Mark Duggan's funeral tomorrow...

[max_tranmere]

oej, preseumably to clear his name so that the people who remember him in later years will be content knowing he wasn't the baddie the public originally thought and that forever more he can be reminised about favouably. I dont think that will be the case though. A neighbour of mine does volunteering work, helps a lot of people completely unpaid, and the most dangerous thing she ever carries is her house keys. If she carried a gun with her and was a known heavy around the manor, then after her death she should be remmebered as someone like that rather than a quiet person who wouldn't say boo to a goose.

[Jonone]

Max, what's the point of having in inquiry ? If you know the 'rights' and 'wrongs', 'facts' and 'fabrications' of the case then they must already be on public record ? I thought you'd already been cautioned by OEJ about the perils of uncritically accepting what you read in the papers and see on television ?

[max_tranmere]

There is always an enquiry with these things, and it is right that there is. If the Police involved are grilled by the enquiry board then the truth will come out and whether they were in 'imminent dagger' or just gung-ho will be established.

[one eyed jack]

If you put this level of faith in the authorities then there's no saving you man.

You said:



Ok, then if they perceive every young black man to be a drug dealer then they may well feel threatened by the possibility he may have a gun so this gives them license to shoot ot kill first then does it?

Therefore if I was the only black man walking through a crowd of BNP supporters should i pull out a gun and kill them all for the same reason you said?

No! Because I dont have authority and thats the real problem here isnt it? Abuse of authority.

I'd feel I had the upper hand on a chap if I had my gun drawn on him first then if he pulled something out I thought was a gun and after warning him "DONT MOVE" then I'd shoot him and not a second sooner and I wouldnt shoot to kill either. Id shot him in the leg. I thought thats how it worked when police make a move on someone they are about to arrest that was a potential danger

The way the man was shot killed had whispers of execution going through that neighbourhood. This was never going to go away quietly.



I hate this as much as you do and therefore see your point but people forget that these same people are fuelled with the same emotions as you and I when it comes to injustice where we are baying for the blood of a criminal and want hanging reinstated. This is the same thing. The difference between you and them is that they are not as smart and thoughtful as you because they WILL go out and kill the person that has brought them pain. I can understand that. I don't agree with it though.



Yup and they are everywhere. Not necessarily just in Tottenham. The riots across the UK proved that too



Yup i can agree with that too. So you admit culpability on the part of the police then?



You believe because you heard that in the news. I heard the same thing one day then the next day I heard differently that the guy didnt have a gun then the third day heard he did in the car which he didnt brandish at the time of getting shot, therefore, if I am a policeman out to arrest a potentially dangerous person, I would do so with my gun levelled at him. If he went for the gun then I would feel my life was in danger but the time it takes someone to draw a gun on someone who already has a gun aimed at him?...Well, you do the math. Why wasnt he shot to injure? Why was he shot dead? There was no excuse for it and sounds dangerously like the paranoid jumpy situation that resulted in the loss of Jean Charles Menezes life.

Difference is , Menezes wasnt from London but if he was, the same outcome wouldve happened then as well. I am sure of it



The only people who will remember Mark Duggan in later years are those who knew and loved him. They don't need to clear his name if they think he is innocent so this sounds confusing to me BUT if his family are trying to clear his name, it isn't for the reason you said.

Max. I think you mean well but you also seem naive of the possibility that the police are human and can make mistakes or the glaring fact that there is an element within the force that is corrupt as the criminals they persue as well.

[max_tranmere]

*If the Police involved are grilled by the enquiry board then the truth will come out and whether they were in 'imminent dagger' or just gung-ho will be established*

*If you put this level of faith in the authorities then there's no saving you man.*

oej, independent enquiries are usually objective and will criticise anyone they think deserves it. The Stephen Lawrence murder enquiry found the Police to be 'institutionally racist'. The Saville enquiry (Lord Saville is a British law lord) into the Bloody Sunday massacre in northern Ireland, which published a year or two ago, found the British Army to have been the bad guys and those gunned down to have been totally innocent. I don't see why an enquiry into Mark Duggan's killing won't be equally un-biased and objective.

*Ok, then if they perceive every young black man to be a drug dealer then they may well feel threatened by the possibility he may have a gun so this gives them license to shoot ot kill first then does it?*

No, only if the Police thought they were about to be shot at. If Duggan just had it in a bag or something and they felt they weren't about to be shot at then they should have arrested him. I imagine they felt they WERE in 'imminent danger' otherwise why would they have shot him. If the officer was as trigger-happy as some people suggest then he would have shot someone every time he went about his duty confronting armed, or possibly armed, suspects.

