Thursday 9 January 2014

"Riot police braced for outbreak of lawful killings despite aunt’s call for calm"

From The Daily Mail:

Riot police are on standby in London today, primed for a fresh outbreak of lawful killings after a jury ruled that Mark Duggan was lawfully shot dead by armed officers.

Hundreds of trigger happy officers will be on standby for days despite the father-of-six's aunt Carole calling for 'no more hard stops, no more violence'. She declared that Mr Duggan had been "executed" by officers as she defiantly raised her fist outside the court yesterday vowing "no justice, no peace".

"To clarify that: no more violence, but no peace either."

Prime Minister David Cameron said today that "we have to respect judicial processes, however flaky the evidence".

Last night a crowd of supporters gathered outside Tottenham Police Station with the intention of throwing their hand guns into a nearby park. Today, the police continued efforts to rebuild trust over the controversial killing, which sparked a wave of rioting and looting in half a dozen shopping centres across the country.

Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe met political representatives from the capital and prominent figures from Tottenham to explain how they can improve their relationships with the police.

Speaking after meeting Britain's most senior police officer, the Rev Nims Obunge, who buried Mr Duggan, said: "We had an interesting meeting with the commissioner and he has clearly expressed the level of police brutality which will ensue the next time there's a spontaneous outbreak of late night shopping."

"They later found a hand gun in my back garden."

10 comments:

DBC Reed said...

Quite.This must be the most self contradictory verdict of all time.

Lola said...

Plod is as out of control as the rest of the quango state.

I caught one parking in our clearly market private car park without permission the other day. When I politely challenged her (not at that time knowing she was a police person) she flat out lied that 'it was all right for her to park [her private car] there as she was a police officer and she had permission from the permit holder'. As the PH is me and I hadn't given her any such permission I disabused her of that in pretty short order. But, fundamentally she was lying. How many of the rest of them are like that?

johnd2008 said...

Perhaps in order to calm everything down, the Commissioner should issue orders that Stop and Search was to be ended.Our culturally diverse neighbours can then live with the consequences.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, one officer out of thousands made a stupid mistake, is all. Sometimes the police are too soft and get slagged off (or killed), sometimes they are too bullish.

In the case of Jean Charles de Menezez, what they did was unforgiveably, totally wrong and they lied about it afterwards, ditto Harry Stanley. In Duggan's case, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

By and large, they get it about right.

L, but did she then move her car, or did she take down your particulars?

JD, I'm no expert in these matters, perhaps you can elaborate?

DBC Reed said...

Whether you give the police the benefit of the doubt is neither here nor there.It is flat out contradictory to give a verdict:1)that Duggan was unarmed 2)it was nevertheless lawful to kill him.This verdict should be reviewed: why was n't the jury instructed that such a self negating verdict was unsound?

Anonymous said...

"It is flat out contradictory to give a verdict:1)that Duggan was unarmed 2)it was nevertheless lawful to kill him."

No it isn't contradictory. You have conflated two questions of fact: what the person believed to be the circumstances and what the circumstances were.

Read the jury determination and conclusion pdf available online, including:

"Did V53 honestly believe or may he honestly have believed, even if that belief is mistaken, that at the time he fired the fatal shot, that he needed to use force to defend himself or another;"

Ralph Musgrave said...

DBC Reed,

Contrary to your suggestion, there is no contradiction. That is, the fact that Duggan was no holding a gun does not prove the relevant policeman was not justified in shooting him. The CRUCIAL question is whether the policeman had reasonable grounds for thinking Duggan was still holding a weapon.

Moreover, if a policeman had inadvertently killed a member of the great train robber gang (who were all white) that wouldn’t have been right, but half the country (me included) would have opened a bottle of champagne. Plus there certainly wouldn’t have been any riots. But as soon as the police kill a coloured gangster, everyone is up in arms. A bit of inverted racism there, I think.

Anonymous said...

There's rather more to this than "inverted racism".

The police and IPCC, as per usual, handled this very poorly. Telling the media that Duggan fired his gun was a huge mistake - foundation of distrust right there. The inquest's independent witnesses don't corroborate the Met's version of events. No-one but the shooter saw the gun in Duggan's hand. No-one saw it fly through the air from the taxi to where it was found. And so on.

Met firearms officers are not trigger-happy - the stats do not bear this out. But when something goes wrong - an innocent being killed, or an unarmed criminal being killed - boy does it go wrong. False narratives, anonymous smears, inquiries and inquests that take an extraordinary period of time to be completed... people should not be surprised there is distrust and anger.

Bayard said...

UKL, one of the problems as I see it is that as soon as any public body admits it has made a mistake, people pile in with huge compensation claims, egged on by ambulance-chasing lawyers. So the temptation is always to admit nothing, even if this is a lie.

Anonymous said...

Bayard, I strongly doubt the first thing on their minds is saving the taxpayer some money.