License to Kill

[Russell Kanning]

If the first shot was valid then this would be a good shooting.

didn't they hold the guy and shoot him?

[KBCraig]

If the first shot was valid then this would be a good shooting.

didn't they hold the guy and shoot him?

What I read into it from the latest articles is that the first officer tackled him and pinned his arms (to prevent activating any kind of device), then someone started shooting at very close range.

This does not sound planned, and such a thing would result in some wall-to-wall peer counselling on any U.S. force.

Kevin

[Kat Kanning]

Met chief tried to stop shooting inquiry
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1551416,00.html
Rosie Cowan, Vikram Dodd and Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday August 18, 2005
The Guardian

Britain's top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday.

Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.

Article continues
According to senior police and Whitehall sources, Sir Ian was concerned that an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission could impact on national security and intelligence. He was also understood to be worried that an outside investigation would damage the morale of CO19, the elite firearms section working under enormous pressure.

"We did make an error, the IPCC should have been called in immediately," the police source said.

Later that same day, after an exchange of opinions between Sir Ian, the Home Office and the IPCC, the commissioner was overruled. A Whitehall insider said: "We won that battle. There's no ambiguity in the legislation, they had to do it."

But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.

It was also disclosed last night in documents leaked to ITV News that a soldier played a crucial role in the surveillance operation that led up to the shooting. The soldier was stationed outside a block of flats where police believed two terrorist suspects lived.

At a key moment in the operation, the soldier was in the process of relieving himself and thus could not turn on his video camera. "I could not confirm whether he was or was not either of our subjects," the soldier later reported, according to the ITV News documents. But he added to others in the surveillance team: "It would be worth somebody else having a look."

This appeared to set in train a chain of events in which Mr de Menezes was followed on to a bus and to the Stockwell tube station, where another two-man surveillance team identified the Brazilian to a police firearms squad. At the point of the shooting, seven undercover officers were all inside the tube carriage within metres of Mr de Menezes.

In a further puzzle, the soldier staking out the block of flats identified Mr de Menezes as he left the building as IC1 -police terminology for ethnic white. Yet the suspected Stockwell bomber had already been captured on CCTV and was known not to be white.

Scotland Yard was making no official comment last night, although senior sources stood by Sir Ian, insisting he had spoken in good faith about the shooting.

Harriet Wistrich, lawyer for the de Menezes family, said: "Sir Ian Blair should resign. The lies that appear to have been put out, like the statement from Sir Ian Blair, for instance, are clearly wrong. And nobody has stepped in to correct the lies.

"From the beginning, the most senior of police officers and government ministers, including the prime minister, claimed the death of Jean Charles to be an unfortunate accident occurring in the context of an entirely legitimate, justifiable, lawful and necessary policy.

"In the context of the lies now revealed, that claim has become even less sustainable and even more alarming."

Speaking from Brazil, Mr de Menezes's cousin, Alex Alves Pereira, said: "The officers who have done this have to be sent to jail for life because it's murder and the people who gave them the order to shoot must be punished. They should lock them up and throw away the key. They murdered him."

Mr Pereira added that both Sir Ian and Tony Blair shared the officers' culpability. "They are the really guilty ones," he said.

Whitehall sources disclosed that members of the army's new Special Reconnaissance Regiment had been involved in the surveillance operation. The precise role of the soldiers is unclear.

Whitehall officials said the operation had been "police-led" and that all the commands had been issued by police officers.

In the weeks since the shooting, Sir Ian has vigorously defended both the new shoot-to-kill policy as regards suspected suicide bombers, and the firearms officers involved in Mr de Menezes's death.

"Whatever else they were doing, they clearly thought they were faced with a suicide bomber and they were running towards him," he told the Metropolitan Police Authority on July 28. "That is cold courage of an extraordinary sort."

He insisted there was "nothing cavalier or capricious" about the operation, stressing the only way to stop a suicide bomber was to shoot him in the head, rather than risk setting off a device strapped around his body.

On the day, Sir Ian, who described the shooting as "directly linked" to the anti-terrorist operation, said: "Any death is deeply regrettable but as I understand it, the man was challenged and refused to obey instructions."

