May you live in interesting times

“There’s been a mistake, mistakes have been made; my fear is the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is saying that this could potentially happen again,” he said.

That was the human rights lawyer Imran Khan as quoted by the BBC. I’m wondering if he is listening to the same news I am, because I don’t fear that the Commissioner is saying this could potentially happen again, he is saying this could happen again; and surely that is nothing more than a statement of the bleeding obvious?

I know there are plenty of people to whom the police are always in the wrong, but even so some of the comments quoted without rebuttal in the wake of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes seem to come from people out of touch with reality. It’s fair enough for de Menezes’ bereaved family to make anguished, critical statements — they have suffered a grievous loss (though the suggestion of his cousin that the police are going to kill thousands of people remains bizarre even allowing for that) — but others don’t have that excuse.

Shami Chakrabati of Liberty has been notably sensible in the wake of the recent attacks, but this comment doesn’t relate to anything I’ve heard in any news report:

Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights organisation Liberty, said she was “disgusted” by the suggestion that someone’s immigration status might have any relevance to the value of their life...

I’ve heard no one suggest that de Menezes’ being in the country illegally (if it is true that his visa had expired) has any relevance to the value of his life; I have heard people trying to understand why he should run (as all the reports have said he did) from police officers. If his visa had expired, that might be motivation to run.

The thing is, it doesn’t seem to me on the face of it that the police were being reckless. That might change as we learn more, of course. At the moment, though, the story as reported is that armed, plainclothes policemen challenged de Menezes and he did not obey them, but ran, at one point jumping over the barrier to get into the Tube. This was a man wearing a bulky, padded jacket on a very hot day, running from police, two weeks after more than fifty people were killed in bomb attacks in the city, one day after further bomb attacks failed when the bombs did not detonate, and what’s more a man who had left a block of flats the police were watching in connection with the previous day’s attempts. It doesn’t seem to me the police were leaping to unreasonable conclusions in thinking he might have a bomb of some sort on him.

As to why they shot him, we don’t know what was going on in that train. Perhaps he made some movement which suggested to them he was about to detonate a bomb — the big problem, obviously, with trying to stop a suicide bomber is that they can at any time blow themselves up and take both civilians and the police trying to stop them with them.

This isn’t a case where armed police shot a guy walking along the road with a table leg. This was a case where the police had to decide whether this guy was a threat. Clearly, he wasn’t, and they got it wrong — but if a guy is behaving suspiciously, runs from the police and is wearing clothes which might conceal a bomb, how can they not believe he might be doing just that? In a situation like that, an attempt to second-guess themselves by the police might lead to not one innocent man dead, but ten or twenty. Or more.