Uponnothing.co.uk

The Sunday Times run this story, and to be honest I don’t think anyone expected them to face charges. However, there must be some people wondering just how accountable the officers involved actually are, and whether if the defence is poor intelligence anyone higher up the food chain will face action. What seems to me to suggest that the officers acted incorrectly is the false statements issued by the Metropolitan police to justify the attack.

The statements - suggesting that ‘his [de Menezes] clothing and his behaviour at the station added to [the officers’] suspicions’ - seemed to acknowledge that even with intelligence fed through to the officers by radio, before lethal force was used the officers’ had to have some further justification. However, the statements were false, and the scene now revolves around a exceedingly normal person sitting on a train being jumped on, forced to the ground and repeatedly shot. The officers have no personal justification in shooting de Menezes, instead they have to admit that although they had been given ‘intelligence’ during the pursuit, they still had to make a judgement call based on their own professional experience, and that they got it badly wrong. A man has died and someone must take responsibility for this, if the officers involved are not charged, then someone else must face charges for false intelligence, or perhaps a failed order handed down without enough evidence that lethal force was neccesary. Conversely, if no-one senior to the officers is charged in this way, and that any orders or intelligence handed down to the officers was given based on interpretation by the officers when confronted by de Menezes, then the officers’ must face charges.

The justification of ‘just following orders’ was not good enough for Nurembourg, and it shouldn’t be good enough here either.