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max_tranmere wrote:

> "Feds" is a term used quite a lot in certain communities in
> London to refer to the Police, if obviously migrated here from
> America, where the term is officially used to refer to a
> certain body and some people here assume it would apply here.

David Platt even used it once in Coronation Street...

"I guess if someone's conveys the impression they are a bad person and are a gangster, and Duggan certainly conveyed that"

Did you know him? Did you know his family? Do you know people who know him? So what are you basing this on, Max, What the police and the Daily Mail tells you?

Did he have his fingerprints on the sock/gun? No.
Did he fire the gun? No residue was found. etc. etc.

As I said whether he was a gangster or not is IRREVELANT. What is relevant is that an unarmed man was shot dead. Much better to arrest, charge and lock up him as well as his associates. At the very least it will allow you to get a good night's sleep, Max, eh?

David Johnson wrote:

> "I guess if someone's conveys the impression they are a bad
> person and are a gangster, and Duggan certainly conveyed that"
>
> Did you know him? Did you know his family? Do you know people
> who know him? So what are you basing this on, Max, What the
> police and the Daily Mail tells you?

Come on David, give it up, you flogging a dead horse here.
>
> Did he have his fingerprints on the sock/gun? No.
> Did he fire the gun? No residue was found. etc. etc.

He was carrying a gun. If he was a law-abiding citizen, why would he do that?

>
> As I said whether he was a gangster or not is IRREVELANT. What
> is relevant is that an unarmed man was shot dead. Much better
> to arrest, charge and lock up him as well as his associates.
> At the very least it will allow you to get a good night's
> sleep, Max, eh?

Saves us the cost of the trial and feeding him in prison, I suppose...

David Johnson wrote:

Some interesting stats
>
> This covers all the deaths in police custody and others arising
> from contact with the police e.g. pursuit, shooting etc.
>
>
>
> This totals nearly 1500 deaths

> Now call me cynical, Maximilian, but this doesn't seem quite
> right to me!!!


looking at the police shooting death stats in isolation, the number is 54 over a 23 year period, this averages out at just over 2 per year. when you consider the level of gun crime in cities like london, Manchester and Nottingham i'm actually suprised the total isnt a lot higher. Clearly the police aren't operating a shoot to kill policy. Quite the opposite, if anything these stats show that shootings by police officers are a very rare event, thankfully.

As for deaths in custody, I agree that at first sight a figure of 969 over 23 years looks a lot, and yes there needs to be a full investigation each time whenever someone dies in a cell. but how many people were in custody in those 23 years? Probably the number runs into hundreds of thousands, more likely millions. So again it's only a very tiny percentage of the total number.

do you think it's actually more likely that most of these people died due to pre-existing conditions that the police were unaware of (or something like alcohol poisioning) or as a reult of actual 'police brutality'?

You may well be right that the number of deaths in police shootings and police custody may be very small in terms of the number of people arrested etc. but that is not the point I am making.

The points that I am making are:

1. If you look at the number of convictions of the police for misdemeanours resulting from those deaths it is miniscule as a percentage of the deaths.
2. That there is a seeming reluctance on the part of judges and members of the public to convict. I suspect that this will now change in the light of the Ian Tomlinson case and the attempt by the police to fit up a Tory cabinet minister.
3. The IPCC which reviews serious cases in which the police have been involved is not fit for purpose, being staffed as it is by a number of ex-policemen.

If you look at the actual, individual cases e.g. in the link below, then it becomes more obvious to question the wonderfulness of the police which the stats seem to suggest i.e. all of these black guys were in good health so it was just bad luck for the police that they ended up dying in custody.

ah OK I see what you were driving at now. The Tomlinson case left a very nasty taste as did the de Menezes case.

that said, I still think that the vast majority of coppers are decent enough people doing a very difficult job. just a pity that the high-profile fuck-ups and cover-ups like Tomlinson, de Menezes and plebgate taint the entire force (or 'service' as it prefers to call itself these days). the problems start when they close ranks, rather than come clean about their mistakes and root out the bad apples.

