Most people in the UK, and many abroad, are familiar with the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was shot dead by Metropolitan police as a suspected suicide bomber on 22nd July, 2005. The latest in this saga is that the shooting was ruled a breach health and safety laws.
Well, okay, I am fairly sure that Jean Charles de Menezes would have felt his health and safety were not well served by the people who shot him dead. But surely coming to that conclusion cannot have taken more than two years of deliberation. The Met screwed up big time and killed an innocent man in a horrific way, that was clear fairly soon after the event.
But at the risk of seeming heartless, mistakes happen. I am not saying the Met should not be raked over the coals for this horrendous error (indeed they should be), but one can still take the view that the principle of shooting dead suicide bombers who are in public places is still a rather good one, just so long as the people doing the shooting have a bloody good reason to think the people they shoot are indeed suicide bombers. That is not a casual qualification of principle… if the decision-making processes used by the Met to make such calls is always likely to be as defective as it demonstrably was on 22nd July, 2005, then we need to be convinced that this is no longer the case if we are to ever trust the police to make that sort of decision again.
But that is a fairly straightforward managerial question… it seems to me that the real issue that needs to be settled is not ‘did the police screw up’ (clearly they did) but rather was the police’s response to its dreadful mistake criminal?
We were fed a stream of completely baseless lies in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Jean Charles de Menezes looked middle eastern (he did not), he was wearing an unseasonable padded coat that could have hidden a bomb (he was not), we was running towards the train (he was not), he ran when challenged by armed police (he did not), he jumped over the turnstile (in fact he used his god damned travel card)… The CCTV footage? It was not turned on. And then it was but it did not record. And then it cannot be found. Lie after lie after lie.
The real questions which need to be answered are not “were the health and safety laws violated?”… An innocent man was shot in the head seven times by the police for Christ’s sake! Of course it was a mistake, no one thinks the police intentionally shot the wrong man just for the hell of it. The question is, why are the people who then tried to cover it up not looking AT THE VERY LEAST at the end of their careers and more reasonably, prosecution for conspiring to pervert the course of justice? What were the names of the people behind each of those falsehoods? Presumably the people who said those things are still working for the Met. Otherwise what? Did journalists just invent those claims? I would really like to know. I have watched the coverage waiting for these things to be asked and not seen anything along those lines. Instead, we hear about ‘health and safety laws’. Amazing.
Mistakes happen and that is tragic. But if the police (who exactly?) then try to cover that fact up, lethal mistakes will continue to happen, which is a catastrophe.
That is the real issue.
I won’t argue the case for or against the MET, but feel I need to point out the much of the above statement is untrue. Those statements issued by the press came from public eye witnesses NOT the MET themselves. The MET do not comment on an operation until a statement is issued through the proper channels. Eye witnesses on the scene got confused over who was who when undercover officers entered the tube. The running, turnstile jumping, coat wearing man/men where either cops or the usual assortment of London weirdos.
The confusion over the “middle eastern’ came about because he (JCDM) was described in radio descriptions as IC1 (white european) and IC3 (North African) and at some point whatever the IC number is for ME. How many people could make a clear cut statement based on skin colour? JCDM was dark but could have fallen just about in all 3 categories.
I see this case as a tragic accident, but I’m sure the debate will rage for a while yet.
For whatever reason, I am reminded of the Jeffrey Dahmer circumstances several years ago here in Milwaukee, WI. He was the serial killer who killed (and ate parts of) several young men and boys. One of his victims, a 14 year old asian boy (whose brother Dahmer went to jail for molesting), actually broke free, naked, with a hole drilled in his head (Dahmer was attempting to make a sex zombie- living, yet under his full control – corpses tended to rot away – the good ones never stay).
So what happened when two of Milwaukee’s finest caught up with the boy? Because he didn’t speak english very well, they took him back to Dahmer (evidently not noticing the hole in his head), didn’t do background checks on either, weren’t able to surmise he was a minor, and ignored the stench permeating Dahmer’s apartment. Dahmer then killed him in due course doing whatever he tended to do with the remains. Dahmer also had several victims afterward as well. There are tapes of the officers laughing during calls back to the station at how they reunited “the lovers”. Race, homophobia, and overall idiocy simply leap off these tapes.
