The Shooting of Mark Duggan

A year ago I wrote here about the relaxed approach the IPCC have to the use of deadly force by police officers, in an article about the shooting of Harry Stanley. He was killed basically because the armed officers were told he had a weapon and so accepted it as a fact and further assumed that he would use it. So when he turned round on hearing 'Stop! Armed Police' having no idea who they were shouting at, the police interpreted it as his intention to shoot them and so opened fire and killed him. By the uncritical report they produced, it is clear the IPCC are happy with this type of police action and the public should expect it to happen routinely. As is possibly the case in the shooting of Mark Duggan. Here the bullet that hit a policeman was from a policemen (chump score 1) and that by Sunday they had found a weapon that was not 'a police weapon'. So not the easy to find gun clearly seen by armed officers thus fearing for their lives who opened fire. Chump score 2. The evasive nature of the police response to questions about the shooting clearly indicates they know something didn't go right. (Bearing in mind that the police shooting someone is never seen as a failure. The thought of even an armed man being arrested rather than shot is completely off the scale for them, it seems).

As the IPCC and the police would see such outrageous criticism as anti-police let me give some outrageous perspective. The police issue 'hollow-point' ammunition to their armed units. Hollow-point has also been called 'dum-dum' and is outlawed by the Geneva Convention for military use. The reason it is used at all is that as the bullet's head collapses it causes a bigger wound (more likely to 'take down' a target) and also loses energy more quickly (so less likely to injure anyone else by passing through a target). I fully support the use of this ammunition as it helps to reduce the danger of an armed suspect to the police officers or members of the public in the vicinity. The police however should  restrict their shooting to situations where they know there is a clear and present danger and the IPCC should have the guts to criticise them when they don't