[Closed] No justice for the family of Jean Charles de Menezes

that to me says that the shooting had a very sinister undertone

And what's that?

I think Hanlon's Razor probably applies here.

Awful thing to happen but I'm not really sure what 'justice' would look like here.

As thegreatape mentioned..

[i]Was it alleged that they colluded to lie about this incident, or was it that questions and concerns were raised about the established and long standing practice of them debriefing and writing up their notes together rather than doing so in isolation? [/i]

I seem to understand that it helps with post-incident de-stressing for the chaps at the sharp end. Or would you rather they go out on a subsequent job pre-stressed?

that first shot should have finished him off...these officers are supposed to be trained so they should not have missed...if they believed him to be a terrorist threat then that first shot should have been a kill shot that totally incapacitates the suspect...then there would not have been a reason to fire 10 more shots...seven of which went into his head and body....that to me says that the shooting had a very sinister undertone

And you say that as an experienced Armed Response officer do you? If they believe the suspect has not been incapacitated then they have every reason to continue firing. For reference incapacitation does not necessarily come with death, muscle spasms could lead to post mortem, detonation from what I understand so any bomb suspect will be treated with such caution. If he was twitching and I was standing there you can be bloody sure I'd be making sure.

Regardless of any other failures that day it still comes down to what is done in the moment you believe the suspect is about to act. The armed response were only going with the info they had, they were set up to fail IMO.

even they should have realised that after that first head shot that he had been stopped...

There are plenty cases of people surviving head shots. Once the decision is made to fire there isn't much point just firing once.

Gunshot wound head trauma is fatal about 90 percent of the time,

http://www.aans.org/Patient%20Information/Conditions%20and%20Treatments/Gunshot%20Wound%20Head%20Trauma.aspx

I think 'through the brain stem' applies, to stop any chance of a last-grasp detonation.

I think 'through the brain stem' applies, to stop any chance of a last-grasp detonation.

not much use if it's a "dead mans handle" detonator. Or are they clairvoyant too ?

[i]not much use if it's a "dead mans handle" detonator[/i]

I always wondered that - surely having the detontaion occur when a trigger is released would be the 'preferred' method?

I don't really see that the number of bullets used makes any material difference. They intended to kill him as they had been led to believe he was a suicide bomber. They carried out their intention.

What difference does it make whether they used 1, 3 or 100 bullets?

Once the decision is made to fire there isn't much point just firing once.

Maybe stop for a cuppa and fill in an H&S form between each shot as well?

The 'reassess' is clearly a continuous process, you would expect anyone to shoot until the (perceived) threat was no longer a threat, that would also be entirely within the law on the use of force in self defence.

The 'reassess' is clearly a continuous process, you would expect anyone to shoot until the (perceived) threat was no longer a threat

Redefine the question 'What would justice look like?'

Sure as hell to me doesn't mean the guy pulling the trigger gets banged up if they were acting on orders and provided intelligence. What justice should look like is the Police learning and taking steps to ensure that it never happens again.

On a related note I've just finished read Hack Attack about the Murdoch press and the phone hacking. Far far more disturbing than the actual hacking was the police to the very top actively blocking any proper investigation and deliberately ignoring evidence.

In this case it's the not standing up and saying we ****ed up that is totally unforgivable. Of course mistakes will happen and innocent people may die but I think most of us could probably accept that if there were honesty after the event. That honesty though probably requires that people are not prosecuted for mistakes in these situations unless their individual behaviour is reckless. I don't think personally that any form of punishment for the officers who fired those shots will match the punishment of living the rest of their lives with the knowledge of what they have done.
I hope that if it happened to a member of my family then the simple honest truth would be enough for me. In this case though that will never be enough for his family because they didn't get it straight away. It's too late for anyone to tell them we got this horribly wrong, they were lied too from the beginning and now nothing that anyone does or says will resolve this for them.
I don't even think jail sentences for all those involved would resolve it for them.
The greatest crime in this is for me is not his killing but that his life was not considered worth honesty afterwards.

To be sure to incapacitate someone completely (edit: suicide bombers are a special case for what should be obvious reasons) you have to destroy their cerebellum.

Even if you are some sort of ninja hollywood movie style shooting master (which I don't think _anyone_ could be when faced at arms length with someone you believe to be a suicide bomber) thats not easy, but you have to be sure.

So you keep shooting until you are.

To put it another way, if they'd shot him only once and then stood around waiting to see what happened; it would strongly imply that they knew he wasn't a suicide bomber at all.

I really feel for the guy who died and his family, but I also feel for the people on the ground who had to do that (in cold blood) to another human being.