These servants of the public, when Dahmer was discovered, eventually were fired. But, through the Union, they were reinstated WITH backpay. One of the fellows is now the head of the Milwaukee Policeman’s Union.
Incredibly cynical, but I wonder if style points should be awarded for attempting to coverup. Granted, job preservation was likely the key issue, but, slight as it is, it seems better than a bald “yeah, we fucked up, whaddya gonna do about it?” attitude which was the final result of the Dahmer incident.
Summary execution is a military doctrine that is incompatible with civil policing.
It’s all very well saying “let’s shoot suicide bombers”, but it’s not as though they’re running through the city with wires poking out of their back-packs, an alarm clock stuck to their chest, and shouting “God is Great”.
Since bombers are rare, but fear is commonplace, the most likely outcome is for overzealous officers to shoot an innocent person. For example… Stockwell.
James, you’re taking Stockwell out of context. It was the day after multiple bombing attempts and two weeks after four actual bombings. One of those wannabe suicide bombers lived in the same building as Menezes.
The fear on 22/7 was well placed.
Not that simple, James. Clearly, at least to me, intelligence based ‘shoot to kill’ makes perfect sense… but only if the intelligence is worth a damn.
As initially presented, the de Meneze shooting made sense as presented (i.e. “he came out a building they were watching because Al Qaeda folks were inside, acted all wrong, etc. etc.”)… My question initially was “in that case why did they wait so long to shoot him then? Why did they let him get on a bus and then a train before shooting him?”
But of course we now know that the ‘facts’ as initially presented were a litany of lies. But then dealing with suicide bombers is NOT a matter of civil policing, it is a para-military issue. Suicide bombers are materially different to armed bank robbers or any other sort of dangerous criminal.
The way I see it is this… the newspapers printed certain facts which were later debunked conclusively. The jacket, de Menezes running when challenged, jumping over the barrier… WHO WAS THE SOURCE OF THOSE ‘FACTS’? What are their names? The journalists in question must have got that from someone. Who?
The death of de Menezes would be a tactical failure or an organisational failure. Those are things that can either be fixed or it can be decided that in truth the lesser risk is to let a potential bomber live (and that may indeed be true if the Met is simply not capable of such calls).
But the attempt to cover up what actually happened and to present de Menezes’ behaviour as a major contributory factor in his own death (which would have been tantamount to ‘death-by-stupidity’ if the bogus ‘facts’ presented had actually been true) indicates an element within the institution whose motivation is not correcting errors but concealing them. That cuts to the fundamental legitimacy of the state being trusted with the use of lethal force in our defence.
It is true that suicide bombers are different from other kinds of criminal. But innocent bystanders are the same everywhere.
There is a reason that shooting suspected persons on sight is illegal, and this case is an example of it.
After all, the vast majority of people arrested by the police for terrorism offences are not terrorists (compare the number of arrests under the Prevention of Terrorism Act with the number of convictions, or even prosecutions).
And as we now know, 100% of the persons killed by the police on the grounds that they are terrorists, are not terrorists.
And even if the plods have a bloody good reason this time, next time the reason will be just a little less good, and the next time a little less good still until in the end they’ll just shoot anyone.
We know this will happen because it has happened everywhere it has been permitted to happen, and it will happen here unless it is stopped now.
I guess you do not know much about the history of The Troubles then.
That said I am willing to accept that maybe the Plod just cannot be trusted to make the call. But I do hope you realise that this may also result in a bunch of people getting blown apart by some Islamic nutter with a semtex waistcoat because the fuzz are not allowed to pull the trigger.
It may indeed be that this really is the lesser risk of course, but do not kid yourself it is not a risk.
Regardless, this is not the main issue that really needs fixing in my view.
