(no subject)

[webofevil]

Snatching this month's coveted “What Do You Have To Do To Get Fired Around Here?” award from the alcoholism counsellor with several previous convictions for fraud, Cressida Dick, the woman who oversaw the unsuccessful test drive of Operation Kratos, has just been promoted.

Because a member of the army reconnaissance team assigned to watch a block of flats left his post for a crafty piss and so missed the moment when Jean-Charles Menezes left the building, no-one knew whether or not Menezes was a potential suicide bomber. The evidence against: He had just come out of a suspect block of flats thought to house one of the 21 July terrorettes. In his favour: The fact that our incontinent hero saw enough of him to identify him as white European, which is the one thing the terrorettes definitely weren’t.

As the surveillance team followed Menezes they became more and more certain that this was not their man. All the aspects of his behaviour later raised by a sceptical public—not acting suspiciously, not carrying or wearing anything suspicious and bulky, being Brazilian—were already fairly obvious to officers on the ground. By the time they got to Stockwell they were convinced, and said, that Menezes was no risk, which is why they were happy to let him board a tube train. They knew he might make a useful witness, living in the same block as Hussein Osman was believed to.

They didn’t know that at one point during the caper one Special Branch officer had positively identified Menezes as Hussein Osman. Based on what, no-one knows, but that was the entry in the log that was later amended by cunningly adding the word “not”. Despite the fact that all other officers at all other times said, with varying degrees of conviction, “This is not our man”, A Certain Someone in charge that day (I’m told it’s all right if I say it rhymes with “Cessida Drick”) appears to have made her decision on the basis of that one guy that one time, and unleashed the men with guns.

The IPCC’s report on the shooting is due soon. This is the report Sir Ian Blair fought so hard to block, presumably because the Met’s own report initially had Menezes just falling on some bullets that were lying around in the carriage, or begging officers to shoot him and end it all, or, get this, I’m on a roll now, he acted threateningly and vaulted the barrier to escape from pursuing policemen! All right, I’m kidding. Obviously no police officer would actually falsify a report like that.

Chances are we'll get a traditional British establishment I Ching-influenced judgment: Bad things happened. No blame. Impartial, impassive, impotent. Can’t be anything else when someone’s pension is on the line.

The police are doing an incredibly tough job in extraordinary circumstances, you say? I entirely agree, which is why it might be better to bestow greater operational responsibility on someone who hasn’t been at the helm of such a fuck-up. Apart from anything, it looks bad. Just as in Social Services, all the emphasis seems to be on protecting people’s jobs rather than actually addressing what’s gone wrong. Plus Menezes’s family are quite miffed, although obviously in matters like this grieving relatives rank somewhere below “coroner’s au pair”.


[Poll #819852]

In related news, the post-mortem has revealed that eleven shots were fired in total on the train: seven into Menezes’s head, one in his shoulder and three that missed. That’s two men, either SAS-trained or themselves special forces, pinning a man to his seat, firing at point blank range and missing him three times. I wouldn’t even begin to question the SAS’s hardness, but on this evidence, given a firearm and a human face, Dick Cheney has a better strike rate.

Comments

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean "blackguard"?

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

It was a honey trap for pedants.

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey! And how!!

[ex-cornfedpi814.livejournal.com]

I feel that this is becoming a get out clause.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_moggy_/]

Jesus christ I'm depressed now.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_moggy_/]

BETTER NOW!! MONKEY! CAT! WASH-WASH CAT, MONKEY!

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

Outstanding piece of writing. Other than that, I just want to echo _moggy_'s comment.

[chiller.livejournal.com]

I want to know how you get seven bullets into one man's head. I mean: there can't have been much head LEFT after three.

Also this:
the Met’s own report initially had Menezes just falling on some bullets that were lying around in the carriage

Genius.

[strictlytrue.livejournal.com]

I agree with this.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

> I'm also not terribly convinced by "it looks bad" as a reason for doing (or not doing) something - that's exactly the sort of thing that gets incompetent people promoted over capable ones.

But doesn't promoting the incompetent itself look bad? Or is it so widespread as to be unremarkable?

