The British press on Monday questioned the police handling of investigations into the July bomb attacks on the London transport system in the wake of the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian man.
Lawmakers also joined the debate about the police shoot-to-kill policy after 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on Friday by police who mistook him for a possible suicide bomber.
”Now public trust in the police in ethnic communities, which holds a key to identifying terrorists, has understandably been badly shaken,” The Guardian said in an editorial.
”It was silly for Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, to deny yesterday [Sunday] that this was not a serious setback for the police.”
Ann Cryer, a Labour Party parliamentarian, sympathised with the police officers involved in the shooting, but voiced disquiet about the existence of a specific policy to kill, when police are otherwise instructed to disable an assailant.
”We mustn’t automatically go down the path of the shoot-to-kill. We are taking on the mantle of terrorists if we do that,” she told the Financial Times.
”We can’t lower ourselves to that standard,” said Cryer, who is also a member of a parliamentary home affairs committee that deals with such issues.
”I would never support a shoot-to-kill policy,” she said.
There were calls for the publication of any new guidelines to police in London.
”Certainly there should be clarification and unless some overwhelming security reason could me made out as to why they should not be published, yes, they should be published,” said Nick Harvey, a Liberal Democrat MP.
The Daily Telegraph reflected growing public anxiety about the failure of the police, despite a massive manhunt, to catch the suspected Islamic extremists who tried to blow up three trains and a bus on Thursday.
”We have their images on camera as well as the bombs they left behind. Our intelligence services have had years to concentrate on infiltrating Islamist groups … Yet, at the time of going to press, all four bombers seem to be still on the loose,” it wrote.
Metropolitan (Met) Police Commissioner Ian Blair has said the investigation is advancing quickly and has apologised for the Menezes shooting.
But the Daily Telegraph said ”troubling questions” hung over the police service.
”We ask whether the Met is getting the leadership it deserves,” it said.
‘There’s no point in shooting anywhere else’
In 2000 the appearance of routine armed patrols in some parts of Britain caused an uproar, although police have been able to count on backup by a growing number of specialist firearms units since the late 1960s.
Under the combined onslaught of ever more violent street crime, bombings by Northern Irish separatist groups, and now suicide bombers, British police have been forced to adopt tougher measures over the years.
Ian Blair defended the shoot-to-kill policy in a televised interview.
”They have to be that. Because there’s no point in shooting at somebody’s chest because that’s where the bomb is likely to be.”
Officers were also told not to hope to disable those who refused to surrender before they could set off their bomb.
”There’s no point in shooting anywhere else because if they fall down they detonate it,” Blair told Sky television.
While he expressed ”deep regret” at the death of De Menezes, the Metropolitan Police chief was adamant that those orders had been repeatedly reviewed and would remain in place.
”This not just a Metropolitan Police policy, it’s a national policy and I think we’re quite comfortable that the policy is right,” said Blair.
John Stevens, who was Blair’s predecessor from 2000 until last February, said on Sunday he had introduced the policy, well before 52 people on a bus and three underground trains in London were killed by the first suicide bombers on British soil on July 7.
”When I was Commissioner of the Met it was my sad duty to end many, many years of police tradition and bring in what’s been called a shoot-to-kill policy against suspected suicide bombers,” Stevens wrote in the News of the World newspaper.
”There is only one sure way to stop a suicide bomber determined to fulfill his mission: destroy his brain instantly, utterly,” he added.
Previously armed police were instructed to shoot at an assailant’s body to disable or overwhelm them. Stevens explained that he engaged in the policy change from experience gleaned in Israel.
Blair said: ”It is drawn on the experience from other countries including Sri Lanka.”
A small minority of police patrolling Britain’s cities and villages carry firearms.
Just 2 060 of Greater London’s 31 000 police officers have guns.
Three hundred and fifty of them in the Metropolitan’s plice’s elite S019 special operations unit are especially concerned by what Blair called ”a shoot to kill in order to protect policy”.
But it is a far cry from the notion of policing by consent that early 19th century Home Affairs minister Robert Peel advocated when he created the police constables who gained their nickname of ”Bobbies” from him.
Although practice varied between regions, apart from a period between 1884 and 1936, British police were allowed little more than a truncheon on routine patrol. Revolvers were kept under lock and key for exceptional events.
A wave of killings and record levels of gun crime in Britain, especially London, in the late 1990s — despite some of the toughest gun laws in the world — brought about more routine use of armed police in recent years.
According to senior officers, guns also brought a new challenge to British police, and the new rules of engagement against defiant suicide bombers have added to the pressure.
”It is a huge ethical dilemma and it takes special quality of individual to put themselves in that situation,” said Ken Jones, head of a committee dealing with terrorism for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
”This is a new world for us. We have been talking about this for some years, but it is now an operational reality on the streets of the United Kingdom. We have dreaded this day,” he added. – Sapa-AFP