I hadn’t thought of it like this before, you must be right, yes, yes, that must be it. The part of me I’d never understood. Thank you for clarifying this.

You should examine the impulses that made you so credulous to begin with.

Is it just a reflexive authoritarianism? Do you automatically incline to believe U.S. and U.K. press releases on terror, war, Palestine, Iraq, ‘the road map to peace’ etc?

What about ASBOs, hoodies, Blair’s mortgage, Avian Bird Flu vaccine rationing or… the Euro?

Couldn’t you smell the lies, notice the uncomfortable gaps, see the evasions, read between the lines? Did you really need an FT article?

I suppose the case law element comes in if it turns out that someone had told the officer who killed de Menezes that he had the latitude to do so without having established proper grounds for setting those parameters. But isn’t this kind of proximate homicide just first-degree manslaughter?

@ ralph
Even in heaven, where the police are British, the cooks are … there have apparently been a several hundred British deaths in police custody over the past 30 years. Succesful prosecutions are few.

Unlike in those cases, I’m inclined to feel that if any cop, the one with the gun or somebody in the information chain, gets charged with manslaughter, he’ll be getting the rough end of the stick, even if guilty. The pressure must have been immense, which surely bears on the element of negligence.

Also, for there to be negligence, there has to have been a correct course of action that was neglected. It may turn out that a chain of misunderstandings ensured that the negligence can only be attributed quite high up the causal chain.

I think this last bit is one of the important points, we haven’t been told, and the law may not even know. I suspect we may see case law here. This judgement will be important, and I think the good news - if there can be any good news in a case like this - is that all our eyes are going to be watching every move, and even more so the Brazilian authorities. So there is the chance of something positive coming out of all this.

Incidentally, I’m not normally a supporter of Ken Livingstone, but what he says today (Wednesday 24) bears a remarkable similarity to what I have been arguing:

In an interview with BBC radio, Mayor Ken Livingstone accused unidentified “disgruntled” police officers of attempting to undermine Blair, whom Livingstone praised as “a radical and reforming commissioner” and “the best news that London policing has got.”

Livingstone called Menezes’ killing a “terrible accident and tragedy,” but said Blair’s detractors within the police department were using the incident to undermine the chief.

“Here is a radical and reforming commissioner making major changes to the police who has many enemies in there, who really don’t want to see those changes,” Livingstone said.

But what about a police officer carrying out his duty negligently? We have not even been told what would count as negligence here.

I too tend to think that something went wrong in the way the decision making processes were set up ? in other words how discretion was allocated, and how the information flow worked. . But lets keep it simple: some poor bastard cop put in a situation where he knew that de Menezes just might be a bomber and because he was being jumped by another, unarmed, officer, just might be about to set his device off - and choosing to shoot — is that justifiable homicide or is it simply homicide?

The people who put the officer in that situation clearly have a lot to answer for, but that?s a different issue.

I presume he was told: ?if you have good grounds to believe your life, or those of others, are threatened, shoot.? As you say, all of us who accept the principle of armed intervention against potential murderers have to imagine ourselves in his shoes, whether we personally would have volunteered for taking on such a responsibility or not.

So:
If I pull this trigger I might be killing an innocent man
If I don?t pull this trigger, innocents may die (me too, of course).

It all depends on how much you know that you know. If you know nothing, (he?s just some Asian on the tube) obviously, it?s homicide. If your superiors have told you he?s got a bomb, or you can assume they know that because they?ve told you to assume it too, it?s clearly justifiable. If you know they haven?t told you that, or you can?t remember what they?ve told you ? well, I?m afraid it?s still homicide.

I regret to say that I will be very surprised if it turns out that this officer was given an explicit order to kill, or knew that he had sufficient grounds to choose to kill. You can call that a rogue cop if you want. I call it the poor bloody infantry ? but then I didn?t volunteer for the army, and, this time, that does let me out.

“Criminal or disciplinary proceedings against the officers involved was a possibility,Richard Latham (an attorney representing the Independent Police Complaints Commission) told a brief hearing at a coroner’s inquest. The inquest into the July 22 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot seven times in the head by police officers, was adjourned until Feb. 23″.

Logically the Coroner’s inquest will be held after the Commission reports, and it is the existence of a Coroner’s jury who need to be convinced which is the strongest guarantee of the Commission’s findings.

Here we go beyond the ‘disinformation’ issue and get to the heart of the matter. There seem to be two main possibilities. Either, that there was a breakdown in communication between the co-ordinator of the surveillance group and the co-ordinator of the armed group, in which case one or other of these - or the person who designed the rules - needs to face some sort of procedure (be it disciplinary or criminal depending on findings), or we are dealing with an individual officer (he who fired the shots) who over-reacted or worse, in which case of course, criminal charges may well be brought.

I want to point out that I have never wished to exclude this latter possibility entirely, but since we have no evidence whatsoever in our hands to date that this was the case, I have been concentrating on the former (more probable) scenario, my point being that if the superiors or the structure are at fault the end of the chain shouldn’t be the one held responsible.

“Edward?s utilitarian argument about what good would be served by finding the officer guilty.”

This is not quite my argument. Firstly I’m not a utilitarian :). Secondly, no, it’s not a question of what good would be served. As I say above if it were a rogue officer, then it could be homicide, and nothing would be put out of place. We do having serving soldiers facing war crimes charges associated with Iraq, and if they are guilty then they should be held responsible.

The issue is we should try and avoid a serving policeman being charged with homicide for obeying a legitimate order. This would be a case of be careful what you ask for, since the almost inevitable result would be a stronger military presence in anti terrorism, since the military are beyond this sort of law when they are obeying orders (think Bloody Sunday). I am not trying to justify Bloody Sunday, quite the opposite: I wouldn’t want to see more of them.

