BLAIR AND LIVINGSTON GET FOOT IN MOUTH DISEASE

I was astonished and disappointed both by the response of Sir Ian Blair to the De Menezes verdict and by the interview that the Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, gave on the Today programme this morning.

Blair’s comment that “sometimes that’s what happens” was at best tactless, but his suggestion that there was no systemic failure by the Met represents, given the evidence presented in court and the verdict, quite unacceptable complacency.

And what a transformation from “Red Ken” the rebel, to whom no member of the security forces from the bobby on the beat or Private Tommy Atkins up to Chief Constables and Generals could get anything right; to “Establishment Ken” who appears willing to defend Sir Ian Blair no matter how disastrously he gets things wrong.

The Health and Safety Executive has form, in the past, for bringing ridiculous prosecutions against the Metropolitan police, as when they brought charges against Sir Ian’s predecessor after an injury sustained by an officer who was quite legitimately and necessarily pursuing a cat burglar. But the De Menezes case, where an innocent man was shot dead by armed police and the court found a serious “corporate failing” in the way the Met handled the incident, is not in the same category.

We must always consider the Stockwell tragedy in the context that it took place the day after an attempted suicide bombing and two weeks after fifty people were murdered in a successful one. Whatever the police did or did not do, there was a risk to human lives if they got it wrong, and in my book the individual who bears the largest single share of moral responsibility for the death of Jean Charles De Menezes is Mohammed Siddiq Khan.

Nevertheless, the fact that there is a real threat posed by suicide bombers makes it all the more necessary to avoid the kind of chaotic mistakes described in court by the prosecution. What makes Sir Ian Blair’s position untenable is not the fact that he was the Met Commissioner when De Menezes was shot. I have never believed that the first response to a problem in an organisation is always to sack the person at the top. However, to resolve a major issue you do sometimes have to remove people who have become an obstacle to reform. Sir Ian Blair’s ill-judged response to the verdict, and particularly his statement that there was no evidence of systematic failure by the Metropolitan Police, suggest to me that he has indeed become such an obstacle.

Ken Livingston has suggested that London will be harder to police if police officers faced with a split second decision on how to deal with an apparent terrorist threat have the additional burden of wondering how their actions might appear to a court. If individual officers had been prosecuted that would indeed have been a concern, and this very problem sometimes made it more difficult to obtain justice in Northern Ireland during the troubles.

We ask a lot of our police and soldiers, and they deserve, as individual human beings, the same presumption of innocence as every other citizen. That does not mean we can afford to place any individual, let alone the police as an organisation, above the law. Where the system fails the courts must be able to ask why.

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