WHO WAS THE SOURCE OF THOSE ‘FACTS’? What are their names? The journalists in question must have got that from someone. Who?
The more I think about the “privilege” that journalists try to claim to protect their sources, the more obviously it is a bad idea.
Subpoena the journalists to a grand jury investigating the death for the purpose of preferring charges. If they don’t talk, slap with a contempt ruling and jail them until they do. Just like you would any other citizen who defies the courts.
You are quite correct, Perry. It is a risk. I will accept that risk because I consider it less dangerous than the alternative, not because I am any fan of suicide bombers (or indeed most other kinds of bombers).
As to your suggestion that those involved are prosecuted for perjury, I heartily concur. Even if the shooting was justified their actions would remain disgraceful.
Let’s blame the lawyers — those who really should be shot on sight, every time, just in case!
Back in the days of stiff upper-lipped Jolly Olde England, when wars were won on the playing fields of Eton, there is no question about how the Chief of the Met (and his lady field commander) would have reacted — immediate resignation. Something bad happened on their watch, and they would have felt “responsible” whether or not their decisions actually had anything to do with the bad thing.
At least, that is the impression left by reading books from the days of Empire. Was that all nonsensical pseudo-history? Did the English really once have a moral code that has now gone the way of the dodo?
While some of the ‘misinformation’ that came out just after the shooting was the result of confusing eye-witness reports, most of what Perry is talking about was the result of ‘leaks’ from sources inside the Met and MI. Quite a few journos were burnt by this and lost a lot of credibility.(Not with the public. They couldn’t care less about that. No, they lost credibility with their peers and that is unforgivable.)
This resulted in a loss of face for the ‘hardliners’ in the media, who were in the ascendant at the time, and a resurgence of the ‘multi-culturalists’, who were taking a bit of a beating.
(We might need a site that practises Kremlinolgy on the Beeb. I’d volunteer myself but a) I’m lazy and b) I couldn’t bear to watch the Beeb enough. Oh and c) I’m lazy.)
I don’t know how the officer in charge of this cock up was absolved of any blame, but if they are deemed not responsible it’s difficult to see how PC Blair can be held directly responsible.
On the Health and Safety issue, those put at risk where surely everyone else travelling on the tube, not because they stood at risk of being shot, but because the police allowed someone they thought a suicide bomber to get on and of buses and trains while they dithered. If he had been a bomber, many more could have died.
As it is, they cocked up the surveillance and cocked up the operational control, leaving an innocent man dead, then tried to blame him for it with innuendo and outright lies. Yes PC Blair should resign, but because of the way he handled the aftermath.
Two questions:
1) What is the likelihood of someone who expected to die in an explosion the day before having enough extra home-made explosives for a rerun the following day?
2) If the armed police were so very serious and up to the job, how come it took them four and a half hours to turn up after their presence was requested?
Sure, mistakes happen. The issue is (as Perry implies) whether the Met’s chance of error is high enough that we shouldn’t let them out with guns at all. Where we may well differ is in answering that question. My current opinion is that we shouldn’t trust them with firearms.
Apart from the Menezes debacle, I have two reasons for saying this. My near neighbour is a PC. He says that he doesn’t trust the firearms officers at all-he describes them as much too gung ho and inclined to be stoned. My wife’s shooting instructor says that the local firearms officers are `the most frightening and dangerous people on the shooting range. When they come on, we take cover. They are so undisciplined and inaccurate.’
Alice asked:
Did the English really once have a moral code that has now gone the way of the dodo?
Not in all cases…but in this context, yes.
We also once had a country to call our own
…which we ruled pretty successfully.
As our kids don’t know about this
there’s not much need to feel sorry for them
or for what they have & will become.
All gone.
the principle of shooting dead suicide bombers who are in public places is still a rather good one
Perhaps if you wish to submit to living in a police state, which I do not, so I will disagree with you.
ONLY if there is an absolutely imminent danger to other people should proportionately reasonable force be used to incapacitate a suspected suicide bomer.
