State-sponsored terrorism, Blair-style
It is now known that Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old Brazilian man shot dead by London police on Friday morning,
had only the briefest involvement in terrorism - not as a terrorist, but as a victim. The police seem to
have taken it upon themselves to act as judge, jury, and executioner - despite the fact that capital
punishment is no longer legal in this country (except for treason and piracy, I think).
It appears that Mr de Menezes was chased into a Tube station by around twenty plain-clothes officers. We
don't know whether he realised they were police, but it is at least possible that he did not. If twenty people
were chasing you and you didn't know why, wouldn't you run? He ran fast, and he ran well. He apparently
vaulted the ticket barriers - which sounds like the act of a criminal, doesn't it?
But wait - if you're being chased by twenty men and you don't know why, vaulting a ticket barrier might not
seem like such a big deal compared to what might happen if you don't. Unfortunately for Mr de Menezes,
it wasn't enough, and his pursuers caught him, bore him to the ground, held a pistol to his head, and shot
him five times at close range. [Update: the inquest heard that Mr de Menezes was shot eight times -
seven in the head and one in the shoulder.]
The police say they challenged the man. At what distance? Close enough to hear? Maybe not. In what language? Portuguese?
Maybe not. Whilst waving guns around? We don't know. But we do know that they got close enough to shoot him several times in
the head. At such close range, they could simply have handcuffed him. This would have been considerably less fatal.
If the police treat "running away from armed non-uniformed men" as a capital crime, many more people are
going to die, because there is something about a guy with a gun that, odd as it may sound, scares some
people into wanting to be elsewhere very quickly indeed. This seems to be what happened on Friday.
The police chief, Sir Ian Blair, said that police policy is currently "shoot to kill in order to protect".
Perhaps he would care to explain precisely how shooting an innocent man dead qualifies as protecting
him. Blair also says "Well, somebody else could be shot." And it could be you.
The police have a long way to go if they wish to regain public confidence. For a start, they
need to put down their guns. Until they do so, we must now regard them not as our protectors, but as our
potential assassins.
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