Reflections of a stormy petrel

I know that there is no reasoning with American gun nuts, and that by now they are already working on several different apologies for what follows. But to the rest of us...

The National Rifle Association wants an armed policeman in every American school and compulsory registration for every person diagnosed with a mental illness. All because unfettered gun ownership is so much on the side of Freedom. And because they are so very very opposed to Big Government.

The reaction of London's emergency services to the four bombs exploded across its public transport system last July, and to the four more attempted two weeks later, struck everyone as exemplary. While the Health Service dealt swiftly and efficiently with the wounded, the police, starting from total ignorance about causes and suspects, and in spite of tremendous material difficulties especially about the Russell Square explosion, managed in a few days to identify a number of suspects and accomplices, and, in the case of the failed bombs, to round them up in short order. This was a first-rate feat of investigation, achieved by unsparing use of resources (at the height of the investigation, 5,000 policemen were involved), high class detecting technology, massive support from the public, and that element of good luck that sometimes helps even a deserving cause.

So when I heard that a man had been shot down by armed police in the course of the investigation, I was tempted, as I dare say millions of others were tempted, to say: "Another gone to meet his 72 virgins. Too, too bad." I was tempted; but, as readers of this blog can testify, I did not say it. I was held back, at first, by a feeling without a name, so thin as hardly to be distinguished from mere laziness; but which, as time went by, grew into a slowly swelling and and gathering cloud of doubts.

I would say that it was the police's prolonged silence - I think it was a good couple of days before anyone said anything about the man's death - that made me uneasy; or, rather, that caused a crawling, increasingly unpleasant sense of recognition. I had seen that sequence of events take place before - first the announcement of the shooting, then the dead silence. And indeed, from the moment that the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, went on TV to declare the dead man's identity and give the first few detail, events followed each other with the inevitability of a script. The man turned out to be innocent. The police said little, but, in a standard pattern of deception, sources close to them - in this case, the pathologist who had performed the first and (irregularly) only post mortem - released details that made the victim sound rash, even provocative - he wore a bulky jacket - he had run from the police - he had vaulted the ticket barrier. The family expressed doubts - the man had been stopped by the police before - he was law-abiding - he had no such jacket. Then an avalanche of evidence from all sides had simply buried the police version of events, leaving us with one simple certainty: a police marksman had approached a wholly innocent, inoffensive man who had just quietly sat down in a Tube seat, and, in front of a wagon full of people, had fired eleven rounds of ammunition at his head at point-blank range.

By the time this became clear, I was not in the least surprised. You see, this is a regular pattern of behaviour of the weapons unit of the Metropolitan Police. This case has resonated across the world, and (as I said to a friend a few days ago) I would not want to be the spokesman who tries to explain this assasination to 180 million angry Brazilians; but to those of us who pay attention to local events here in London - a city that is, after all, not only a world metropolis and setting of great works of literature, not only the capital of an ancient empire that has left its marks across the planet, but also the familiar setting of domestic life for eight million people - the script, the unleashed series of events, had a loathsome kind of familiarity. There was the case of that professional criminal who was riddled by police bullets as he lay half-asleep, naked and helpless in his girlfriend's bed. Sure, he was a villain; but short of being handed to them bound hand and foot, there was no imaginable circumstance in which he could have been less ready to do any harm to anyone. And sure, this was a gangster's girlfriend; but was that any reason to awaken her to the crash of a door being broken down, the roar of gunfire, the spurting of the blood of the man she had been lying with, staining her from top to toe as he was murdered in her bed, in front of her eyes?

Then there was the Harry Stanley case. Some six years ago, a carpenter called Harry Stanley was walking along the street with a table leg in a clear plastic bag. Some hysterical moron, whose name was never made public, took the table leg for a shotgun (an easy mistake to make, you will agree, if you are blind and paranoid) and called the police. The Weapons Squad came, and, without so much as telling him to halt, and in spite of the fact that the supposed shotgun hung harmless in a plastic bag and could not possibly have been pointed at them, let alone fired, shot him dead like a dog. It was their bad luck that Harry Stanley left a widow and five children, all with indomitable tempers and a justified sense of grievance, who have been pursuing them through the courts ever since. They have not appreciated the way that the Metropolitan Police have waged a genuine campaign of vilification against Harry Stanley; and that they, in spite of losing court case after court case because of the evidence of their misconduct, have not so far paid her a penny compensation.

Recently, a timid attempt to discipline - five years after their crime! - the officers/assassins responsible, has provoked an outright mutiny in the ranks of the Weapons Squad. If I had been Sir Ian Blair, I would have taken the opportunity, said "don't let the door hit you on the way out," and sacked them all; instead of which, Sir Ian, who has brutally persecuted some ordinary officers guilty of mild anti-Islamic jokes, caved in like the most craven of cowards, and let himself be used as the mouthpiece of these gon-toting scum.

This is not the only such case; indeed, a man was on TV the other day to claim that the same kind of thing had happened to him - only, he had survived - twenty-five years ago. It is a regular pattern of behaviour by the Metropolitan armed unit. And it is difficult to eradicate. Unlike many other countries, Britain has no national police services. Police units and command are highly localized, dispersed in 43 county units, each practically independent. It follows that when a police unit goes really, seriously bad (and it has been known to happen; as in the case of the infamous West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad), it is very difficult to simply break it up, as people do in other police forces, by dismissing a few and reassigning the rest elsewhere in the country. The only thing that can honestly be done is what Sir Ian Blair was too craven to do - dismiss the lot, and start again.

And there is a further and even more fundamental problem, in my view. It is a matter of pride for the British that their police are not, except for Northern Ireland, armed. But having taken these cases into consideration, it seems to me all too evident that this has led to a mentality where to call in the armed police means that you are supposed to kill someone; that these men have been trained to kill their quarry, and that they do not understand any other use for their guns. I have to wonder whether arming the whole force, like every other police force in the free world is armed, would not dilute this murderous mentality and actually make Londoners safer in their streets.