I do not want to see any suspected suicide bomber attempt to justify their possible future actions to some Make Believe Friend in the Sky- I want to see them account for themselves before a court of law.
Perry de Havilland FTW:
You guys had your Columbine moment. I don’t see much comfort in it having only one innocent death, rather than thirteen.
By Columbine moment, I mean the point where police doctrine and training fails and needs to change. Going into the shootings at CHS, police doctrine was to contain, limit access, and open negotiations while preparing for a hopefully-unneeded deliberate entry. As everybody knows, on 4-20-99 that doctrine failed. We’ve since re-visited the question. I won’t go into specifics of the new doctrine on an open forum, but I will tell you that, in the event of an active shooter we won’t fiddlefuck around in the parking lot for an hour.
It seems to me that British policing badly needs to have the sort of internal review that we did. The only thing that I know about the JCDM shooting was that it was screwed up from beginning to end. I haven’t been able to find one canonical after-action review, and the newspaper accounts all contradict each other, and I don’t have access to anything trustworthy to serve as a basis for comment.
James Barlow:
As a general rule, I’d agree that most cities are not full of jihaddis with DuPont underwear.
We’re not talking about a general case, though. We’re talking about a specific instance where there WAS intelligence that suggested that this person DID have the aforementioned alarm clock and wires and such.
The intelligence was badly flawed, as it happened. After watching the Met’s command staff dancing around avoiding responsibility, I don’t see how the situation can be fixed: we don’t even have a good picture of what’s broken. I have a bad feeling that, even if the proper officials were to offer Ian Blair and most of his subordinates immunity in order to get them to talk freely about that day, we wouldn’t get anything helpful. From where I sit, a clear, detailed, and HONEST AAR would be highly desireable so that we know what to do differently next time.
Canker:
Insufficient data. There just aren’t that many suicide attacks in western countries. In Israel and Iraq, suicide bombings are usually the products of ongoing conspiracies, who usually have material for subsequent attacks on hand or not far away.
Stoned? As in drugs and/or alcohol?
I’m not trying to duck your question about response time. However, UK policing is so damn different from how we do it here that I’m not going to go there: I can guess, but I don’t have enough context for the information I do have to make my comments better than a guess.
James:
Picture it: The guy you’re trying to incapacitate need only twitch his thumb on the switch, and everybody in a thirty-foot-plus radius dies. How would you incapacitate him? (I have an answer, but you won’t like it.)
Dealing with active shooters and terrorists is messy like this: There is essentially NO way to ensure that no innocent people will die at all. Take half-measures and dick around containing the situation, and Harris and Klebold will kill whoever they want to kill and do it on their timetable. Send unarmed or under-armed officers, and Charles Whitman gets the high ground and uses it. Attempt immediate entry, and Cho Sun-Hui chained the doors shut which means he still has plenty of time to kill people while you’re breaching.
..which isn’t helped by the Met being unable to settle on one TRUTHFUL explanation of what actually happened.
There’s a reasonable analysis of the whole Menezes affair here:
http://trustyservant.com/archives/32 – Ian Blair – Part 1
http://trustyservant.com/archives/39 – Ian Blair – Part 2
http://trustyservant.com/archives/48 – Ian Blair – Part 3
WTF? First we need to settle some semantics: to be a ‘suspected suicide bomber’ I would define that as someone who is suspected of wearing a self-detonatable bomb under their clothes… which they presumably only wear when in the process of making their way towards their intended target rather than relaxing in a safe house eating baklava and discussing the latest Britney Spears upskirt incident with Abdul.
So now please answer two questions:
(1) Please lay out a scenario in which a suicide bomber does *not* pose an imminent danger to either nearly civilians or the arresting officer strolling up to them and saying “You’re nicked!”
(2) Kindly explain exactly how do you incapacitate in a non-lethal manner (i.e. something that does not involves a head shot) a person wrapped in a fragmentation bomb who intends to kill himself and other people by walking up to them and exploding? Please be as technical as possible as I am an avid and quite expert shooter with a wide variety of weapons, but clearly you know something I do not.
