How Would You Feel?

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Colin Phillips

At the Start
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How would you feel if you part of Jean Charles de Menezes family?

Taken from the BBC News site :


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11 Menezes police face no action

Mr Menezes was mistaken for a suicide bomber
Eleven officers involved in the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes will not face disciplinary action, the police watchdog has said.
They were among 15 Metropolitan Police officers interviewed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

Decisions have not been made on the four most senior officers investigated.

The family of Mr Menezes - shot eight times at Stockwell Tube station after being mistaken for a suicide bomber - said the decision was "disgraceful".

The 27-year-old was killed on 22 July 2005, one day after the failed London bombings.

The IPCC said a surveillance officer, one of the 11 not facing disciplinary action, would be given "management advice" in relation to action he took after the shooting.

It is a travesty of justice and another slap in the face for our family

Patricia da Silva Armani, Mr Menezes' cousin

It said a decision on whether the four commanders and tactical advisers investigated should be disciplined would be made after the end of court proceedings.

The Crown Prosecution Service previously found no evidence to warrant the prosecution of any individual over the shooting of Mr Menezes, an electrician.

However, Scotland Yard is facing prosecution under health and safety laws over the incident. The trial is due to start in October.

'Turmoil'

Patricia da Silva Armani, Mr Menezes' cousin, said: "It is a travesty of justice and another slap in the face for our family.

"The police officers' lives go on as normal while we exist in turmoil, fighting to get the answers and justice we deserve."

The Justice4Jean Campaign questioned the decision to clear the officers before the health and safety case is brought.

"This is entirely premature and, worse still, may potentially prejudice any future criminal proceedings," a spokesman said.

The grief and anger of his family is entirely understandable and - as I have been powerfully reminded - remains unassuaged

IPCC chairman Nick Hardwick

"This sends out the signal that no action against officers will ever be taken in this case, which is devastating for the family."

The Menezes family said they believed there were grounds for gross negligence manslaughter criminal charges against the four senior officers.

A spokeswoman, speaking on their behalf, said: "We hope ultimately that all the officers about whom evidence emerges of wrongdoing that led to this wrongful death are ultimately rendered fully accountable," the spokeswoman added.

'Challenging circumstances'

The IPCC's chairman, Nick Hardwick, said he understood the feelings of Mr Menezes' family.

"The grief and anger of his family is entirely understandable and - as I have been powerfully reminded - remains unassuaged," he said.

"I would not do anything lightly that adds to that grief or anger."

But he said although Mr Menezes was "entirely innocent" there was "no realistic prospect" of disciplinary charges being upheld against the firearms or surveillance officers involved, including the two officers directly responsible for the fatal shooting .

They were facing the "challenge" of the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, he added.

The human rights group, Liberty, condemned the delay in deciding whether the more senior officers should be punished.

The Metropolitan Police welcomed the IPCC recommendation but said the shooting of Mr Menezes was "a matter of very deep regret" to the service and said its thoughts were "with his family".

A spokesman added: "There is no doubt that the events of July 2005 brought significant challenges to the Met and during this time many officers operated under difficult and dangerous conditions to protect London and Londoners."


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I am still baffled over the business of him being shot in the head SEVEN times!!!!!
 
Originally posted by Colin Phillips@May 14 2007, 07:35 AM
I am still baffled over the business of him being shot in the head SEVEN times!!!!!
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Me too Colin. What were those police all about.
 
The analysis has to be cool and detached, and factual. That will always sit uncomfortably against raw grief. There were mistakes made, the main one, of course, being wrongful identification. It seems that the police almost hunted him in a pack, surveilling first and then deciding he was one of the wanted men. Once they'd decided that, there was the will only to bring him back dead, it seemed.

Any family of a person mistakenly executed or killed will never feel right, no matter whether people go to jail for the mistake or not. You're not going to get your son back, which is the most important issue. So abject apology and heavy financial 'compensation' will never be adequate. The Menezes family want to see officers put in jail for what was a team error. It's not going to happen, the family won't or can't come to terms with it and if they allow it to, it will rot their lives until they die.

If they are churchgoers, perhaps the best thing that can be offered to them is the advice of their priest to forgive. Really, truly, completely, forgive. If Christ could forgive his brutal tormentors, perhaps they could try to forgive those who have tormented them? It's possibly the only way to liberate themselves from being shackled to, and eroded by, their grief and anger forever.
 
Another excellent piece, Krizon.

Seven bullets seem excessive but if I was one of the policemen and was being told I was tracking a suicide bomber and that the bomb could be detonated any second, taking me with it, I wouldn't hesitate to empty my gun into the suspect's head.

Has it been revealed if automatic weapons were used, the type that fire repeatedly very quickly? That might account for two or three of the bullets.
 
I would imagine that's what they'd be armed with in this circumstance, DO. As you say, they already thought the poor man was carrying a concealed package on him, so there's no way they were going to be polite about this. Thanks for the kind words. It's a dreadful and tragic case, but at the time it was rather like a wartime incident, where in a few moments, a wrongful i.d. is made and an innocent party is killed. We should view it (not that as his Mother I ever could, to be honest) rather like a 'friendly fire' incident when troops are under great stress. No job is failsafe, and some errors have more drastic consequences than others. We're being pushed all the time towards more and more of a blame culture, where someone HAS to be found responsible. Sometimes, it's a lot more fuzzy than that.
 
Was he not just wearing a denim jacket and carrying no baggage? Did they think the bomb was up his @rse.
 
I was about to say, what about the "disinformation" that we were fed when they realised what a massive bollock they had dropped?

The padded jacket that might have been hiding the bomb.........not so.

He fled and vaulted a ticket barrier when challenged......not so.

