Policing

Join the police. Kill with impunity

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered

That seems to be the message behind the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s decision not to prosecute 11 officers involved in the Menezes murder. Can’t say that this decision comes as a great surprise: from the very first the Metropolitan Police and its political masters did its best to sweep its “mistake” under the carpet, in the process slandering an innocent man. It was clear all along that nothing would ever happen to the people who helped kill Jean Charles de Menezes. Like I said last year, the police in Britain can get away with murder.

Not just the police either. The failure to punish anybody for the murder of Jean Charles, or even to take responsibility for his death, is part of a broader pattern of evasion of duty in Blair’s Britain. Blair’s government has been an unmitigated failure with everything they’ve touched, where they’ve not been criminal: just in the last week there have been the election cockups in Scotland, the revelation that MI5 had the July 7 bombers but let them go and only today there was the story that the government’s latest miracle IT system, the socalled medical training application service was rubbish and going to be scrapped. Yet few if any government ministers have had to face the consequences of such failures. At worst, it seems, they are banished to the shadows for a bit before recycled back into new jobs to fuck up, like Mandelson or Blunkett.

Menezes killers not charged?

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Or so The Sun alleges:

Menezes lying in the carriage after his murder

THE police officers who shot dead innocent suicide bomb suspect Jean Charles de Menezes at a Tube station last year will not face charges, according to a tabloid newspaper.

There is insufficient evidence of criminal offences in the shooting of the 27-year-old Brazilian at Stockwell Station, in south London, on July 22, according to a lawyer reviewing the case for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr De Menezes was shot in the head seven times by officers who mistook him for a suicide bomber in the wake of last July’s London bombings.

The lawyer quoted in The Sun said: “Mistakes were made but they do not amount to criminal misconduct.

“The firearms officers were acting under orders. Those in charge of surveillance believed he was a suspect.

“There is no realistic prospect that they will be prosecuted.”

In other news, it seems that Brian Paddick a Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner is being kicked off the force, for the crime of testifying against Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner:

Friends of Paddick said he had been offered the option of going on “gardening leave” for the next six months. This would last until November, when he has the option of retiring with a full police pension after 30 years’ service.

If agreed, the deal would mean Paddick spending half a year being paid £52,000 — half his estimated £104,000 annual salary — for doing nothing.

The Met has offered Paddick the alternative of taking a posting involving a “less visible position” that would mean him rarely visiting Scotland Yard. Colleagues say Paddick, who was on holiday last week, is now considering his options.

[…]

Earlier this year Paddick gave investigators from the Independent Police Complaints Commission a signed statement that appeared to contradict Blair’s account of the aftermath of the shooting.

Paddick testified that Moir Stewart, a key member of Blair’s private office, had been told just six hours after the shooting that police might have killed an innocent man.

Blair has maintained that the first he and his advisers knew of the error was 24 hours after the shooting.

It seems the coverup is in full effect. And it seems nobody is paying attention anymore, as I haven’t seen either story mention on the usual blogs. Will the Metropolitan Police really get away with another murder?

Inquiry in the Menezes murder is finished

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing, War on Terror
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Menezes lying in the carriage after his murder

The BBC reports that the “Independent” Police Complaints Commission has finished its inquiry into the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken for a terrorist and murdered by gung-ho Metropolitan police officers, though of course they don’t call it a murder. That it was murder proves the eyewitness report quoted by the BBC:

The BBC has obtained an eyewitness statement, given to the IPCC, which described how anti-terror
officers shot at Mr Menezes 11 times.

The statement read: “The shots were evenly spaced, with about three seconds between the shots
for the first few shots.

“Then a gap of a little longer. Then the shots were evenly spaced again.”

Mr Menezes, an electrician from Gonzaga in south-eastern Brazil, was hit seven times in the head.

On the six o’clock news, it was said that if prosecutions of the police officers were started, most if not all Metropolitan gun officers would refuse to carry them any longer, once more confirmed that the police think themselves above the law. Here’s hoping the prosecution services will not given in to this common blackmail.

Earlier posts about the murder of Menezes:

Asbo nation

Civil liberties, Law in action, Policing, UK politics
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The asbo, antisocial behaviour order, is one of the more odious pieces of social control Nu Labour have managed to bring in. As it is a civil procedure, it has none of the safeguards of criminal proceedings, can be brought against people to disallow behaviour that is not criminal in itself, but carries criminal penalties. You could find yourself in jail for something as innocuous as walking down the wrong street or wearing your underwear where people can see it.

The BBC News Magazine has done an occasional series on asbos handed out, some of which are plainly ridicolous, some of which are responses to things that are indeed serious nuisances, but all of which are basically NIMBY responses: Not In My Back Yard. Play loud music, attempting to commit suicide, addicted to petrol sniffing? We don’t care, we just do not want you to do it here. It’s the institutionalisation of Mrs. Grundy, with the government in the role of social arbiter. It is the ultimate in symbol politics, as it only treats the symptoms of “antisocial behaviour” rather than its causes.

It is also dangerous, as at least one attempt (scroll down) has already been made to penalise free speech…

Sliming the Justice 4 Jean campaign

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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For some reason best known to the local cable company, our local BBC station is BBC London and it was on their local news bulletin that I saw the worst smear attempt I’ve seen in a long time. Apparantly, with Jean Charles de Menezes now entirely blameless in his own killing, the Metropolitan Police and/or its allies have shifted their focus on his family and the Justice 4 Jean campaign. Dimly realising that smearing the family themselves may backfire, the police or its allies have chosen to smear their advisors, which resulted in this “news” item: “is the Menezes family’s campaign for justice hijacked by the far-left?”

The common sense answer is of course “no”, but that’s not what the BBC wanted to show so we got treated to several minutes of ominous, slo-mo shots of two of the family’s advicers, one Asad Rehman, who turned out to be connected to George Galloway and Respect (no!), the other, Yasmin Khan who, so the BBC revealed after some intensive googlin^wresearch revealed to be behind the Corporate Pirates website, which is devoted to the plundering of Iraq by big business. At no point was explained why this was so sinister; any appeal was emotional not reasoned.

Two talking heads were asked to comment, one some wet behind the ears police spokesman, who adviced the Menezes family to change advisors — as if they’d take the advice of their son’s killers— the second Brian Coleman, who was indentified as being on the Greater London Assembly, but not as a Tory, strangely enough, who saw it all as a “far-left plot” to damage the police and “sir” Ian Blair. Neither had any political agenda themselves, I’m sure.

The interesting thing was how this was presented. I’m sure the BBC London news team meant this all to be outrageous, but it just fell flat. Course, I might not be the best person to judge this by, but I don’t think this would convince anybody who didn’t already think Menezes had it coming and “those lefties” should stop hassling the police. It was all too American, too Republican and while the British public can be just as ignorant, pigheaded and stupid as the American, it’s not this stupid. Anti-war is not a scary word in the UK, not like it is in the US: the gulf between cant and reality in this programme was just too great for anybody to swallow…

Which does not mean this wasn’t a slimy piece of biased crap for which everybody responsible at the BBC should be sacked, of course. But that’s no more then we’ve come to expect from the post-election, post-spine BBC.