And you say that as an experienced Armed Response officer do you?

no i'm not but i'm trying to apply some sort of logic into what i understand happened.
if he was an suicide bobmber then i assume he would have tried to detonate as soon ash the frist officer grabbed him and shoved him back in his seat...if he was unable to do so at that time then it would be justified to fire a shot at him to try and stop him.
i presume that the first shot fired was the one that hit his shoulder thus the further need to fire at his head.
using hollow point rounds which are intended to cause more soft tissue damage then its understandable that if after the first shot to the head he was moving around then a another shot to the head is warranted...but from close range of say a few feet or even closer the first shot to the head pretty much should have finished him off using the standard issue Glock 17 handgun from a trained firearms officer...how many shots to the head does it take at such close range to kill a man??
also if they weren't to know what type of detonation device the suspect could have been carrying...was it a wise move to shoot him first? if he did have a dead mans trigger then shooting him would have had the opposite effect of their objective of stopping him from detonating an explosive device

Gonzy, Maybe if you think about it this way:

The specific aim of the police was not to kill him, it was to incapacitate him.

The second implies the first, but is not the point of the exercise.

It also requires more bullets.

Sure as hell to me doesn't mean the guy pulling the trigger gets banged up if they were acting on orders and provided intelligence. What justice should look like is the Police learning and taking steps to ensure that it never happens again.

those two things are not mutually exclusive. To my (admittedly untrained and inexpert) eye 11 shots fired by two men holding down a third at close range would need careful and intense scrutiny, and very clear and detailed explanation. Either they are highly trained and recognise when some-one is no-longer a threat, or they continue firing "to make sure" in which case they are far from expert and should have no business being there.

this whole operation tends towards the "****ed up from the get go" which at the very least (to my mind) given that an innocent man has been brutally murdered, some goal time for some-one.

Nickc, oh yeah, of course.
The police should be able to tell from several feet away using "expert training" something that a doctor would be hard pushed to tell for sure.

If the police are ever as skilled as you apparently think they ought to be, the NHS would be able to ask for their assistance with faster tonsillectomies.

As I said above, I have every sympathy for the victim and his family. But whatever went wrong in this situation, the ugly bit at the end with the guns is not the bit that needs to be looked at with the most critical eye.

But whatever went wrong in this situation, the ugly bit at the end with the guns is not the bit that needs to be looked at with the most critical eye.

all of it needs to be looked at.
the operation was doomed from the start due to incompetence on the ground and at the control desk.
poor intel was fed back and then used to base an opinion that he was a suspect and needed to be stopped which led to his death.
the fact that they had 3 officers following him for some time and were presented with time and opportunity to stop him before he entered stockwell station needs to looked at.
did the officers identify themselves before or after they shot him. according to the officer who initally grabbed him no identification of police presence was made until after the first shot was fired
the fact that he was shot 7 times i the head at very close range whilst being "pinned" down should also be reviewed.
they didnt even know for sure that he was a terrorist because the officer who initially identified couldnt corroborate it because he was busy taking a piss.
even after that he was a suspect but not confirmed as a would be bomber...was enough done to ascertain the fact that he did in fact have explosives on his person?
i can accept the policy that headshots are the best way of stopping would be bombers from detonating devices...but in this instance the accounts of the first officer there (Hotel3), after he had pointed him out on the train, de manezes got up from his seat. the officer then went to grab him and pushed him pack into his seat. if de menezes was a bomber then he would have made a play for the detonator rather than standing up and even when he was grabbed would have still made an attempt to detonate. this never happened. the armed officers and the officer there should have assessed this as it should have been part of their training and thought to themselves that if he was a bomber then his actions dont come across as that...but instead they went in with guns blazing.

i can accept the policy that headshots are the best way of stopping would be bombers from detonating devices...but in this instance the accounts of the first officer there (Hotel3), after he had pointed him out on the train, de manezes got up from his seat. the officer then went to grab him and pushed him pack into his seat. if de menezes was a bomber then he would have made a play for the detonator rather than standing up and even when he was grabbed would have still made an attempt to detonate. this never happened. the armed officers and the officer there should have assessed this as it should have been part of their training and thought to themselves that if he was a bomber then his actions dont come across as that...but instead they went in with guns blazing.

Look up the difference between fast and slow thinking.

Fast thinking is you putting to together all the information you have available and drawing a conclusion and acting on it. Slow thinking is applying a second layer of scrutiny and logic to that.

He gets up (to run away?) - fast thinking - looks guilty, must be the bomber. Given time for slow thinking, hindsight and less adrenaline your hypothesis makes perfect sense, but that's not how you would have reacted in the situation.

