(from the rather marvellous www.iShotTheDeputy.com, London)
As we are periodically updated on the progress of a governmental campaign to instil respect into the young people of this country, it is becoming increasingly clear that, at the highest official level, we live in a world where a brazen disrespect for legality and procedural propriety is considered the highest virtue. The notions of accountability and responsibility, so central to our established ideas about respect, are empty shells to which our officialdom pays but the merest of lip service, while it in turn demands the highest standards from the rest of society, indeed disproportionately focussing its anger on those most vulnerable in society in a series of campaigns and measures amounting to a crude war against the poor.
Let us leave aside for now the contradiction of a government that has stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States on an illegal and barbaric mission in Iraq, now laying claim to legality and respect. Never mind that the Prime Minister has allowed David Blunkett back into his Cabinet barely months after the former Home Secretary’s disgraced resignation. Clearly resignations do not mean all that much these days. Nevertheless, even against such a backdrop, the arrogant aloofness of the Metropolitan Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, is startling. The facts of the Jean Charles De Menezes story do not need repeating in full here. Suffice it to say that an elaborate, mendacious account of the incident was deliberately fabricated and disseminated by the police within hours of Mr De Menezes’s death - an account which belied the fact that Mr De Menezes had given the police no reason - either in his clothing or behaviour - to consider him any kind of a threat, still less an immediate danger warranting the use of fatal force. Without warning, armed officers shot him in the head five times at point blank range, before sending for an air ambulance.
Sir Ian Blair has this week admitted that he had considered resigning, and in so doing has managed to retrospectively make his refusal to resign even more offensive. Had he not even considered resigning, one may have forgiven him on the grounds that he had a subjectively different approach to resignations - that it is not incumbent on the Chief of Police to resign when something goes badly, badly wrong. In other words, the dispute would have been an intellectual argument about the nature of public administration. Sir Ian's recent “admission”, however, shows that this was not the case. Clearly he has considered resignation as falling within a range of possible responses to the De Menezes killing, and from his decision not to resign we can make the following inference: that Sir Ian did not consider that the killing was a serious enough matter to justify the resignation of the one man who is responsible for the implementation and overseeing of the shoot-to-kill policy. Which in turn leads us naturally to ask this - Under what circumstances would Sir Ian Blair agree that it would be right for the Police Chief to resign? If the wanton execution of a clearly innocent man is not serious enough, what kind of a disaster would be sufficiently serious for Sir Ian to deign to take responsibility? I cannot think of much that is worse. Dare we consider whether Mr Blair may indeed have resigned, had the victim in question not been an immigrant, but had instead been a white British man.
The police, in these trying times of suicide bombers and generic terror threats, have an extremely difficult job to do, and no reasonable person would dispute this. On the facts of this particular set of circumstances, however, there is absolutely no defence available to them. At the very least there must be charges of gross negligence manslaughter brought against the officers involved, as well as the resignation of the Police Chief nominally responsible. If we can excuse this kind of thing on the grounds of the heightened threat, then the terrorists have won, and our society as we knew it is defeated. Likewise if we accept the lack of any accountability or redress, and tell ourselves that this was just a one-off, a freak incident, without concerning ourselves with the power structures, the policies, and the individuals, that have allowed this to happen, then let us be certain that it will happen again.
www.iShotTheDeputy.com
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