Policing

Still no justice for Jean

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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It’s been three years since Jean Charles de Menezes was brutally murdered by the Metropolitian Police and still nobody has been punished for it. Commissioner “sir” Ian Blair is still in power, Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the operation that murdered de Menezes was actually promoted and we still don’t know the names of the police agents that actually shot him. Sure, the Metropolitian Police as a whole was found guilty of his murder last year and had to pay some insultingly low fine for it, but as I noted then we still didn’t know the exact details of what lead to Jean’s murder. One year on, and a new report says we still don’t know:

It finds officers involved are yet to be fully debriefed about the events and says legal constraints, due to the inquest to be held in September, may be partly to blame. But it lambasts senior officers it interviewed for accepting the lack of a full explanation from those under their command.

“We were presented with a paradox during our evidence sessions: on the one hand a recognition that undertaking a comprehensive debrief is important and that lessons need to be learnt, and on the other hand a complacent acceptance that, in this case, it has not happened and is unlikely to in the future.

“The scrutiny panel also wishes to emphasise that it is our perception that the MPS has a cultural predisposition to adopt an overly defensive stance when asked to explain how it is responding to criticism and challenge. It is our view that the MPS needs to counter this tendency energetically.”

After the shooting, firearms officers wrote their accounts together, and presented their notes 36 hours after the shooting. The IPCC contrasted this with civilian witnesses who gave their accounts straight away and without consulting other witnesses. The MPA says officers did nothing wrong, but: “The practice of conferring … is open to misinterpretation.”

Thirtysix hours to get their statements straight? That’s not open to misinterpretation, that’s the police protecting its own. It will be interesting to see how that tendency plays out now Ian Blair has been accused of something even the dullest law ‘n order, trust-the-police freak will admit is a crime. It’s telling of the priorities of British politics if “improper financial dealings” were what finally got Blair sacked instead of the murder of an innocent man.

If pigs could fly…

Policing
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Scotland Yard would be London’s biggest airport, as the old joke goes. Here’s some video showing the friendliness of the traditional British Bobby in action — by beating up Brian Haw as well as the protesters he was filming:

See also the story on Prog Gold yesterday. If the name sounds familiar, Brian Haw is the guy whose anti-war protests so stuck in Blair’s craw he pushed through a law forbidding any unlicenced protests near Parliament, only to find that it didn’t apply retro-actively so Haw could stay on his lonely vigil. Later on some “artist” berk copied his protest as an artwork and won forty grand for it, hence the title of the Prog Gold story.

Jean Charles de Menezes roundup

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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I’ve wanted to say something about the Metropolitian Police finally being held responsible for their murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, but I think Palau said everything I wanted to say on Friday about the Met’s continuing refusal to accept this responsibility:

But if there has been a defining leitmotif of the Labour years it’s been this, this constant, mulish refusal to take responsibility for incompetence and error, this wilful blindness to one’s own fault and this utter certainty, despite all the evidence to the contrary, of one’s own rectitude.
Anything to justify hanging on to power for power’s sake.

To much of the public it’s simple. Blair is responsible for the safety of the public. He didn’t do that, he did the opposite. He should go. Like his namesake the forner prime minister, Blair argues he’s not guilty of any personal wringdoing therefore he’s squeaky-clean and should stay in the job.

Anyone who gets up in the morning in a crowded city and gets on a metro or a tram or a tube system will have seen that CCTV footage of Jean Charles de Menezes’ extra-judicial murder and will have seen themselves in that blurry video, on the floor, scared out of their wits, about to
have their brains very deliberately blown out on the carriage floor.

But Londoners have real cause to fear; their police chief thinks that the deliberate murder of an innocent man by his subordinates is not a serious matter enough to resign over. ‘Mistakes happen’.

Palau hints that the reason various government officials and Nwe Labourites, including London mayor Ken Livingstone have rallied around Ian Blair may have something to do with the police chief’s habit of taping phone calls, ala J. Edgar Hoover back in the day. Personally, I think
it’s simpler than that. The first instinct of New Labour when confronted by a fuckup has always been to deny responsibility and shift the blame away from theirselves. Mistakes may be made, but they should not have consequences for the people in charge, who always do the best they can in difficult circumstances. Livingstone has long ceased to be a rebel and has fully reintegrated himself into the New Labour project, hence has no problem defending Blair.

Speaking of Livingstone, Jamie K tears apart his defense of Blair:

Of course counterterrorism is hard. The point is that counterterrorism is irreducibly hard. If you make it “easier” by tolerating a permissive attitude towards killing innocent people, then that is what will happen. To reverse Livingstone’s thought experiment: what happens if an armed police
officer in pursuit of someone who he believes might be a terrorist but isn’t quite sure starts making calculations along the lines of “I’m legally immune so I’ll shoot him anyway, just to make sure.”