As you might surmise, I think ‘proportionately reasonable force’ in such a case is a rifle shot to the brain, ideally the brain stem if you can set the shot up.
Sunfish: “… there WAS intelligence that suggested that this person DID have the aforementioned alarm clock and wires and such…”
One of the key points is there was no such intelligence or data. The only connection between JCDM and suicide bombing was that he happened to live in the same building as a suspect. The fact that he didn’t have a rucksack or bulky jacket to conceal a bomb meant that even if he had been a suspect, it would not have been necessary to kill him.
THis discussion started with the assertion that the the problem is not the shooting of an innocent man but the police cover-up.
But then dealing with suicide bombers is NOT a matter of civil policing, it is a para-military issue. Suicide bombers are materially different to armed bank robbers or any other sort of dangerous criminal.
I disagree. A police cover-up is not new. What is new is the shooting.
Perry is saying that he wants the police to act as a para-military force all of the time, not just when chasing suspected suicide bombers.
Why is a sucide bomber different from an armed bank robber?
An armed robber will be shot at by police, because he there is evidence of danger. The same should apply to the suspected suicide bomber.
The problem is not the reaction of the police but of shallow libitarians.
relaxing in a safe house eating baklava and discussing the latest Britney Spears upskirt incident with Abdul.
That’s not far-fetched. I read an interview with a failed suicide bomber (Kurdistan) who spent the evening before watching Jackie Chan movies with his mate in a perfectly relaxed and happy manner. he was also a fan of the England football team.
there’s something quite bizarrely chilling about this. Although the England fan thing is certainly grounds for the suicide part at least.
Perry,
As to your question about stopping a suicide bomber you appear to have come to the same conclusions as the Israelis who have more experience than anyone else at such matters.
Sunfish,
Yes, stoned as in drugs/alcohol.
I appreciate your reasoned and reasonable response. This whole thing comes close to one of the cruxes where libertarianism, the role of the state, and morality collide. I suppose that there is no reason to expect any light to emerge from the collision.
Your point that a no-fault debriefing exercise (AAR?) should be helpful, but probably wouldn’t be given the responsibility-avoidance manoeuvres of all the management is, I think, why I am still so angry about the whole thing.
Mistakes are forgivable but a willful refusal to learn from them is not.
Huh? Please quote where I say that.
I get the impression you have not thought about this very hard… an armed bank robber does not intend to die (his objective is to escape with money) and therefore he can be threatened with death if he does not lay down his weapons… a suicide bomber intends to die (the ‘suicide’ bit of ‘suicide bomber’ kind of gives the game away), so threatening him with death is not very useful.
Also a bank robber can be negotiated with if he takes hostages, so shooting him just because other people are nearby is not really an imperative. The majority of hostage situations end up with the hostage-taker surrendering because ‘death’ was really not part of the intended game-plan. However a suicide bomber will most likely just blow himself up along with anyone around him, which does rather change things.
Er, no. An armed bank robber will usually only be shot if they are actually shooting their weapon or give a good indication they are about to. That is why many armed stand-offs (for example a hostage situation following a bungled bank robbery) do NOT end in a bloodbath. Although a bank robber may kill someone in the course of their crime, that is not really their objective (stealing money is their objective). However a suicide bomber does not ‘shoot’, they simply explode, and their objective is to kill people, not steal things.
Either you did not actually read the article I wrote or you did not put your brain in gear before typing.
Interesting discussion — and especial thanks to Sunfish for his analysis. The key to long-term success of any organization is to learn from everything that happens (failures & successes). And it is especially useful to learn from things that happen to other people.
I have some experience in a much less fraught commercial context of trying to learn from experience. Businesses will proudly pronounce themselves to be “Learning Organizations”, and set up good processes like Post-Project Evaluations or Retrospective Reviews. Unfortunately, these tend to devolve into exercises in self-congratulation — and the learning lessons are lost.