Well, DO and Kri, I do find seven shots in the back of the head excessive, and to my mind the man responsible for those shots should have been, at least temporarily, removed from firearm duty and referred for mental assessment.

This is, of course, only my opinion.
 
There were all kinds of pieces of misinformation which came to light later. The procedure was a tragic farce from start to bloody finish. But that's the problem with it - you can't jail the man or men who pulled the fatal triggers, without jailing those who gave them the wrong information and the surveillers who surveilled the wrong person. A cock-up all the way, but that's the problem with these kinds of incidents - it's a team effort, without one person bearing sole responsibility for the mess. Not that any of that makes the Menezes family feel any better.

Colin, we can all be a judge and jury when we're not being held to account. We are all gifted with perfect hindsight when it's someone else's mistake, so I'm not going to go over old ground for the sake of it. Your question was 'how would YOU feel' if you were the Menezes family and no-one was going to go to jail for this incident. I've tried to answer that, but I can't see the point in going over everything that was in the papers later. As I said, jail isn't going to happen and we all know how the Menezes feel. But you asked how WE would feel, and I would probably feel the same, except that in the long run - if I didn't want to be consumed by this for the rest of my life - I'd have to find a way in which to TRY to put it into a form of context, however wrong, mistaken, idiotic, cruel, that context was.

The real cause of the death of the Menezes boy, in my own opinion, wasn't our Police. The catalyst for his tragic death was the terrorist activity which caused the investigation, and it's at their door that ultimate blame should be laid.
 
Commuter Anthony Larkin, who was also on the train at Stockwell station, told 5 Live he saw police chasing a man.

"I saw these police officers in uniform and out of uniform shouting 'get down, get down', and I saw this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out and people were panicking and I heard two shots being fired."
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:nuts:
 
You would also have to ask how do the families of the innocent victims of murders on both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland feel when they see killers being released under political agreements. Do they feel robbed of justice?

Then you really only need to attend court to see drunk drivers or drug addicts getting off with fines and community sentences when their crimes may have had life-altering effects on their victims. Justice?

It's a high-profile case but in principal it's arguably no different to many other cases where families feel justice hasn't been served.
 
I think the whole case is a terrible whitewash and his family should be very upset by this outcome. Shot for having dark skin and a jacket. It really is an Orwellian world now. Disgusting.
 
Yes, we know all that, Pee, but Colin's question was 'HOW WOULD YOU FEEL?' I think we'd feel the same as the family does, and the same as any family of anyone wrongly convicted, wrongly executed, shot by mistake in the line of military combat, the Deepcut cadets, and on and on. We'd be appalled, wouldn't we? But really the big question is how will they cope now that they know there will be no further investigation and no trial and definitely no jail time? They have lives to lead, and need to somehow get past the shock and awfulness, like others before them.

It's a point of irony to me that a Brazilian is shot by our police here, while in Brazil hundreds of street kids have been shot dead, entirely illegally and in cold blood, by their own forces on the grounds that they were 'cleaning up' the streets of wrongdoers. Who's appalled for them? Has any officer been brought to justice for their clear murders?
 
Originally posted by krizon@May 14 2007, 12:20 PM
Yes, we know all that, Pee, but Colin's question was 'HOW WOULD YOU FEEL?' I think we'd feel the same as the family does, and the same as any family of anyone wrongly convicted, wrongly executed, shot by mistake in the line of military combat, the Deepcut cadets, and on and on. We'd be appalled, wouldn't we? But really the big question is how will they cope now that they know there will be no further investigation and no trial and definitely no jail time? They have lives to lead, and need to somehow get past the shock and awfulness, like others before them.

It's a point of irony to me that a Brazilian is shot by our police here, while in Brazil hundreds of street kids have been shot dead, entirely illegally and in cold blood, by their own forces on the grounds that they were 'cleaning up' the streets of wrongdoers. Who's appalled for them? Has any officer been brought to justice for their clear murders?
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Thats a really good point Kri. Good post.
 
Well, perhaps the police being fined £175,000 and having to pay £300,000+ in costs will make the family feel better.

Ian Blair must have the skin of a rhinocercerceros!!!!
 
Originally posted by Colin Phillips@Nov 2 2007, 05:41 PM
Well, perhaps the police being fined £175,000 and having to pay £300,000+ in costs will make the family feel better.
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And that coming from the tax payer in the long run.
 
No charges to be brought against any police officers.

C2 and C12 claim that Jean Charles Meneses carried on walking towards them after being told that they were police officers and for him to stop, when he didn't then they opened fire.

The cps refer to inconsistencies in these officers accounts.

There seems to be one glaring inconsistency, reportedly Jean Charles was shot several times in the back of the head.

Do we have more "magic bullets"?,
 
The other and in a sense the most important point, if we are using the threat of terrorism as any kind of justification, is why on earth the firearms unit didn't stop him getting on the tube or even entering the network at all! If they were going to shoot him 'on suspicion', because they sincerely believed him to be carrying a bomb, then in the street was the placed to do it, without risk to others and to the transport system.

When they allowed him into the tube system, the risk of a panic killing was always going to be there. I've always felt the person who gave the orders needs to be brought to book, rather than the individuals on the hit team -

BUT I had thought that was Cressida Dick, however according to the Wiki piece below, she quite properly gave an order for him to be detained before entereing the tube. someone should certainly have been brought to account since it must have been obvious by the time the guy was sitting in the tube that he was not carrying a bomb!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

It seems quite clear the unit had decided he was one of the previous day's bombers and just 'decided' in the heat of the moment to 'take him out' - utterly disgraceful
 
Would entirely agree - those in charge should have factored in the 'hair-trigger' adrenaline charge that resulted post July 7th - that they didn't showed a lack of plain common sense.
 
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