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

When I talk about it "looking bad", I don't just mean that it will lead to uncomfortable silences at the Christmas party; it means public confidence in the police will take yet another whacking great dent. The more the public suspect they might be shot dead for their own protection, the less they'll trust those assigned to protect them.

Wearing suits and carrying clipboards, Special Branch came round to my house that morning, shortly before Menezes was shot, to ask me if I'd seen anything of the previous day's attempted bombings. They weren't part of the surveillance team ambling after Menezes and so were not responsible for his misidentification, and almost certainly had nothing to do with the falsified report about his jumping the barrier. (The "amendation" of the log where he was falsely identifed couldn't have been the work of any of the plods on the ground; that, apparently, has to have been the work of a senior officer.) In the light of events, and in anticipation of at least a greywash that will leave culprits unidentified, they are therefore the only two Special Branch officers I would currently trust.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Unless they suddenly went rogue and she's covering for them, she was responsible for CO19 coming off the leash. She may even be legally responsible for the trigger being pulled, although that's untested territory. If she did so deliberately, it was on the basis of one guy's positive identification against everyone else saying no. If she did so accidentally, it may be because she yelled something like, as was reported earlier this year, "Stop him AT ALL COSTS!" Codeword schmodeword.

So, after all the blunders recorded and serious questions raised, a few of which I detailed in my post, there really shouldn't have been any question of promotion until her name was officially cleared. And, to quote Baroness Byford, that's I think where I am.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

I think I'm right in saying that even under Kratos, a senior officer had to authorise the use of deadly force. And I don't think they've disclosed who that was.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

"The Independent Police Complaints Commission found that firearms officers thought she had cleared them to shoot De Menezes dead. In fact, she told investigators, she had intended that he be arrested outside Stockwell tube station."

I remember now. She gave a clear, unambiguous order like "Stop him" or "Let him have it - an informal interview and some home security advice, that is" or something.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1870916,00.html

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Panorama, 8 March 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/4790350.stm)

TAYLOR
The critical question is, did Commander Dick order CO19 just to stop him or to use lethal force.

HOUSE
There are code words in Operation Kratos which do signify to the officers on the ground the tactics to be used and one of those is use of firearms fired at someone's head, yes.

TAYLOR
Did those code words exist for Operation Kratos before the 22nd July?

HOUSE
Before the 22nd July those words did exist, yes.

TAYLOR
And there was a code word that says "use lethal force."

HOUSE
There is, yes.

TAYLOR
And did the designated senior officer use that code word, or would the designated senior officer have been in a position to use that code word?

HOUSE
You'll understand, and we did agree before this interview, that I won't comment on specific events on 22nd July.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

And given that Dick was the designated senior officer and was in charge, we have to conclude that either:
i) she wrongly authorised the use of lethal force,
or
ii) she did such a bad job of communicating that the firearms team thought she had. The point of code words being to make communications simple and unambiguous.
or
iii) as an outside bet, the firearms team went completely rogue and acted without orders. In this case she must be lying to protect them.

From the Guardian article:
"During the year it took the IPCC to investigate, Ms Dick is said to have impressed her bosses with the way she coped with the pressure."

So she's good at coping with the pressure of stalling an investigation, but shouldn't they be promoting people who are good at coping with the pressure of deciding who to shoot in the first place?

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

Maybe she mixed up her bedroom fun-time safe word with the code word. It's an honest mistake.

"Cleveland! Wait, no--Banan. . ., aaahhhh too late."

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Tragically, her bedroom safe phrase was "Shoot the Brazilian in the face".

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Would they really proceed to promote someone without having got the nod that it would be worth their time promoting her in the first place? You wouldn't promote someone you had any reason to suspect would be clearing their desk the moment an investigation into their actions was concluded. So it looks as if the MPA has judged that she'll be safe in her post. Nonetheless, their timing, with regard to public trust, really is pisspoor.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

If there's a huge question about somebody's competence - to the extent that they may have caused someone to die needlessly - perhaps it would be a good idea to hold off on promoting them until the inquiry results are out, no?

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

But with the disclaimer that it may not be possible. The BBC article says that promoted officers won't actually take up new positions until after the inquiry is over - so it's obviously not desperate for her to start ASAP.