[Johnny Brown]

Problem is in this situation the rozzers may well have been following the rules and protocol to the letter and still cap an innocent G

If that is true, the protocol is wrong. No question.

[dave]

No question.

You'd have said it'd be right if they had not shot the guy, but what happens if tomorrow they don't shoot a guy in the same circumstances and that guy sets a bomb off and 500 people die, is it right then? Its six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Its all very well with the benefit of hindsight saying whats right and wrong, thats of no use to people faced with those decisions when the shit hits the fan. If the enquiry decides that this was unlawful then yes it was wrong, but we can't say that right here and now, we don't have any of the facts. and we all know factximportance=news.

[Yossarian]

er, surely news = (fact + conjecture + (whatever journalist can get away with/times he's fucked up in the past)) x importance

[Johnny Brown]

Its all very well with the benefit of hindsight saying you was right and I was wrong...

The guy was innocent. They shot him. They were wrong.

but what happens if tomorrow they don't shoot a guy in the same circumstances and that guy sets a bomb off and 500 people die

If he has a bomb, its hardly the same circumstances, is it?

[dave]

sounds like you'd better offer your services to the Met as a marksman then JB, what with your time machine, crystal ball and magic hindsight binos I'm sure you'll be a valuable addition to the force. You can drive to work everyday in your modified delorian.

[Johnny Brown]

You really need to watch soem of the SAS documentaries about the iranian embasy seige adn shit liek that, it will really fill you in on the realities of terrorist flavaz.

(sic)

Perhaps you could lend me your videos first Dave, obviously they are the best source of info on this. In return you can borrow my dictionary, and check what 'hindsight' means.

[a dense loner]

i have got the wild geese if you want to borrow that, pure class

[Yossarian]

i think we all know that the only reliable source of accurate counter-terrorist strategy and methodology is ultimate force...

[Fingers of a Martyr]

sounds like you'd better offer your services to the Met as a marksman then JB, what with your time machine, crystal ball and magic hindsight binos I'm sure you'll be a valuable addition to the force. You can drive to work everyday in your modified delorian.

 

If that is true, the protocol is wrong. No question.

If the officer who shot him was following protocol it doesn't mean the protocol is wrong. FFS the guy is running towards a train away from a load of police men who are screaming 'stop' at him. Put yourself in the cop who shot him's position. You see an 'olive-skinned' (to quote John Straw) guy running towards a train full of people, running away from a load of cops shouting stop. This is happening within hours of several attempted terrorists attacks in London. What the fuck would you?  :roll:

If he has a bomb, its hardly the same circumstances, is it?

The point is, at the time, no one knew whether he had a bomb or not. In the policeman who shot him's mind he probably did have a bomb and was gonna try and blow up a fucking train and kills loadsa people.

[Johnny Brown]

British police don't carry guns or operate a shoot-to-kill policy for good reason - they make big mistakes that they can't undo. In inner-city london most 'olive-skinned' youths would automatically run from a copper, and with good reason. Life long attitudes don't switch just because of events elsewhere, as a brazilian you can hardly expect him to presume they  think he's a terrorist.
The bottom line is they made a big mistake. You can defend them if you want, but you're defending a mistake.

[Fingers of a Martyr]

British police don't carry guns or operate a shoot-to-kill policy for good reason - they make big mistakes that they can't undo.

I'd say attempting to stop terrorists IS a good reason. These aren't exactly the type of people who you can offer tea and crumpets and have a nice chat explaining what they are doing is 'wrong'. :roll:

In inner-city london most 'olive-skinned' youths would automatically run from a copper, and with good reason.

Sorry, i forgot the police are all racist neo nazi cunts. :roll:

Life long attitudes don't switch just because of events elsewhere, as a brazilian you can hardly expect him to presume they think he's a terrorist.

Ah right, so he had a flashing neon sign floating above his head saying 'I'm Brazilian - Not a Terrorist'. He was the same colour as the muslim terrorists. And I'm sorry but running from armed police isn't a terribly clever thing to do.

The bottom line is they made a big mistake. You can defend them if you want, but you're defending a mistake.

Of course it was a fucking mistake. But it was a mistake made with the best of intentions i.e saving a lot of people's lives.

[Sloper]

Fingers, Listen to JB here, he's talking 100% sense.

This is a agrade A 100% fuck up.

Take it from me (and I doubt there's anyone who posts on here who's better placed to comment) the action from the information in the public domain cannot be justified.

I'm not anti-police, I've worked with them, climbed with them and had the odd drink with them, but to suggest that they thought they were doing the right thing which makes it OK is simply shite of the first water.

[Bubba]

It was a big fuck up - how you could mistake a Brazilian for an Asian is beyond me for a start....but perhaps to the met "they all look the same"?

Of course we don't have access to all the facts but it strikes me that there was a major intelligence screw-up for this guy to even become a suspect in the first place.

It's easy for us to say "he shouldn't have run" but the guy was out of visa and probably thought that was what he was running from -  many of us in his place would probably have done the same thing.

On the other hand, I can imagine how things can very quickly get out of hand in the heat of the moment and yeah, the officer concerned probably *did* think he was downing a terrorist at the time.

A shoot to kill policy may well save lives of innocent commuters somewhere down the line, but as long as it's place I doubt Jean Charles de Menezes will be the only person who dies unnecessarily.

Maybe using non-lethal weapons like they did in the recent Birmingham arrest is a better idea?

