The headlines online today seem to be entirely the debate about the shooting of the Brazilian electrician at Stockwell Tube on Friday (see here.) I don’t think my position has changed since I wrote the Shooting To Kill post on Saturday. It is a tragedy that an innocent man was killed (and it still needs to be shown that the police were acting properly and following whatever guidelines are laid down for such events) but I suspect that that is what it was: a tragedy. A terrible chain of coincidence that an uninvolved person would be leaving a house under anti-terrorist surveillance, would be wearing a heavy jacket in high summer, would run rather than stop when challenged by armed police, would run into a Tube station and then onto a train.
Some of the comments I’ve seen from people have been bizarre. People who say, “This was an execution purely by the element that all reports state five shots were fired into the back of this young person's head,” haven’t really thought through what shoot-to-kill means. Then there’s, “The police can go around and just shoot anyone they like and answer to no one,” which forgets about the whole unhappy chain of coincidence I’ve mentioned above, plus the mandatory inquest and inquiries which will now follow.
My heart does go out to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, though. To have someone close die accidentally is a terrible thing, to have them killed ‘in error’ in a situation like this will add a whole other dimension to the anguish and pain.
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