Alex does away with the idea that “our security” means we cannot criticise the security forces:

More seriously, where do these people get the idea that organisations with safety critical functions work better in the absence of criticism or responsibility? It can’t be from experience; Kettle is a career pundit, having started out as a leader writer. The whole history of safety engineering is the exact opposite; if you’re playing with the big boys’ toys, you cannot afford to skim over your mistakes, ever. There are very good reasons why airlines have senior training captains and CHIRP confidential-reporting forms, companies have external auditors, and newspapers have editors.

Or IT companies have software testers, for that matter.

Alex also has a post up about all the things we still don’t know about the shooting and how the Met seems more interested in smearing de Menezes again than finding out exactly what happened that day. Standard operational procedure it seems with the Met; see also the Forest Gate affair.

Apologise for being tasered!

Policing
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Remembered that Florida student who got tasered for asking John Kerry questions? Remember how many socalled liberal bloggers and commentators thought he got what he deserved and called him insane, immature, an attention seeker? Well, it worked. The guy has written a letter of apology to his school for having the audacity to be tasered:

He said Meyer’s apology was completely self-prompted. He started drafting it immediately after his release from jail Sept. 18.

“In society, as in life, there are consequences for not following the rules,” Meyer wrote. “In this instance, not following the rules has imposed consequences for many people other than myself, people who have seen their school, and perhaps their degree, tarnished in the eyes of others through no fault of their own.”

Griscti said Meyer didn’t plan his outburst, as the UPD report might have suggested.

However, Meyer’s remark to officers in the police car, when he said they “did nothing wrong,” was accurate. Meyer had no animosity toward individual officers, Griscti said.

You see, in America it’s no longer enough to be punished by the state for thinking you have rights, you also need to be sincerily sorry for your crimes and beg for forgiveness. Any resemblence to a certain Asian dictatorship big on self-criticism sessions is of course purely coincidental.

Our Orwellian world

Autoritarianism, Civil liberties, Law in action, Policing, Security theatre, War on Terror
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Item one: a man is jailed for three-and-a-half years for carrying a blueprint of a rocket through Luton Airport:

British man who was found with blueprints for a rocket in his luggage at Luton Airport has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Yassin Nassari, 28, from Ealing, west London, was earlier found guilty at the Old Bailey of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist.

[…]

Sentencing him, Judge Gerald Gordon said: “I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, like a number of young Muslims, you have somehow been indoctrinated into beliefs supporting terrorism by others.

“I have no doubt you wanted to immerse yourself in this fundamentalist trash, but in the material available to me there is nothing to indicate that any actual terrorist use would have been made of it by anyone.”

Nassari’s hard drive contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket – a home-made steel rocket used by terrorist groups in the Middle-East.

So even though there was no evidence that this guy was involved with any terrorist organisation or intended to perform any terrorist acts himself, the mere fact of possessing documents that are a bit dodgy landed him in jail. Really, you don’t need to be an evil terrorist to be interested in the sort of material described in the last quoted paragraph; who hasn’t downloaded The Anarchist Cookbook at one point or another out of curiosity? There are plenty of people interested in weapons, guns, warfare etc. who aren’t terrorists or even terrorist sympathisers; remember Gareth the T.A. nerd from the Office?

Item two: The Metropolitian Police is given real-time access to London’s congestion charge cameras:

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras – allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blamed the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” for the change.

The thing is, a) the only true “vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” was organised by the Keystone Cops branch of Al Queda, b) you cannot tell from the outside if a car is a terrorist car c) if you know enough to know which car to track, you also could’ve gotten permission to do so anyway under the old rules. In his science fiction thriller Whole Wide World Paul J. McAuley predicted that ultimately, all of the UK’s CCTV cameras would be linked up into one giant network, controlled by police computers; this seems like a step in that direction. The Met says this capacity will only be used to fight terrorist activity, but once a capability is there, other uses will be found for it, as the internet itself has shown us.

Item three: The association of Chief Police Officers wants unlimited detention without charge, again for the noble cause of fighting terrorism. And again the question crops up, what is the purpose of locking people up if you don’t have the evidence to charge them, let alone convict them?

Item four: the Dutch police can now keep records of anybody who interacts with them — detainees, suspects, victims, witnesses, literally anybody– for up to five years (Dutch). In the first year, any police officer can look into these records, afterwards it’s only accesible to those who have “a good reason” to do so. But that’s not all, as it’s not just the police who can view these records, but also other parties with a vested interest: social workers, housing societies, even shopowners. All in the name of fighting crime.