Are we now a country where police shoot to kill?

Britain

Look at what our fear of terrorism has done to us, said Mike Sullivan in the London Sun. Police last week were watching an apartment building where, they believed, one of the second wave of Underground bombers may have been living. When they saw an olive-skinned man emerge wearing a heavy coat and head for an Underground entrance, they immediately assumed he was one of the men who had tried to detonate a suicide bomb a few days earlier and failed. The man ignored their commands to stop, and instead “vaulted over a ticket barrier” and fled down an escalator. When he tripped while boarding a subway car, an officer caught up to him and, as the man lay on the ground, shot him eight times. The next day, police admitted that the dead man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was no terrorist, but an innocent electrician from Brazil on his way to work.

The British people feel terrible for Menezes’ family, said the London Independent in an editorial. But they do not want the officer who killed him to be “made a scapegoat.” He was simply following accepted counterterrorism procedures. Our police have consulted with their colleagues in Sri Lanka and Israel, two nations frequently targeted by suicide bombers. They’ve learned that simply wounding a would-be suicide bomber will not stop him from detonating. He must be completely incapacitated. “If that means blowing out his brains, that is horrible but necessary.”

Surely not necessary, said Gary Younge in the London Guardian. On news programs and talk shows, the prevailing theme has been that we are better safe than sorry. But after the shooting of Menezes, “we are left with one man dead, nobody safe, and everybody sorry.” Now we are jumpier than ever. Muslim Britons, who were already afraid of being blown up by a crazy suicide bomber, must now also fear “a paramilitary-style execution at the hands of London’s finest.” British police do not have much experience in using firearms. Very few of them are even qualified to carry a gun and, of those, fewer still have ever drawn one on the job. Obviously our cops cannot handle the responsibility of a shoot-to-kill policy.

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What choice do they have? said Tony Parsons in the London Mirror. The police “are, after all, dealing with men who are operating a bomb-to-kill policy.” Shooting Menezes was a tragic mistake, but an understandable one. The police believed he was about to blow up an entire subway car, and they had to make a split-second decision. The Brazilian was unlucky. “But if he had been a suicide bomber, everyone on that train would have been unlucky.”

Tim Hames

Times