[ethanpooley]

I'm suprised by the level of disagreement here. Police have rules of engagement, and what we are really discussing is what those rules of engagement should be. For engaging with deadly force I don't see how those rules can allow engagement except when:

1. There is evidence *beyond a reasonable doubt* that the subject intends to cause deadly harm to another. This includes explicit or obviously implied threats by the subject to do so.
   AND
2. There is no other way to stop the subject.

In the situation being discussed there was certainly not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, if only because, notwithstanding everything else they *thought* they knew, they had no good evidence that the man had a bomb on him at that particular time. A heavy coat does not cut it and anyone who thinks it does scares the heck out of me. Running from the police does not cut it (especially if he's a bomber... he's always going to run if a SWAT team comes after him!). Letting 100 more people die in a bombing because the evidence just wasn't quite good enough is not a horrific thing; it's the sign of a free society. I think people are brainwashed by hollywood. In the movies it is very rare to see rules of engagement followed; running from a cop for any reason is enough to get shot at. Even in the military the peacetime rules of engagement for security forces are just as strict, even in protecting Top Secret stuff. Unless you are saving a life, you can't shoot. The only exceptions in peactime that I know of are for certain higher-than-TS items and situations involving nuclear weapons. And that is even if you are sure that it's a bad guy you are aiming at!

[lildog]

Ethan, it?s not as simple as the two rules you put out there.  Aside from the fact this happened in England vs. the US I?m going to discuss US law only for a moment because I?m admittedly ignorant of English law.

First off in 1985 the US supreme court clarified the use of deadly force saying "Whenever an officer restrains the freedom of a person to walk away, he has seized that person . . . there can be no question that application of deadly force is a seizure subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment."

This means they can?t just shoot for the sake of keeping you from running away.

In 1989 in the case Graham v. Connor they explored what is ?reasonable?, which is to say they need to put the situation in perspective.  Shooting an unarmed man as he walked down the street just because he quickly reached into his jacket is not reasonable? but when staking out a building where a known criminal lives, then confronting someone fitting that description appears and is told to holt immediately makes a move for his jacket would be reasonable.

As you state that there has to be ?evidence *beyond a reasonable doubt* that the subject intends to cause deadly harm to another? is just wrong and would force police to wait until a criminal actually pulls out a gun then shoots first proving it?s a real gun and not a toy.  The 1989 case came to the conclusion that this would be unreasonable.

There are even more cases that explain that if someone does not comply with an arrest police can use the appropriate amount of force needed to subdue and arrest the person.

So now going back to the case at hand in England, saying it fell under US law the question comes down to what actually happened at the scene.  Early reports were that the guy was in a bulky coat with wires hanging from it, he fit the description of someone they were looking for, he was coming out of a house staked out as a suspects house, he jumped the gate, ran toward a subway car when police asked him to stop and the subway was the scene of two prior bombings with in just a couple days prior to the shooting.  Based on all of that the shooting sounded as if it would have been justified as reasonable as he could very well have been trying to bomb another subway car.

But since then new facts have surfaced? he did NOT have the bulky coat (but he did have a coat never the less) and more importantly he was in the process of being subdued when police shoot.  What caused the first officer to shoot?  That question and that question alone will tell if this is a justified shooting or not.

Even with a light jacket, if there were visible wires, he was resisting arrest and if he made a sudden move towards his jacket where the wires could be seen then I would say it would be totally reasonable for an officer to suspect he was trying to set off a bomb under his coat.

[Russell Kanning]

Even with a light jacket, if there were visible wires, he was resisting arrest and if he made a sudden move towards his jacket where the wires could be seen then I would say it would be totally reasonable for an officer to suspect he was trying to set off a bomb under his coat.

He didn't do any of that .... so why did they shoot him?

[president]

In the US we have the 2nd amendment:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

"Arms" would include suicide bombs.

[president]

Even with a light jacket, if there were visible wires, he was resisting arrest and if he made a sudden move towards his jacket where the wires could be seen then I would say it would be totally reasonable for an officer to suspect he was trying to set off a bomb under his coat.

He didn't do any of that .... so why did they shoot him?

They got scared. Don't you know that scared cops are allowed to kill people?

[lildog]

Even with a light jacket, if there were visible wires, he was resisting arrest and if he made a sudden move towards his jacket where the wires could be seen then I would say it would be totally reasonable for an officer to suspect he was trying to set off a bomb under his coat.

