h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'British police say a man they killed on a London subway train wasn't connected to Thursday's attempted bombings in the city's transit system.

The man, identified by police as 27-year-old Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot in the head five times in front of dozens of passengers on a train at the Stockwell subway station on Friday. . .

The admission of error further fueled controversy over the shooting, which was the first public application of a policy to stop suicide bombers devised after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

It gives police the authority to shoot suspected suicide bombers first and ask questions later.

Police authorities said officers have to aim for the heads of suspected bombers because they could have explosives strapped to their bodies.'

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/07/23/londonattacks-070523.html

The first time the new policy is applied they make a mistake and put five bullets into a Brazillian's head? I realize the investigation hasn't even started, and I realize that people in London are nervous, and I realize that the victim put the police into an awkward situation (as they did to him, it would seem) but I can't imagine this makes anyone feel safer.

I can't help but think of the capital punishment debate, in which I come down on the side of 'Capital punishment shouldn't happen because the execution of one innocent is one too many, and lots of people have been wrongly convicted.'

Is it worth killing a few innocents in the hope that one day you might get a bomber?

I can't understand why they had to shoot him at all, since two other policemen were actually holding him down while their colleague shot him. Couldn't they have cuffed him or something?

"You may open fire against a person only when absolutely necessary after traditional methods have tried and failed, or must, by the very nature of the circumstances, be unlikely to succeed if tried.

"To sum up, a police officer should not decide to open fire unless that officer is satisfied that nothing short of opening fire could protect the officer or another person from imminent danger to life or serious injury."


That's all I have to say until more accurate and precise information on what happened come out.

I think its easy to second guess this situation - I'm sure there is a lot we are not being told, and I wasn't there, but as with the capital punishment arguement there are intangibles we can't answer - like how many lives were saved because killers were scared of the consequences ? We've certainly seen people who would have been hung in the past being freed to kill again, which is another innocent life lost.

How did they produce this picture of these 4 guys at Luton station so quickly ? I mean why Luton ? I think we're on the outside of the majority of the facts.

I absolutely agree, McKay. I don't want to second guess the police either. And I certainly know that all the facts aren't out. But I do find it disturbing.


(the capital punishment bit was just stream of consciousness association; just me trying to come to terms with the event.)

" I mean why Luton?"

If one of you is driving from Aylesbury; the others are driving down from Leeds, and you want to meet to make it to Kings Cross together. Then geographically Luton is your natural rendezvous.

No.
it is not justified to kill an innocent on the basis taht they 'might' have been a nasty person or whateer it is.

I've said it bfore.

I'd prefer to die a horrible death in blazing flames on the London underground, than be made to carry a ID card. the same rings true in this situeation, leave us* teh f*** alone. if they are ment to be 'inteligence' police ( and yes the word inteligence in terms of military/police action has rightly taken a back seat of late) then let them for one and only time actually strat taking an inteligent approch to this new situeationl. in teh meantine. let us, sorry, lettuce stop all this boloocks, and get on with the normal abomination that is London Transport

'I'd prefer to die a horrible death in blazing flames on the London underground, than be made to carry a ID card.'


I don't know that I would. But I'm not sure that that particular choice is the one being offered here.

If, on the other hand, I were offered the choice between dying quickly as I sat reading my morning paper on the tube and being chased by a number of non-uniformed men with large guns through the streets of London, tackled in a tube station and pumped full of bullets, well, I'd probably be pissed off that I had to make the choice.

And, as McKay has pointed out, and as I have tried to as well, no one is sure that that choice was offered in this case either.

I don't have the full facts, so any comment I can make is conditional upon that.

The young man was obviously acting in a way that called attention to himself and created suspicion. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but if cops were chasing me with guns and I was totally innocent, I think I'd stop and put my hands up.

He is perhaps a casualty of war now. I do not believe the police shot him just for the hell of it.

As to the previous post about dying in the Underground rather than carry an id card, please keep your facile remarks to yourself, grow up and learn to type, spell or whatever.

At the end of the day , and asides all the awful desicions that have ben taken since the attacks on the twin towers which is what at ath edn of the day this all boils doen tooo.
This just does look like another yet another yet another, totaly failure of competance by the UK police; I am thinking in particular about the guy they shot dead a fe w years back cause he'd popped to a friend s to help fix ttheir table... wondering down the street with their bust table leg ment he got shot dead.. yeh, shounds reasonable to me, heck, I'm a UK citizen and I'm white, ain't I the kind of guy whos ment to (according to our government) want to see anyone who is black or non white just killed anyhow... oh yes, the've got the idea in this country, p*****g off more and more races and cultures, will inevitabably make us less a risk of terrorism... oh no... that doesnt' work does it...

I thought this was the UK, where people really are innocent until proven guilty, and the police just can't shoot whoever the hell they feel like.

Whether the man was acting in a suspicious manner or not, 'shoot first ask questions later' is never a sensible form of action. Might they not have wanted, at least, to take the man in for questioning, instead of just killing him? And it might have at least occurred to someone that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty. They even have to do that here in the States - and you guys don't have the death penalty over there.

