From this morning's Times:
Did officer Charlie 12 shout the words “armed police” at Mr Menezes before firing? Jury’s answer: no
Did Mr de Menezes move towards Charlie 12 before he was grabbed in a bear-hug by officer “Ivor”? Jury’s answer: no
The officer said Mr de Menezes had moved aggressively towards him and made him fear he was in mortal danger. Passengers said they did not see any such action.
And on the damning list goes. Nearly everything which the Met told us at the time of Mr Menezes' death, and subsequent to it, has been shown to be untrue. We already knew that the officers concerned were allowed to write up their notes on the incident together, to ensure that their accounts coincided with one another; now we know that their version of what happened was not believed by the jury which heard their evidence.
This verdict must have implications that go beyond a 'Lessons Learned' type soul-searching activity, of the sort suggested by Nick Hardwick, chairman of the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission. Here are the lessons for the Met to learn, to save Mr Hardwick time: In the future, we promise we'll try not to execute an innocent man, then lie about his behaviour beforehand, then put out a doctored photo of the intended target solely to try to make him look more like the man that we killed, then smear our victim by leaking details of his visa status, then claim that everything was just so awful after the London bombs that we just have to accept that sometimes these hideous things can happen, and then claim that no-one in the Met command should pay a price for our grotesque operational failures.
The refusal to accept culpability for the outcome is that which I find most insidious, this suggestion that the real blame for Mr Menezes' death lies with the 7/7 bombers. David Aaranovitch writes such a piece in the Times today. Mr Menezes was killed in the aftermath of the fortunately abortive 21/7 second wave. His death was due to police errors, not because of the suicide bombers. I feel pity for the men who killed Mr Menezes: but his death was their fault. It feels important that this point is not forgotten, that we do not permit the Met to leave the impression that civilian casualties are just part of the price we have to pay in the war against terror. Policemen should not gun down tube passengers, regardless of what else is happening at the time. Surely the woman in charge that day, Cressida Dick, must consider her position (regardless of her unwavering support from Ken Livingstone).
One of the bombs intended for 21/7 was on the upper deck of 'our' bus, the 26, the one we use every day. Those pictures you see of it in the newspapers, abandoned, windows broken, are at the Shoreditch end of Hackney Road, a grubby little patch of the world, where the City crumbles into the borough of Hackney, and the banks of Bishopsgate give way to the strip joints, bookmakers, cafes, pubs and handbag shops which line the E2 thoroughfare. It's my bit of London, and for whatever reason, I love it. I love the unconcrete London too: the one where police officers can be relied upon to tell the truth, and their leaders can be expected to act with honour and integrity. The loss of that expectation as an outcome of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, this deformation of the institutional character of the Metropolitan Police, would be a true casualty of the terror attacks on London.
