Still no justice for Jean

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.

Jean Charles de Menezes roundup

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.

Menezes killers not charged?

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?

No coverup? Suuuure

Yes, we figured the police lied from day one about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, but as usual the police bosses, Ian Blair first, were adamant this was all a ghastly mistake and the police behaved properly. Even after hard evidence emerged that the version of events the police put forth was simply not true, they kept denying wrong doing. Yesterday the other shoe dropped: the Metropolitan police chief Ian Blair tried to stop the independent investigation without which we would’ve never known the truth:

Britain’s top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday.

Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.

Further down in the article:

But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.

Gee, such a departure from normal procedure. I wonder why? Blair can “reject the concept of a coverup” as much as he wants, but I have only one response:

bliar