He didn't do any of that .... so why did they shoot him?

From the last updated story posted about this:

"He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 officers. I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side.

"I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting. I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage."

We don't know if he did any of that.  Whatever triggered the first shot happened as he was pushed back into the seat.  Since it sounds like there is security video of this incident that and that alone will tell if he made a move or not.

The statement that he advanced toward the officers can also be telling... HOW did he advance?  Was he charging them or slowly walking following their commands?

I see a lot of unanswer questions which would determin if this shooting was right or wrong.

[ethanpooley]

but when staking out a building where a known criminal lives, then confronting someone fitting that description appears and is told to halt immediately makes a move for his jacket would be reasonable.

Court decisions don't carry a lot of weight on this board as you may have noticed. This is not anywhere near reasonable in my book. Nobody is forced to be a police officer and they are pretty well paid. Part of the job is putting your life at risk in such situations until you are sure of what the subject is doing.

Regarding the toy gun situation, I don't see why you have to wait until the gun is fired to believe it is real. When somebody in a normal everyday situation pulls a realistic-looking gun out of their coat the assumption is that it is real. The only decent look-alikes are airsoft guns or collectors replicas and not many people pack them around all day under their coats. Nobody, including me, is going to get on a cop's case for assuming that anything that looks like a real firearm IS a real firearm. But assuming that anything that I am attempting to pull from a jacket pocket is a firearm is a huge leap from that. What if it's a phone? Heck, what if it's pepper spray or a Taser? If it's non-lethal I should be able to use it against the police without getting shot, right? What if it's a knife? Even that is no reason to shoot me from range! What if it's drugs that I'm going to toss down a storm drain?

The example is doubly flawed because you only require that he "fit the description." So the cops aren't even sure that this is the criminal! If he's not the criminal he could have all kinds of additional reasons for reaching quickly into his pocket. As far as I am concerned you've just described rules of engagement that are responsible for the kinds of mistakes we are trying to keep from happening.

[Ron Helwig]

but when staking out a building where a known criminal lives, then confronting someone fitting that description appears and is told to halt immediately makes a move for his jacket would be reasonable.

Court decisions don't carry a lot of weight on this board as you may have noticed. This is not anywhere near reasonable in my book. Nobody is forced to be a police officer and they are pretty well paid. Part of the job is putting your life at risk in such situations until you are sure of what the subject is doing.

Regarding the toy gun situation, I don't see why you have to wait until the gun is fired to believe it is real. When somebody in a normal everyday situation pulls a realistic-looking gun out of their coat the assumption is that it is real. The only decent look-alikes are airsoft guns or collectors replicas and not many people pack them around all day under their coats. Nobody, including me, is going to get on a cop's case for assuming that anything that looks like a real firearm IS a real firearm. But assuming that anything that I am attempting to pull from a jacket pocket is a firearm is a huge leap from that. What if it's a phone? Heck, what if it's pepper spray or a Taser? If it's non-lethal I should be able to use it against the police without getting shot, right? What if it's a knife? Even that is no reason to shoot me from range! What if it's drugs that I'm going to toss down a storm drain?

The example is doubly flawed because you only require that he "fit the description." So the cops aren't even sure that this is the criminal! If he's not the criminal he could have all kinds of additional reasons for reaching quickly into his pocket. As far as I am concerned you've just described rules of engagement that are responsible for the kinds of mistakes we are trying to keep from happening.

What if its an undercover cop reaching for his badge 

[KBCraig]

What I find curious is that the video is at odds with witness statements about him running like a scared rabbit. And those witnesses were critical of the police, so it's not like they were being used as justification for use of force.

[ethanpooley]

What if its an undercover cop reaching for his badge 

Yeah I was going to mention that too, but I think an undercover cop would know better than to make a quick move. *I* would know better than to make a quick move, I just shouldn't have to.

[ethanpooley]

KBCraig, I'd be interested to hear your take on appropriate rules of engagement.

[lildog]

What if its an undercover cop reaching for his badge 

If it were another cop I would hope they would be sensible enough not to make a quick move for it.  They should put their hands up where the other officers can see them and say loudly enough to be heard something like "don't shoot I'm a cop, I'm slowly going to reach in and get my badge".