"that said, I still think that the vast majority of coppers are decent enough people doing a very difficult job."

I agree completely with you. The police do appear to be taking steps to improve the situation e.g.

1. Adapting restraint procedures to avoid the deaths that have occurred when violent people were being restrained.
2. Trying to introduce more detailed training for all police about these issues.
3. Looking at the possibility of helmet cameras for armed police similar to those that get used in the army. This might help to avoid a situation where a number of non-police witnesses as in the Duggan case say he was not holding a gun and yet the policeman who shot Duggan swears blind he was holding a gun.

In addition the government needs to completely revamp the IPCC which does not appear fit for purpose.

We will see!

You had a problem with Stephen Lawrence situation getting traction? Why is that? You wanted his killers to get away? Why? Because he was black, or because they were white, or a combination of both?

Would you have wanted them to get away if he were a white human?

Regarding whether we would have heard much more or much less about this if the killers were white, it would still get coverage as it was a murder but it was because of what happened subsequently that got the Duggan murder big, and lasting, coverage - because of the riots that followed in Tottenham and the media then picked up on this much more and ran with it - and because of THAT the outcome of the enquiry into whether Duggan was lawfully or unlawfully killed got lots of coverage too. The colours of the killers and victims, when there is no subsequent riot though, always determines the amount of coverage a murder gets and I've always found that curious.

I remember when that 16 year old white lad Ben Kinsella was killed in Islington. That got much much more coverage than it would have got if he had been black and the killers had been black. Black teenagers are killed in gang attacks, by other black youngsters, on a semi-regular basis sadly - and that gets about 4th or 5th billing on the local TV news and then gets forgotten. A black person being killed by some white people though would have get massive coverage.

Some comments about the Ben Kinsella murder: if it had been three white guys killing a black guy it would have been a huge media story, and be called 'racist' and so on. If it's three black guys killing a white guy it is a massive story (as that was) but not described as a 'racist murder', just a 'murder'. Black on black killings get little media coverage. Black on white killings get huge media coverage but are not 'racist'. White on black killings get huge coverage and ARE 'racist'. The odd thing here is why it is 'racist' when done one way round and not the other, and also why black on black is not seen as being as much a big deal by the media and not covered as much.

The Ben Kinsella murder created a situation where his sister, Brooke Kinsella, became a regular on TV, met David Cameron, and also became a well known anti-knife campaigner as a result. She also got an Honour from Cameron for her troubles. Local gangsters were also so incensed by Ben Kinsella's murder that they got involved in getting the killers put away. Here are two interesting articles about it:





I also remember after Ben Kinsella's murder celebrities started talking about it. Here is Noel Gallagher on the subject and he is saying all this specifically following-on from that murder. A black on black knife murder does not get celebrities talking and is not reported as much as I've said:

I had just moved to the UK for university at the time of the whole Stephen Lawrence ordeal. That is - the inquest etc etc. From where I sat, it was not only the fact that IT WAS INDEED RACIALLY motivated (the murder), but also something so many Whites are glossing over as they only see the 'what if he were white' angle, and that is the wanton disregard the police had for the plea from Stephen's friend for help.

So for me it's not the racist pigs that killed him. Racism is ever present in the UK. That is no biggie to me. The thing about it was that the police generally have little regard for Black life; it's cheap and unimportant to them. This, I find, transcends the UK and is very much the same in 'Black' countries...as it relates to the police. The police in some of those very countries are hardly likely to show little regard for White life, for example. Perhaps because the fall out would be big. It's a Worldwide thing. Police are the same to me, no matter the country.

I'm just concerned about Argie's quip about Stephen. Does he know something about Stephen that we/I don't? Was Stephen a thug that got what was coming to him? What really was Argie's point?