The problem is one of morality, perhaps. The people at the top of many organizations are not leaders, they are CYA bureaucrats; they will not take personal responsibility for their organizations; and they will squash any individuals in their commands who are prepared to voice “inconvenient truths”, seeing them as a threat instead of an asset.
London’s Metropolitan Police sounds like just another big bureaucracy which long ago lost sight of its reason for existence.
Too true. That’s why someone like Miss Dick can segueway from being the Met’s Head of Diversity to being Gold Commander in an armed terrorist incident. Makes sense doesn’t it?
She says she did not give the Kratos code word, but she did give armed police an order to “stop” a man she thought, by a process which has not been explained, was a suicide bomber. How did she think the armed police were going to “stop” such a man?
Anyhow, fair play to her, she must be a bloody great witness, because she has come out of this with the endorsement of the jury. She was the commander of an operation with 19 catastrophic failures, resulting in the death of an innocent man, but no blame attaches to her, and everyone is calling for Plod Blair to resign. Funny old world.
why are the people who then tried to cover it up not looking AT THE VERY LEAST at the end of their careers and more reasonably, prosecution for conspiring to pervert the course of justice
Absolutely. Most reasonable comment I’ve read on this sorry affair.
The problem is that there was insufficient evidence, that the man was a suicide bomber, to shoot him dead rather than take some alternative action. This is at the time rather than just with the benefit of hindsight.
There is, thereafter, probable cause to suspect misrepresentation, cover-up and abuse of process, relating to that lack of evidence for the gunning down of the man. Of that, there has, in my view, been no adequate investigation.
Best regards
I do not think anyone can reasonably disagree with that assessment.
Most suicide attempts aren’t actually meant to succeed. They’re a cry for help. Therefore, Tommy (because it’s racist to assume that all suicide bombers are of a given religion) [1] of the Semtex Skivvies should be taken to the nearest hospital for an immediate mental health evaluation.
Was that from un-named sources in a newspaper article? Color me unimpressed. Were there any photos of what JCDM was wearing? Have there actually been any real agreements among the witness statements, or even a useful pattern connecting those statements?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
John K:
“Stop” normally has a rather different meaning than “shoot him if he runs or if he doesn’t.” Is that what she actually said? Maybe you’re right, though, and she also would have thought that “take him out” meant “Escort him to a restaurant and buy him a kebab and a pint.” I’m not overly impressed with Ms. Dick right now.
Usually, you tell me to stop someone and what I hear is, “Prevent them from leaving for a brief period while we investigate something.” Or “Stop” as in “Shooting to stop” as opposed to “shoot to wound” or “shoot to kill.”
Canker:
AAR: After-Action Review. It’s exactly what you guessed, a time for going over what did and didn’t work and extracting the lessons to be learned. When the participants are capable of brutal but constructive self-criticism and mature about accepting brutal but constructive criticism from others, it’s probably the most valuable teaching tool I’ve ever seen.
I’m going to leave the drunk/drugged reference alone. I don’t dispute you, but…
Once again, I start thinking I understand how it’s done on your side of the lake and then a thread like this comes along. I think I’m going to have to lie down for a while.
Heaven forbid we should actually look at how people who already deal with this problem deal with it successfully.
I’ll bite, here’s a hypothetical. You have intelligence that a given person is a suicide bomber and plans to detonate his clothes in a train station. He leaves his house and heads to that train station. Anybody who doesn’t believe that immediate CNS-disabling lethal force is justified to prevent the suicide bombing…
What would you do? What tools or techniques would you use?
[1] Because us CofE people can be pretty dang militant.
We have a government that with great fanfare and drooling bloodlust from its anti-capitalist supporters, created the crime of “corporate manslaughter”, in order to be able personally to punish executives when there are transport or sports accidents. (Though it only just came into law so wouldn’t apply to the de Menezes case.) Yet the same Labour politicians who demanded to know why some director couldn’t sent to gaol for sloppy track maintenance against instructions, are queuing up to excuse Sir Ian Blair from having to resign after officers followed orders under a misapprehension created by bad management he might or might not have been involved in creating and terror-panic he definitely was.