The whole fiasco seems almost like it was a screwed-up death sentence, sort of Sacco and Vanzetti-ish. The man was judged on account of the fact that he looked suspicious, and then killed in grossly unfair circumstances, and was later found to be innocent in the matter.

Surely if a policeman tells you to stop, you stop. They are employed to uphold the law. Under the current circumstances anyone who *doesn't* stop when told to is either:

a) hiding something
b) incredibly dim

If you don't want to be shot, stop when told to. Pretty straightforward, I'd have thought.

I agree with emr, this is a very big deal. There are circumstances in which it would be right for the police to shoot a man in the head, and it seems extremely unlikely that this was one of them. Firstly, I want them to have specific information. Just wearing a bulky coat, looking shifty and running away from the police is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Secondly, I want there to be no other alternative. If indeed he was pinned down by two officers (this isn't entirely clear from what I've heard), then it was not necessary to shoot him. I don't want to hear excuses for this.

I can respect someone who thinks that ID cards are justified, or someone who thinks that tighter border controls, etc. are justified, but trying to justify this is going too far.

roymondo! Hiding something or being dim isn't good enough reason to kill someone! I can't believe you can say something like that.

If you don't speak the language or are deaf, I suppose that you need to have ESP to avoid being shot in the head repeatedly....

Just for another perspective, I'm looking at it from the point-of-view of the police officer who shot the guy. Not saying it's 'right' or should be used to set a precedent, but *I* can understand it.

If *I* were the cop, right then, after all the goings-on in London the past couple of weeks, I'd probably be pretty on-edge. If I had some reason to believe that someone was carrying a bomb, and they ran from me rather than stopping to let me carry on as proceedure would normally dictate, and I already had it in my mind that suicide-bomber-terrorists (or whatever they're calling them these days) could be *anywhere*, it would probably be pretty easy to temporarily lose track of the reality that an investigation would be better carried out with a living Suspect rather than a dead person who was planning to be dead anyway, and take a bunch of other bystanders along with him. I might even think I was taking the best action possible, under the circumstances. And I might think differently, once more information became available and the immediate rush of danger had subsided.

Personally, I don't think we have enough information yet to do much more than be disturbed. I was disturbed when I first heard about it. A bit more information came out and I was more disturbed. Then I learned that he was a Brazilian living and working in the UK legally (for three years now) that he is Catholic and that his English is very good and I decided that I was even more disturbed. Beyond that, however, I can't come to much of a conclusion. Except . . .

It strikes me that a policy of shoot first (five times in the head) and ask questions later (if this reported policy is actually in place) is probably not really a terribly useful law enforcement or crime investigation policy in the long run. I'm not sure that in any situation -- including terrorism situations -- it could be a terribly good public protection policy. It seems like a tragedy waiting to happen.

That having been said, the specifics of this case are still foggy. I will be very interested in following the results of the investigation. I'm not sure that my disturbance will become reduced.

MoG, I can understand it, but I really don't think that matters. I can understand the motivation of the suicide bomber too. It's pretty clear that understanding why someone did the very wrong thing that they did doesn't go any way towards excusing it. What I will say is that the media and the politicans take some of the blame too, for whipping up the entire country into a frenzy over terrorism.

anhaga, you're right that we don't have all the facts yet, but in my opinion it's pretty difficult to imagine that the circumstances in any way justified this. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

Roymondo, if a police officer is waving a gun at you, wouldn't you freak out? Maybe your natural response, when freaked out, would be to run away.

Perhaps this fellow was carrying drugs, a weapon, something he didn't want to be caught with. But whatever it was, it doesn't mean he was a terrorist, and there are still no circumstances under which it could possibly requit his execution.

I thought I had read that the police in the UK didn't carry guns, anyway?

On a complete and utter tangent, I find that police with guns are more nerve-wracking than the people they're trying to stop from breaking the law. We have two police officers permanently stationed at my school, and personally I find that the guns they wear are a lot more disturbing than the fighting kids or druggies they're supposed to deal with.

"I can understand the motivation of the suicide bomber too"

Then please explain them to me - because I can't. Its causing me a lot of problems, because I cannot imagine circumstances under which I would deliberately kill women and children, and myself.

2legs - I think you're going to an extreme on this one (hey what's new ?) Whilst you personally would be prepared to suffer rather than have freedom further eroded, I presume that you feel that children have the right to be safe ? In any situation like this there is a choice to be made between the greater freedom of society and the imfringement of the liberties of the individual.

Freedom of speech cropped up elsewhere - these people should be able to say that bombing is OK because they can't fight America any other way - I consider this encitement, and don't think its OK and I would declare it illegal.

If I thought ID cards would make the streets safe from bombs I'd carry one - however at least one of these bombers had undergone a CRB check for his work in a school - so I don't think its a valid reason. However I already carry 3 for my job.