I think this isn’t even a lesser evil argument, it’s a kind of consequentialist one. I don’t think you can judge de-ontologically (or ethically) another human for carrying out a legally correct order effectively in your name: you should go and face the judge personally. Another issue altogether is whether those who issued the order took a good decision.

Which brings us nearly back to the begining. What I am smelling here is that the divided command structure may be at the heart of this. It may be that this talk of an ‘elite corps’ may be the issue. These officers in the armed group should probably be under the command of the surveillance or other local group in whose assistance they are deployed. It is the other group who have the intelligence and other necessary information, and this may well have been what produced the tragedy.

The disinformation ? and not issuing denials about the coat, the barrier, etc, the moment the facts were established does count as disinformation ? is tasteless and stupid, but I think the key issue is the prospective homicide charge. This is tough, so I?ll just ask:

What would have to be true for the killing of this young man to count as homicide?

For instance, if the officers who shot him knew that there was no positive ID of him as a suspect, that would count as homicide, I think. And if they didn?t seek to establish if there was a positive ID before killing him, I think that would too, although the problem may lie elsewhere in the chain of command, depending on what the police procedures are.

So one thing that Ian Blair ought to do right now is explain to us, in detail, what those police procedures are, and exactly what the points of discretion along that chain of command are, even if this may hand a theoretical marginal advantage to terrorists in future confrontations.

Others will have their own views which it would be interesting to hear, but I think I would prefer a deontological answer, not Edward?s utilitarian argument about what good would be served by finding the officer guilty.

“Menezes’ mother, Maria, told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Monday that she wants the police who shot her son to be punished. “They ended not only my son’s life but mine as well,” she said from Brazil”

Nothing can console a mother’s grieving, but when I see the above, or read about the 15,000 pound offer, which may or may not have been well presented, but was not derisory in the sense that it was not compensation (that is still to come), but just something to help with immediate expenses, then I also start to worry about the anti-Blair campaign (do I try to be too even-handed). Whatever the issues, the shooting was not a calculated cold blooded murder, and no-one should be giving anyone the impression that this is where we are headed. So while the mother may well feel that someone should ‘pay’, there may be no one person to ‘pay’ in that sense. I hope her solicitors are communicating this, and not riding the un-popularity wave.

And the observer has this:

“Jean’s mother, Maria Otoni de Menezes, told The Observer this weekend. ‘I didn’t think it was right to talk about money so soon after my son’s death.’”

Is their interest in contact Maria de Menzes in these difficult moments to console the family, or if not is such a quote worth the intrusion.

and this, from the BBC:

“But the family rejected the offer, which is said to have caused them offence. Gareth Peirce, whose firm Birnberg Peirce is representing the Menezes family, described the approach by the Met as “disturbing”. It might have been a “deliberate attempt to ensnare families into inappropriate agreements or inappropriate decisions”, she said. Really I think you and I are not very far apart.”

Ensnarement, what is Gareth Pierce up to?. It is clear that a substantial sum will be paid, and that this was - perhaps ill-advisedly - a small initial gesture. The British state may be in a mess, but its still good for a bit more than 15,000 quid.

“I distinctly recall someone from the IPCC (I thought it was the chair) being intereviewed on radio a couple of days after the shooting and saying that the government should “shut up” and stop spinning the issue. I’d like to know more about that.”

Me too. I’m glad there are still attentive listeners around :).

“I suspect a police press release would have been issued pretty damn smartly to ensure that the true picture was known”.

I agree with this 100%. But the issue of the role of the press in facilitating the rumour mill should also be part of the investigative brief. This today - eg - in the daily mail:

“Sources at Scotland Yard have, however, claimed that many members of the force were aware by the afternoon of July 22 that Met marksmen had shot and killed an “innocent Brazilian tourist”. One said: “It seems incredible that Sir Ian did not know what many members of his force were openly discussing.”

This may or may not be true, one would hope the commission will discover, but who are these anonymous sources at Scotland Yard who obviously have it in for Ian Blair, are out to make trouble, and have been from the very start. Who are they, and what do they want, that’s the issue which is also going round and round in my head.

I think we agree on most of this.

I guess it is quite possible that blair is being set up as a fall guy. Someone is going to have to be sacrificed as I feel pretty sure that whatever report they do is going to find some pretty big holes in the operational procedures followed, compounded by unfortunate coincidence. And we have more than a little of the blame culture, rightly or wrongly, in the UK.

And I agree that really the substantive issue is how this came about, what procedures were followed, what were rules of engagement, what went wrong, why, and when key decisions were taken. All agreed. The main thing should be to actually try to make sure that in future such mistakes do not happen.

But I think there is plenty of reason to want to look a little closer at this disinformation business. Yes, I agree it’s not the main issue. But there are some very disturbing things in this case that suggest we should not just let it lie. I do listen to R4 a lot, and I distinctly recall someone from the IPCC (I thought it was the chair) being intereviewed on radio a couple of days after the shooting and saying that the government should “shut up” and stop spinning the issue. I’d like to know more about that.

And while I agree of course that the distinction between “explain” and “justify” matters, things can get blurred awfully quickly in the media world. There is no doubt that the “thick coat” line, and the “running from the police” lines, were certainly taken by some people as suggesting that the police acted “reasonably” - or at least, not obviously unreasonably, given the pressures they were working under. In short -it was useful veneer in the very short term.

Let’s turn things 180 degrees. Suppose the public perception in the immediate aftermath was that the police had simply shot an innocent man seated on the tube, when in fact the man shot had been armed and running from the police. I suspect a police press release would have been issued pretty damn smartly to ensure that the true picture was known. Or one from the Home Office. It’s the asymmetry that bothers me.