[dave]

It was a big fuck up - how you could mistake a Brazilian for an Asian is beyond me for a start

Even if he was wearing a pele shirt, shaking maraccas to the samba and with his pubes shaved into a thin strip that wouldn't stop him being a terrorist. To say that the terrists are going to be asian is a gross oversimplification of the situation. extremist muslims could be of any ethnicity. on of the july7th bombers was jamaican. there are pleanty of african, arab and eastern european muslins around, and pleanty of write middle class british muslim converts anall. as terrorist could be from any background. this whole thing of saying "he's obviosuly not a terrorist if he's brazillian" is as bad as saying something like "all the terrorists are pakis" (I'm sure thats not what you mean though bubba!!). islam has nothing intrinsic to do with race.

[Bubba]

I don't mean that - the early news reports of this incident were saying things like "a young man of Asian appearance...." etc, etc.

[tommytwotone]

Fingers, small point of pendantry:

"You see an 'olive-skinned' (to quote John Straw)..."

assume you mean Jack Straw, Home Secretary?

For what it's worth, I agree with the view that this has been a cock up of fairly major proportions.

As for whether the police were justified, think that there are too many unanswered questions (that will doubtless stay unanswered) in this case.

Firstly, if he was being trailed from his home, how come the undercover surveillance allowed him to get on a bus before he'd even got to the underground?

Secondly, the "they were shouting stop at him" argument doesn't really cut much ice with me, mainly because if that's the protocol the old bill were following I would have thought that they would be making more noise about it to underline there wasn't any doubt.

On the contrary, there's been very little said about the facts of what happened, aside from eye-witness testimony, plus the information about 8 holes being put into the guy rather than the 5 originally thought.

So secondly, precisely what warnings were being given to the suspect?

And while we're there, how did the undercover, plain clothes cops identify themselves prior to shooting?

If a group of 4, 5 casually dressed guys were following you, and then pulled out their guns, wouldn't your reaction be to run?

Finally, I'm interested in the fact that the guy was put under suspiscion as they'd found his flat's address on some papers in the unexploded rucksack. Given that I still get post for the previous 3 or 4 residents of my rented flat, hope none of them are up to anything dodgy...

[dave]

word - i think one of the things we can take away from these bombing is that early news reports generally turn out to be well wide of the mark - i bet most of them are just chinese whispers by friends of BBC employees. you know like an eye witness says the fella was a bit tanned, the next person say he said he was olive skinned, the next man says it was an asian/arab or whatever.

[Bubba]

Firstly, if he was being trailed from his home, how come the undercover surveillance allowed him to get on a bus before he'd even got to the underground?

Good point, especially considering that it was his appearance and not his actions that aroused suspicion.

According to police, their suspicions were aroused because Mr De Menezes was wearing a bulky jacket, thought to be too heavy for the time of year.

[Bubba]

i bet most of them are just chinese whispers by friends of BBC employees. you know like an eye witness says the fella was a bit tanned, the next person say he said he was olive skinned, the next man says it was an asian/arab or whatever.

True - breaking news reports are often full of crap that is later nullified. According to early news, the explosions were due to a "power surge" :roll:

[Fingers of a Martyr]

Fingers, small point of pendantry:

"You see an 'olive-skinned' (to quote John Straw)..."

assume you mean Jack Straw, Home Secretary?

bollox, lol, no i meant john snow of C4 news.  

It was a big fuck up - how you could mistake a Brazilian for an Asian is beyond me for a start....but perhaps to the met "they all look the same"?

 :roll:

[Bubba]

Why the rolling eyes - you trying to say the Met aren't racist? I thought that had been established years ago.

[Johnny Brown]

From the start, the whole thing has smacked of trigger-happy coppers getting carried away... I can understand their motivation but not their actions. Look at it objectively, and the guy was acting very normally - wearing a big jacket, catching a bus, then the tube, running from some guys who were following him... meanwhile each of these actions was convincing the coppers of his guilt.
Seven bullets to the head is not the actions of a team operating in a cool, collected manner, its collective panic. Had this not happened, would the guy  captured this morning been shot instead of taken alive with a stun-gun?

[tommytwotone]

steady on the conjecture there JB - I know what it looks like but talking about "coppers getting carried away" ain't helping the matter.

From what I've heard from speaking to friends down in London, attending a service of rememberance and reading the tributes in Russell Square gardens Friday before lasy the majority of people were proud of and fully respect the way the emergency services, police included, responded to the immediate needs of the public on both 7/7 and 21/7.

This guy ended up dead for one of two reasons:

Either someone further up the food chain authorised deadly force (a so called "gold command"), or not, as reported in the Guardian:

"Shooting to kill needs no warning"

If someone higher up than the officers who fired the shots authorised the hit, they need to speak up and take responsibility. If not (and this seems implicit from the information in the public domain), it would seem that the Guardian's story holds water.

The fact is, that the "shoot to kill" protocol is pretty shadowy at the moment, apparently due to "operational reasons".

At the end of the day, I guess that's the beauty of this counter-terrorism stuff to a government / police force / other body - the ability to exercise maximum control with minimum transparency.

[Rico]

It would be interesting to see whether so many people would believe this to be acceptable behaviour if the Brazilian police had gunned down a British tourorrist.

I'm sure the media reaction would be entirely reasonable.

Unlike this hysterical overreaction:-

"Here in Brazil it's common for the police to act violently, especially against poor and black people," says Maria Luisa Mendonca of the Network for Justice and Human Rights in Sao Paulo.
 
"For us the police in England were always a model," she adds. "Human rights groups always studied how officers acted there. But not any more, after this situation."

[Fingers of a Martyr]

It would be interesting to see whether so many people would believe this to be acceptable behaviour if the Brazilian police had gunned down a British tourorrist.

I'm sure the media reaction would be entirely reasonable.

Unlike this hysterical overreaction:-

"Here in Brazil it's common for the police to act violently, especially against poor and black people," says Maria Luisa Mendonca of the Network for Justice and Human Rights in Sao Paulo.
 
"For us the police in England were always a model," she adds. "Human rights groups always studied how officers acted there. But not any more, after this situation."