I was upset rather than surprised this week to read of the further revelation of cover ups in the Menezes killing. Since the innocent Brazilian was murdered, the police statements have been remarkable for their contradictory nature and apparently deliberate obfuscation. As inconsistencies have slowly been exposed, I have found myself concluding that they were desperately trying to come up with a plausible reason for what was, and must be recognised as, an indefensible act.

Since the day of the fatal shooting, the following police-issued statements have been exposed as outright falsehoods:

1. Menezes was wearing a ‘bulky’ jacket: This flimsy piece of evidence seemed hardly enough to justify the atrocity which took place on the tube, and we now find out that he was, in fact, as his family claims, wearing a light-weight denim jacket.

2. He jumped the barrier and ran away from the police officers when they called to him to stop: He went through the barrier, as evidence of the machine readable ticket already showed, and went on to walk through the station, stopping to pick up a free paper as he went, and only broke into a run to catch a train.

3. The CCTV Cameras in the station were not working: In proving this to be a lie, the leak which is widely being reported also exposes the first two falsehoods, for it confirms them through the footage which was supposedly not in existence.

Now I don’t want to get all conspiracy theorist about this, but since America’s actions post 9/11 have caused little furore in the developed world, I was sort of expecting this kind of response from us. Fearing a string of human rights violations along the line of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib etc, I was relieved, when I attended the memorial event in Trafalgar Square, not to find the ‘we’ll hunt the fuckers down and kill them’ rhetoric which George Bush, with his close together eyes trying to ooze sincerity, spouted at that time.

But I find that we are too much alike. Too self-centred, scared of what is different, willing to believe that the brown people out there are our enemies, to see beyond the knee-jerk self-preservation reaction to what is the right thing to do. The lip service which has been given to working with the Muslim communities is bullshit. A Muslim friend of mine was telling me last week that her brother was waiting at King’s Cross for a taxi, and 11 passed with their lights on before he could get in one, and also of how many of her family’s community are furious at the blanket anti-Muslim feeling the bombings have created. We didn’t hate all of the Irish because of Sinn Fein, did we? Is that because they are broadly similar to us? Apart from the funny accents and the fact that they are a bit more religious.

And what has disappointed me most is not the expected cover up and fluff from politicians and police, but the public and media response. Why did every paper, from the supposedly left leaning Guardian to The Telegraph, so readily lap up the police story with no query? And why did the members of the public who witnessed bits of the pursuit and execution claim to have seen the fictitious bulky jacket, suspicious behaviour and evasive tactics supposedly displayed by the Brazilian? Were they suggestible because they felt intimidated by the police? Or under threat because of the recent attacks?

Whatever the answer to my questions, I am chilled to think of the deceit used to justify the string of mistakes which led to the death of this innocent man. From the fact that Menezes was in the block of flats, not the flat, that was under suspicion, and that because the officer on watch was in the toilet at the time he left, the CCTV footage was not checked against that of the suspects, to the two teams of policemen involved blaming each other for the shooting, to the news that Menezes was in a seat, and apprehended, when shot (i.e. he was incapacitated, and that should have meant that the ’shoot-to-kill policy became obsolete in that situation). From the fact that for the first time in the history of the Met an investigation into a fatal shooting wasn’t launched immediately, to the wholesale support of police actions by all of the political parties. From the fact that all the papers are reporting this story today, pointing out the lies and discrepancies, to the sorry truth that they all come to the conclusion that Sir Ian Blair should not resign. There seems to be no one who is willing to stand up and point out that this is not what we expect from a civilised police force which is supposed to be protecting us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2005 at 4:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

They buried Menezes today. As darkeel pointed out in a comment on Tuesday’s entry, yesterday his family gave a press conference in which they revealed that the Met has told them that Menezes was wearing a denim jacket, not a ‘bulky puffer jacket’, and that he used his Oyster card to swipe through the barriers, not vaulting them, as was initially reported.

(But it looks like the police may be redeeming themselves slightly. Following arrests in the last few days, we have been unable to leave our building here at work, because downstairs in Liverpool Street station the police cordons are out following the arrest of two people (reports vary – some say it is two women, some say a man and a woman) who are said to have links to last weeks’ attempted bombings. )

My concern at the lack of public protest at Menezes’ shooting is that if we don’t decry these actions, we condone them by proxy. Which is the current state in America – because of the self-interest of the many, the few (generally non-white, non-Christian, non-Rightwing) have their human rights systematically stripped from them. I really hope this does not become the case here, and am delighted to see that Amnesty International have called for a full investigation into Menezes’ killing.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 4:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Friday’s fatal mistake by a police officer in Stockwell station has been remarkably downplayed by the media. The first headline on all channels on Friday was the release of CCTV images of the failed bombers. At that point I began to be concerned about the authenticity of the intelligence that the police were acting on when they shot Menezes dead. Had he been either one of the bombers (the first media assumption) or implicated (the police justification for the shooting, put out shortly after the death), then I have no doubt that there would have been bombastic speeches in crowing press conferences from the Metropolitan Police and politicians.

Of course, we now know that he is innocent, and I see that the incident is not listed on the front page of any of the major news services’ web pages today. I have a great concern that there has been no outcry at the killing of this man. There has been a small vigil held by Brazilians, but the public seems unmoved by the death.

We were initially told that he was shot five times in the head, but reports out in the last few hours confirm that a senior police officer has told the complaints commission investigating the killing that it was 7 times in the head, and once in the shoulder. And while Sir Ian Blair defends the ’shoot to kill’ policy when dealing with known suicide bombers, and while there is justification in a policy dedicated to ensuring that a known suicide bomber is rendered incapable of detonating his explosive device, the guidelines when using such policy says that it is allowable if the suspect present an immediate and known threat to the public.

Far from this being the case, the truth is that Menezes left a block of flats which was under surveillance because the address of one of the flats in the block was written on a piece of paper found in one of the rucksacks holding the failed bombs. He was a pale-skinned Brazilian, and the footage of the would-be bombers had already been released at this stage, so the police would have known he was not one of them – they were all recognisably Asian or East African. He was wearing a heavy jacket, but carried no rucksack. The police did not approach him as he left the flats, while he travelled a ten minute bus ride or while they followed him on foot to the tube station, but rather let him enter the tube station, which was surely inadvisable if they believed he was a suicide bomber.

And while the one justification of the killing is that Menezes ran and jumped over the tube barriers when police shouted out to him, there are also question marks over that in that some witnesses don’t recall the policemen shouting out to him, and they were wearing plain clothes and carrying guns, so he would have been justified in feeling threatened by them, especially as it has been revealed that he was recently mugged on the underground.

A straw poll of people at work revealed that they feel comfortable with the killing, because we are ‘at war’. And would not be bothered if more innocent people died, although they weren’t entirely happy with his death. When I asked whether they would feel the same if it was their partners or families killed in this way, they laughed as though my question was ridiculous. I bit my tongue, and was grateful one more time, that I had handed in my notice.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 9:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.