mistake, it was due to gross incompetence at every single level.

Finally, there is this…

When the police kill an innocent man in a dictatorship, no one dares protest…We don’t always realise it but we are lucky to live in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously.

There are two problems with this argument. Firstly, to what extent is it actually true in practice? No one involved in the De Menezes case has been prosecuted or lost their job, in fact the officer in charge has since been promoted. In cases of police killing totally innocent people in the past (Harry Stanley and Stephen Waldorf spring to mind but there have been numerous others) not one officer has ever been prosecuted.
The main point though is the reason that we supposedly take seriously abuses of power by those who are charged to protect us is that we recognise such abuses to be wrong and dangerous, and however much we may congratulate ourselves on having robust procedures to deal with them it in no way mitigates the abuses themselves. It defies logic and reason to simultanteously proclaim the fact that we hold officers of the law to account for their misdeeds and complain that people are trying to do exactly that.

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