An unmitigated disaster

The shooting of a Brazilian national unconnected with the London bombings is an unmitigated disaster, obviously for his family and friends but also for the rest of us. Tim Hames in The Times has a perplexing monopoly, as opposed to his usual large share, of wisdom on the matter:

I am a hardliner on the War on Terror and remain a hawk on the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But if al-Qaeda has created an atmosphere in which an ordinary person can have five bullets pumped into him by the police, and society shrugs its shoulders, then the terrorists have already won a modest victory.

The inconsistency bordering on callousness of Scotland Yard has been breathtaking.

Me too; yes, they have; and yes, it is.

Everyone can understand that policemen have to take an immediate decision on the threat to the public from a suspected terrorist, and there can be no serious principled objection to - and from me at least, strong support for - their being prepared to shoot if they believe the lives of the public are endangered. But it is baffling - genuinely so; I can't begin to see how this terrible mistaken identification could have been made - to trail a suspect and finally see no option but to shoot dead a man who we now know was harmless and must have been scared witless. There may in fact have been reasonable (if obviously mistaken) grounds for police suspicion of Mr Menezes, but at the moment it does not look that way. If the police tailed him from Tulse Hill, did they have any grounds for regarding his behaviour as potentially threatening, and if so why did they not apprehend him before he boarded a bus or a train? Did they hear him speak? If so, were their suspicions in any way allayed or were they heightened? Or were they unable to tell, so shot anyway? (I lived in Stockwell for 12 years, and it is rare to be on Stockwell Road for more than a few minutes without hearing Portuguese spoken; you would hope that the police know this distinctive character of the area.)

This all argues for an appalling and careless failure of intelligence that must be cleared up. Mistakes do happen, and sometimes for understandable reasons - but those reasons don't protect those who have failed. Israel has a policy of finding and killing terrorists who have murdered Israeli nationals, and again - in the absence of an effective supranational system of law enforcement - I have no principled objections to this, which strikes me as a policy of strengthening deterrence to future terrorist acts. But on one occasion when a terrible mistake was made - a Moroccan-born waiter was shot in Norway by Mossad agents, mistaking him for one of the terrorists from the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 - the rule of law had to take its course. Norway tracked down the Israelis, put them on trial and imprisoned them. That was the right thing to do despite the justice of Israel's policy and the fact that the waiter's death was a terrible mistake. In the case of Mr Menezes, there will have to be resignations at the least, and at the top.

I'm surprised that Tony Blair's normal political instincts seem to have deserted him on this. It is of course true that the police would have been criticised for failing to act if the suspect had been a terrorist, and that anyone who knows the identities of the real bombers has a duty to tell the police. But these are truisms, and a man has been needlessly killed. Ken Livingstone, coincident with an absurd and offensive comparison of Likud, a democratic party, to Hamas, a terrorist organisation, has managed to hit the wrong note on a subject that genuinely is part of his remit, namely the security of Londoners. He is strictly right to say that Mr Menezes's killing "has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility", in the sense that had the terrorists not killed then Mr Menezes would be alive today. But the form of his argument is is ominously reminiscent of the 'root cause' fallacy that blames the London bombings on our overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Leaving aside the question of whether this is true (as it is in the first case, and is not in the second), it is the wrong thing to say, when by definition - for an innocent man has been killed - a terrible failure of policing has happened and it is essential that the risks of its happening again be minimised.