*I'd feel I had the upper hand on a chap if I had my gun drawn on him first then if he pulled something out I thought was a gun and after warning him "DONT MOVE" then I'd shoot him and not a second sooner and I wouldnt shoot to kill either. Id shot him in the leg. I thought thats how it worked when police make a move on someone they are about to arrest that was a potential danger*

I remember the Chief Constable of the Met saying after De Menzes was killed by Police in Stockwell tube station that it is "shoot to stop, not shoot to kill". The person may get killed but they are doing it to stop him from doing what he is about to do, or what they think he is about to do, and it he ends up dead then it is a shame but unavoidable. As far as shooting someone in the leg, they can bleed to death very quickly, so a leg shot can be as bad as a shot anywhere else on the body. Remember Damilola Taylor, he was stabbed in the leg and bled to death on a stairwell. Also, in the case of Mark Duggan, the Police may not have been able to see the lower half of his body if he was sitting in a car.

*they WILL go out and kill the person that has brought them pain*

So it looks like Duggan was off to avenge the death of his cousin, and was armed for that reason. Quite inevitable and right that armed Police were tailing him them. Whether it was right they shot him we will hopefully discover in the enquiry, but it was certainly bound to happen that armed Police would follow him and confront him.

*So you admit culpability on the part of the police then?*

The Police's action and errors certainly wound the community up, but it doesn't justify the rioting. If the rioters were made to pay for the damage themselves, rather than have everyone else pay for it as always, they may have thought twice about burning down their neighbourhood. I remember someone in Tottenham saying recently that when the Broadwater Farm riots happened 26 years ago, the community got a new swimming pool complex built. If I had my way, the people involved in the riot would pay every penny to cover the rebuilding of the area, the loss of trade to local businesses affected, and also pay for the Policing. If that means each of them has to work 60 hours a week for the next 10 years at minimum wage digging trenches, then so be it. Why should everyone else have to pick up the tab?

*if I am a policeman out to arrest a potentially dangerous person, I would do so with my gun levelled at him. If he went for the gun then I would feel my life was in danger but the time it takes someone to draw a gun on someone who already has a gun aimed at him?...Well, you do the math. Why wasnt he shot to injure? Why was he shot dead? There was no excuse for it and sounds dangerously like the paranoid jumpy situation that resulted in the loss of Jean Charles Menezes life.*

So if Duggan had a gun then the Police were right to aim theirs at him, it he had gone for his gun (and the Police are in "imminent danger") then they are right to shoot him. As I said all this will come out in the enquiry. As I said earlier they may not have been able to shoot him someone that may not have killed him (if there really is such a place on the body) as maybe only his upper half was visible as he was sitting in a car.

*Difference is , Menezes wasnt from London but if he was, the same outcome wouldve happened then as well. I am sure of it*

Maybe, who knows. If he was from some tough part of town and from a community where tensions are high with the Police then things may have kicked off. It wouldn't have been right though.

To close, I would say that we can now look forward to months of local 'community leaders' (who no one has ever heard of), local priests, middle-class Guardian reading white lefties, and so on, appearing on the news lambasting the Police at every turn, and at the end of each feature they will show a two line response from the Police - if that. The TV media, particularly programmes like the London Evening News on BBC1, will have a field day for months. Programmes will appear with names like "Tottenham - six months on", and the same parade of people will appear, and whine and criticise. Watching them anyone would think it was the Police who set fire to the area and that all the local criminals are really nice people and are just "misunderstood". Thankfully there are such things as 'mute' buttons on TV remote controls and I will be using mine.

[Jonone]

Max, wouldn't the findings of the Bloody Sunday inquiry have been more useful in 1973/74 than forty years later ? Isn't it an indictment of inquiries that things can easily get buried ?

Your argument is that people should be confident in and satisfied by the outcome of inquiries. If people agreed with you the Saville inquiry would never have happened because people would have accepted the 'truth' of previous inquiries.

[David Johnson]

Deaths in police custody since 1998, 333. Officers convicted, 0

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/0 ... -convicted

These staggering figures would suggest that it is best to keep a completely open mind on these matters until there is incontrovertible evidence, one way or the other.

Cheers
D