Plenty of similar cock up happen, there was one where maintenance workers left the covers open on a passenger jet, they then went back at the end of the shift, checked the wrong plane, assumed someone else must have both fixed the problem they'd opened them to fix, closed them and wondered off. The Co-pilot on his checks assumed they were supposed to be like that as the maintenance record was signed off. Lo and behold the covers got ripped off shortly after takeoff an the plane had to land. That's fast thinking, see something, rationalize it, act on it as fact. It's how brains work, we like everything to make sense, and they had a whole shift (and the clue that the faults had disappeared and the covers locked shut)to realize their mistake.

also if they weren't to know what type of detonation device the suspect could have been carrying...was it a wise move to shoot him first? if he did have a dead mans trigger then shooting him would have had the opposite effect of their objective of stopping him from detonating an explosive device

I'm probably a far too wishy washy yogurt weaving ,liberal but I don't think that everyone is a psychopath and I apply that same faith in people to the police officers.

There were clearly some systemic failures, and the situation spiraled out of control. But I agree with the conclusions of the investigation, no individual was at fault, there were procedural problems, and convenient 'facts' were repeated to support what people probably believed which later turned out to be wrong, but to hold individuals accountable would require an identified individual to have acted maliciously, not to have just followed a flawed procedure.

There were clearly some systemic failures, and the situation spiraled out of control. But I agree with the conclusions of the investigation, no individual was at fault, there were procedural problems, and convenient 'facts' were repeated to support what people probably believed which later turned out to be wrong, but to hold individuals accountable would require an identified individual to have acted maliciously, not to have just followed a flawed procedure.

fair point and i agree with this....it was a systematic cock up that put people in situations they didnt want to be in to make fatal decisions that would forever be scrutinised....which ultimately led to the death of an innocent man

Again people are forgetting the high stress environment post 7/7, as I understand it training was to shoot in the head multiple times to reduce risk of detonating a suicide bomb/vest. If you are a police office sat on top of what you think is a live bomb you are not going to take too many chances.

As I said it was a terrible mistake made worse by the collusion afterwards. People are not perfect and nothing including policing will be error free. The European court said the matter was at an end, we in the UK have no bearing on its judgements so an independent court has said the matter is at an end.

EDIT: again tomrepeat myself but @gonzy is totally correct there where a large number of errors even letting him get anywhere near the tube. He should have been stopped at gun point immediately upon leaving the flats and his id checked. However it takes a very brave police officer to confront a potentail bomber at the very close range required with a hand gun. If he is a bomber you are dead unkess you can surprise him

He should have been stopped at gun point immediately upon leaving the flats and his id checked. However it takes a very brave police officer to confront a potentail bomber at the very close range required with a hand gun. If he is a bomber you are dead unkess you can surprise him

IIRC the surveillance team weren't authorised to do this at the time because they weren't neccesarily trained to do this being surveillance operatives, they were only armed with handguns and the hard stop team were laid up to far away to respond quickly, again if IIRC the i.d upon him leaving the flat was tentative so any stop immediatley outside the flat would've compromised the operation possibly leading to a gretaer loss of life and as you say how do you surprise a suicide bomber at close range. Systematic failures, a new dynamic risk that through up situations and stresses (lack of resources, dealing with suicide bombers etc) that had not been encountered before and just plain old bad luck all played a part imho

As I recall, the officers on scene were only tasked initially with tailing him, though were armed for thier own protection (and bearing in mind that if it had been him, he could have led them to co-conspirators, so there was a judgement call to be made whether he was 'about to carry out an attack' or potentially 'leading us to the rats nest'

Thus when it became clear that he was headed for the tube, there was another judgement call to make whether to stop him with the less trained 'armed' officers or and wait for the specialist firearms team, who were inbound, and the decision was made since their arrival was imminent.

We can only imagine the uproar from the usual suspects if he had been shot, or indeed exploded, and it came to light that the officers who stopped him were not specialist firearm officers who had been trained in how to deal with suicide bombers, but were only armed for their own self defence.

This one still shocks me..

[url= http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/05/nickdavies1 ]From Prison[/url]

A small bird whispered in my ear that the police shooters werent actually police firearms officers. Alledgedly there simply were not enough officers to cover the transport network so other men with guns were out and about that day.
Do not ask me how I know this and i cant prove it anyway

Justice was done. Just because the outcome doesn't suit someone doesn't mean it that things are not correct. If we went along that road there could never be justice as someone would always be unhappy.
And the above post is just s*** stirring.

Really I do not understand the attempts to blame the shooters in this . They followed what they were told was a human bomb underground from the second they entered the tube they believed if they messed up they and dozens of others were dead .
As I understand it the training for dealing with suicide bombers is pretty clear you kill them and you make sure they are dead as quickly and ruthlessly as possible destroying any ability to last gasp trigger the bomb. In that light for me the shooters are heros tragically wrong acting on flawed information but heros . The blame and fault is in the systems and decisions that sent them underground with the Intel that they had and for that a legal finding of culpability has been made.

A small bird whispered in my ear that the police shooters werent actually police firearms officers.

There was a lot of speculation it was the SRR, due to the tools that where used for the job, yes..