An old and noble tradition amongst the Law’nOrder set, where the shooting of a Brazilian electrician on the way to work or IRish looking guy on his way back from the pub carrying a tableleg in his bag is excused on the grounds that their murderers though they were a suicide bomber, or were carrying a sawnoff shotgun and besides, don’t you know how hard their job is? Case in point, little Nicky Cohen’s column in The Evening Standard, as excerpted by Aaronovitch Watch:
In the hubbub a simple point is being lost. 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.
He also mumbles something about how the left was pleased to see De Menezes killed, so they had something to blame the police for, a standard Cohen projection, as witnessed by his own delight at the 7/7 bombings and how that showed up the left. Disgusting as that is, it isn’t new. More interesting is that belief that the police should be allowed to kill people as long as the cops sincerily believe that they’re bad people. Surely that’s just a licence to kill, as the cops can always gin up some story to justify their actions. (Or to smear their victims, as happened to de Menezes, but also to the suspects in the Forest Gate affair.)
Cohen wants to argue that the system works because there’s now an inquest into the de Menezes murder, but as I said earlier, this was explicitely set up not to assign blame, while the Crown Prosecution Services had already decided earlier to not do their job, after being blackmailed with massive police walkouts if they had. Instead there was an absurdistic health and safety prosecution agains the Metroplotian Police as a whole. No real incentive not to murder somebody there: nobody prosecuted, no careers cut short by this mistake, just a court order to one arm of the state to pay a fine to another arm. And Cohen thinks this is evidence that he’s living “in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously”? If so, do I have a bridge to sell him…
Disgusting as it is, Cohen’s bilge does accurately state the gut reflex of a lot of voters, “decenthardworkingfamilies” who like to believe they will never be the victim of police brutality themselves, but think that it is necessary to protect them, even if the occasional unfortunate accident happens. And even then the victims must’ve done something wrong to deserve it…