Jean Charles de Menezes – Wis[s]e Words

Jean Charles de Menezes 7 January 1978 – 22 July 2005

Published on July 22, 2015Leave a comment

At 09:30 on Friday morning, a Brazilian-born man called Jean Charles de Menezes left a house that police had identified as the home of a possible suspect. He was an electrician, on his way to a job in Kilburn. But the police, anxious to prevent another Tube attack, jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Ten years ago, less than a month after the 7/7 Bombings, the Metropolitian Police tracked and murdered Jean Charles de Menezes under the impression he was one of the people responsible for the botched attack the day before. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for it, though we did get that disgusting health & safety prosecution against the Met itself.

His family is currently in the UK to take part in remembrance ceremonies for him, but also to plead their case for The European Court of Human Rights:

Lawyers for the family argue that the assessment used by prosecutors in deciding that no individual should be charged over the 2005 shooting is incompatible with article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which covers the right to life.

They claim the evidential test applied by the Crown Prosecution Service – that there should be sufficient evidence for a “realistic prospect” of conviction – is too high a threshold. It means that, in effect, the decision not to bring a prosecution was based on a conclusion that there was less than a 50% chance of conviction, they say.

It remains an outrage that ten years after his murder, there’s still no real justice for Jean, with his murderers and those who unleashed them never having had to feel the consequences of their actions. It also shows why the ECHR is so important, the last hope of all those denied justice in their own country’s courts.

Trains to Brazil

Published on August 29, 2012Leave a comment

Best song the Guillemots ever did; pretty good for a largely annoying hipster band, as it captured the mood of the UK after 7/7 and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. At the time I was working at a small startup where I could listen to 6usic all day and this came up loads of times in late 2005/early 2006. That was also around the time Sandra and I bought our house and before her health problems had gotten the worst of her. In retrospect one of the happier times of our lives and this fits that so well: uplifting melody, bitter sweet lyrics, a simple recipe deftly executed.

The Ian Tomlinson verdict: will it change anything?

Published on May 6, 2011

Probably not, thinks septicisle:

As wearingly familiar as this sad tale of changing stories, incompetence and abuses of power is, the real outrage is that the overall cause remains the same. Just as the officers on the morning of the 22nd of July 2005 were briefed that those they were after were “up for it” and ready to commit acts of mass murder, giving the impression that lethal force was permissible even when it hadn’t been authorised, so the police prior to the G20 had made clear just how determined they were to crack down hard on those who were out to smash up the City. We duly saw police medics brandishing batons, those without the first idea how to “safely” use a truncheon flinging it around, and of course, the storming of the entirely peaceful Climate Camp, since found to have been illegal. Ian Tomlinson died both as he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because he was vulnerable to just such an injury as he received; dozens of others got cracked heads or worse just for daring to take part in a demonstration. It would be nice to think that following such regrettable incidents that future policing would have been rethought, but no, as the example of Alfie Meadows so pungently demonstrates.

I agree. The deaths of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes before him were the result of a deliberate policy to make the Metropolitian Police more ‘ard and confrontational. In de Menezes case it was the whole anti-terrorism mentality that was to blame, wherein any terrorism suspect is incredibly dangerous and needs to be “taken out” or London would disappear in a mushroom cloud; combine that with the fuckups that happened while de Menezes was under suspicion and you get why he was shot in the head in the metro. From that point of view the fact that he was innocent doesn’t matter; what does is that his exxecution send the message that the Met is serious about terrorism.

With Tomlinson’s death a similar sort of attitude is to blame, one that’s perhaps even more pernicious as this time it wasn’t about keeping London safe from terrorism, but about showing who’s boss in the city: the police or the demonstrators. The Met was and is incredibly aggressive in its policing of political demonstrations because it and its political masters want to discourage them; Tomlinson’s death is a side effect of this.

Without a change in attitude, de Menezes and Tomlinson won’t be the last victims of the Metropolitian Police, but the likelyhood of this change is small.

Murderer of Ian Tomlinson to escape justice

Published on July 23, 2010

The Crown Prosecution Service dedices not to bother with charging Ian Tomlinson’s killer:

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said there was “no realistic prospect” of a conviction, because of a conflict between the postmortem examinations carried out after the death of Ian Tomlinson last year.

The newspaper seller died following the demonstrations on 1 April 2009 in central London. The official account that he died from a heart attack was undermined when the Guardian obtained video footage showing a riot officer striking the 47-year-old with a baton and shoving him to the ground shortly before he collapsed and died.

In a written statement the CPS admitted that there was sufficient evidence to bring a charge of assault against the officer, but claimed a host of technical reasons meant he could not be charged.

Tomlinson’s stepson Paul King, flanked by his mother, Julia, said: “It’s been a huge cover-up and they’re incompetent.”

King said: “He [Starmer] has just admitted on TV that a copper assaulted our dad. But he hasn’t done anything. He’s the man in charge … why hasn’t he charged him?

“They knew that if they dragged this out long enough, they would avoid charges. They knew just what they were doing. They’ve pulled us through a hedge backwards – now we have to go on living our lives.”

Is anybody surprised by this? Has there ever been a high profile case of police murder where the subsequent investigation led to a meaningful conviction, rather than at best a slap on the wrist? Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Harry Stanley, going all the way back to Blair Peach or Liddle Towers, ther have always been reasons why a prosecution could not happen or an officer was “punished enough” already. Who watches the watchmen is not just the tagline to that Alan Moore comic but also the single most important question we can ask about the police and justice system. Can we trust the police not to kill is for no reason? Can we trust them not to cover up if own of their own does kill us? Can we trust the justice system to investigate and prosecute, never mind convict a police officer when the worst does happen? So far, the answer to all these questions is no…

Insult to injury

Published on May 26, 2009

Police officer who altered evidence in the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes has been cleared of “deliberate deception”:

The Special Branch officer deleted text from his computer note before speaking to the inquest in October last year.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said he was not guilty of “deliberate deception”.

Mr de Menezes, 27, was shot dead by police at Stockwell Tube station in south London in July 2005.

The IPCC said the officer, known as “Owen”, had acted naively, but found no evidence of deliberate deception.

Last October, the officer told the inquest he deleted a line from computer notes which quoted Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick.

The note had originally claimed Dick had initially said the electrician could “run onto Tube as not carrying anything”.

But at the inquest he said: “On reflection, I looked at that and thought ‘I cannot actually say that.'”

The officer, a supervisor in the operations room at Scotland Yard, told the court he had removed the line because he believed it was “wrong and gave a totally false impression.”

The IPCC found Owen “acted alone” in failing to disclose the note and then deleting it.

Its report concluded the officer had shown a “lack of understanding” of how he should behave, but had not committed an offence.

Unbelievable, but not surprising. The socalled “Independent” Police Complaints Commission has shown time and again in the de Menezes case to be toothless or unwilling to actually prosecute the police. The IPCC is too much a part of the police establishment to do its job, either unwilling or unable to handle these sort of cases. As with parliament we once again see that self regulation does not work.