Thursday 26 March 2015

Mark Duggan Lawfully Shot

It comes as no surprise whatsoever that the career criminal Mark Duggan was shot and killed quite lawfully, by armed police officers. There doesn't seem to be a situation in which our superb police ever shoot people wrongly.

Sure there have been completely innocent people shot, and the deranged man with a gun, shot to hurry things up, and the baddies who should have had a gun, though on this occasion didn't, but they were all shot with the best intentions and purest of motives.

Mark Duggan put himself in harms way when he devoted himself to a life of violent crime. The police killed him, but it could so easily have been another gang, or a street argument. He chose to play with fire and he got burnt.

I don't have a huge amount of sympathy that he found himself in front of armed police and I'm not that concerned that he was shot. I am however, always concerned that our police do things the right way and for the right reasons. Usually these days you can assume they won't. Firearms officers really do not need to be in that kind of culture.

I understand that people like the Met Commissioner are probably too dim to understand the consequences down the line of their inept, ideology driven version of policing. But in a free society (which clearly he despises) we demand better.

So, my problem, as ever is the IPCC and their protection racket and the way armed police deploy, act, are led and when they fire their weapons. With the Duggan case, the main issue for the IPCC to gloss over is the actual shooting, most of the rest is self evidently easily supported.

The summary is this; the police knew Duggan was involved in using firearms, they knew on this day he was going to acquire a firearm. They even seem to be aware that this fatal cab journey was to pick up a gun. So a team of firearms officers (CO19) was scrambled to intercept him.

They decided to use a tactic known as 'hard stop', which involves blocking in the vehicle a target is in with police cars and apprehending the suspect at gunpoint. When you know where he is going, I'm not entirely sure you need to do this, but it is what they decided on. I would think the best way to apprehend someone would be to present them, in a calm situation with a fait accompli. They are caught, by armed police and only the terminally insane would then react.

The best way to get an unpredictable result I would guess would be to surprise and disorient an armed man. He is likely to make an instinctive self preservation movement that may include firing a weapon (in defence as he would see it), to run, or to dispose of the weapon. He may, calmly stop what he is doing and raise his hands. Though that is akin to not jumping when someone pops a balloon.

Duggan looked to escape (his police profile refers to him as an escaper, that is, someone liable to try to escape). So the entirely unforeseen action of Duggan exiting the vehicle no doubt increased the tension in the police officers. As the lead car was blocking the pavement and with a wall and railings alongside, Duggan could only run in the direction of two police cars behind the taxi.

At this point, the police allege, Duggan reached inside his jacket and produced a gun, which he was raising when one of the officers fired two shots. One of these rounds proved fatal to Duggan and also struck a police officer. The sort of thing that happens when you surround someone and start shooting. Possibly better to deploy with tactical forethought but hey, ideal worlds and all that.

The report has the officer saying he could see the gun and that it was being raised towards him. Now I don't care if Duggan was going to throw it away or whatever, that alone would justify opening fire. You know he has a gun, there it is, fire.

Only, the photo of the weapon as found 4.35 metres from the taxi is a picture of a sock. Because the gun was in a sock. So if the officer had said 'I saw him reach for and produce a sock' that would have been factually accurate. But he said he saw a gun. This is a bit of semantics as I accept that the intelligence was good and in the split second and with the suspect moving, he should expect to get shot. Gun, gun in a sock, it doesn't matter.

But the report presses many areas on detail, yet here it accepts the officer saw a gun. Which didn't then just drop to the ground apparently. And a police officer caught Duggan before he hit the ground too. Which suggests even further than he was unlikely to escape, so close were they.

Mark Duggan is dead for two reasons. Firstly because he chose to become involved in criminal behaviour with firearms, but also due to the faulty tactics of our armed police. And the report makes clear that neither the police nor the IPCC care.

http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documents/investigation_commissioner_reports/IPCC-investigation-report-fatal-shooting-of-MD.pdf

No comments:

Post a Comment