Blame for fatal shooting would hamper policing, says QC

The police have started defending themselves in the case surrounding the shooting of Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station.

A trial at the Old Bailey heard that the attempt to prosecute police over the death of the 27-year-old Brazilian, who was shot dead by police marksman at the height of the anti-terrorist operation in July 2005, was based on ignorance and hindsight.

"The prosecution in this case are attempting to dictate to the police how they should do their job from a position of near ignorance," defence counsel Ronald Thwaites QC told the jury.

He added that a conviction would "inhibit their effectiveness in combating serious crime" and said the trial should be viewed as a test case. "The prosecution do not appear to understand how the police organise themselves, how they conduct major operations, or how they work."

The court heard from commander John McDowell, who was in overall charge of the operation. Cmdr McDowell said: "Given the way circumstances unfolded it is very difficult to find anything I would have done differently."

I am sure if Mr McDowell were honest then he would have hoped that the armed unit (that turned up four hours late) had turned up on time and that they had the ability to stop Charles de Menezes in the street and ascertain whether or not he was a suicide bomber before he got anywhere near a bus or a tube train.

The more one hears of how the police prepared for this action the more what took place seems inevitable.

The armed police who shot Jean Charles de Menezes were briefed hours beforehand that they would be using "unusual" lethal tactics and would only be deployed if officers on the ground believed they were dealing with a suicide bomber who was "deadly" and "up for it", the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

The armed officers were deployed without having understood whether or not a positive identification had been made that the man on the train was Hussain Osman, one of the four men who had attempted copycat suicide bombings on London tube trains two weeks after 7-7.

The jury was told that "confusion reigned" about who had been asked to stop Mr Menezes as he entered Stockwell Tube station on the morning of 22 July. The court heard that the leader of the CO19 team, codenamed Ralph, believed he heard a radio message that the Brazilian was "definitely our man" as his officers raced to the station and that the only safe way to stop Mr Menezes, who was suspected of being Osman, was likely to be to shoot him.

Clare Montgomery QC, for the prosecution, said the actions of the armed officers were the culmination of a catalogue of misunderstandings and errors during the hours before Mr Menezes left his flat in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, south London at 9.33am while under the watch of a covert surveillance team.

Amidst all this confusion over whether or not de Menezes was Osman or not, the shooters of the CO19 unit were being given a briefing which the prosecution described as "positively inflammatory".

Ms Montgomery said that, crucially, Trojan 84 did not tell Ralph that part of his team's job would be to divert ordinary commuters and members of the public away from Scotia Road. "The briefings, in effect, assumed the bombers were in Scotia Road and would be coming out armed," she told the court. "It did not make clear that there was a real possibility they would not be dealing with a suspected suicide bomber."

The defence team have claimed that this prosecution is being brought out of ignorance at how the police work and that, if it succeeds, it will "dictate to police how they should be doing the job".

This appears to miss the point. The public, who employ the police and pay for their wages, have every right "to dictate to the police how they should be doing their job". We do not live in a police state.

And we certainly have the right to ask questions when the police shoot an innocent man through the head seven times on a London tube train. Cmdr McDowell's comments, that he wouldn't have done anything differently, are simply astounding.

Mr Thwaites for the defence offered a similar outlook:

"The prosecution say an issue in this case was the police did not intervene in the five minutes available to them by intercepting Jean Charles de Menezes before he got on a bus at Tulse Hill. If the prosecution is right ... it would in effect remove the discretion police officers have in deciding when is the best time to act."

No-one is arguing that the police do not have the discretion to decide when is the best time to act, what is being said is that in this case the police used their discretion wrongly and intervened too late with their armed officers primed to face a suicide bomber who was "up for it". No attempt was ever made to allow de Menezes to establish his innocence.

Had an armed unit been present when de Menezes left his flat he could have safely been stopped and searched in the street and he would not now be dead.

It seems inarguable that this would not have been a better state of affairs.

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Tags: Charles de Menezes, police shooting, Stockwell tube station