LOL!
I think was established that he was wearing a denim jacket. The initial claim was he was wearing a bulky quilted winter jacket (which in July would indeed be mighty curious behaviour).
It seems to me that it is quite possible that the person who actually killed the hapless Brazillian *might* be not culpable *if* they were told categorically THIS PERSON IS A SUICIDE BOMBER… if that is the case then they acted appropriately within that context and the blame should attach to the person who was responsible for that false information to be given to the shooter (though one needs to ask in that case why they waited so long and allowed a purported suicide bomber to ride on a bus and a train before doing something about it).
That is of course a big glowing heap of *might* and *if* that I would love to know the answers to.
With the benefit of looking at this hypothetical in a relaxed, unpressured [i.e. unreal] environment — the key word there is “immediate”.
Maybe this possible suicide bomber is smarter than average. His bomb is already armed, and will explode as soon as he [she?] releases his grip. Now, do we feel so positive about a quick shot to the brain stem?
Maybe the smart course of action would be to evacuate all the other people around the potential bomber — clear the area, so that if he does go off, it is simply another job for the street-cleaners.
But either way — shoot the suspect, or clear the area — the key word is “immediate”. If he gets onto a bus or a train, some officer made a poor call.
A couple of questions
If I remember correctly, JCDM was in the UK illegally. It’s conceivable that police then had information in the format “There are x female residents in the building, y males of ages below 14 and above 50, and z males of age range a to b, all of whom are suspected suicide bombers.” I am not saying that an overstayed visa is grounds for getting shot, but it could well be the case that the fellow was partially to blame (gasp!), believe it or not?
Also, if I am mistaken, a “suicide belt” is a actually a belt merely because of certain fashion trends in the Middle East and the fact that most suicide bombers in that region are lazy, uneducated amateurs who want a big bang, and so think 30 lbs of plastic explosive is better than 20 lbs. You can make an equally efficient suicide bomb by distributing the explosive over the body in a manner that can easily be concealed by baggy pants and a sweatshirt – would require 15 more minutes of “dressing time.” So maybe, just maybe, police know that, and thus correctly do not view a loose overcoat as an acid test?
Either way, I agree fully with Perry that an investigation is due, but I will not rush to second-guess the officers on location.
Perry,
Your laughing and ridicule is exactly why Tommy wants to blow himself up. Tell him you didn’t mean it and give him a hug. You might save a life.
Alice,
Your point about a dead-man switch is well-taken. However, they’re a pretty uncommon device.[1][2]
I don’t mean to sound dismissive. However, historically the most-likely threats have been simple push-button switches, and a fast CNS shutdown (such as that caused by a sniper’s bullet to the brainstem) is the most-certain way of achieving same. It’s worth noting that, except for the taser, ALL less-lethal control techniques and technologies work via pain compliance, using pain as negative reinforcement to overcome resistance. That’s why I wouldn’t have even tried any of them.
Your point about evacuating the area: also well-taken. If police actually had the ability to do so, and didn’t, then someone has some explaining to do. However, I can see a number of ways where that either won’t work or will tip the suspect off before everybody is outside the blast radius.
That’s why it’s especially aggravating that the Met is so far incapable of simply coming out with the complete and truthful account. A life was lost because of (we don’t know why, but a collosal screw-up by someone in the Met is a reasonable possibility). More innocent people could die in a future event if the Met doesn’t have sound doctrine and the right people to carry it out.
[1] In the western world, suicide bombing is pretty rare altogether. We haven’t been dealing with it for a few decades as in Israel, which means that we’ll be behind the curve when Hezbollah decides to start splodeyating in Times Square.
[2] Truck bombs of the type used in the early 1980’s against the US Embassy and USMC barracks and the French installations in Beiruit were thought to have radio detonators as well. If the driver experienced a last-minute change of heart, then the bomb could be set off remotely.