It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet Barrister

Max Hastings huffs and puffs about the shooting of an unfortunate man.

No, not Jean Charles DeMenezes, that’s such old news. This is, of course, the coked-up, booze-sodden Saunders:

Many people will agree, saying: the police have a tough job; anybody who fires guns recklessly and confronts armed officers deserves whatever he gets.

I cannot agree.

Well, it’s not up to you. It’s up to the jury.

And they decided it was lawful (something which rightly bothers Anna Raccoon, given the state's decision to forgo the death penalty option in other instances).

Armed response teams wear paramilitary garb and equip themselves in imitation of the SAS.

This is necessary when they are mobilised to address terrorists or violent criminals like Raoul Moat, who blinded PC David Rathband in Cumbria before killing himself in May this year.

A coked-up lawyer firing blindly and drunkenly out of his window into a city street, you see, isn’t a ‘violent criminal’ as far as Max is concerned…

More alarming was the apparent mindset of the officers ¬conducting the five-hour siege. They rejected the traditional view of British policemen, and of any humane society, that their objective should be to try to take their man alive.

Well, no, actually. That was one reason given for not letting the wife talk to him – in case that was what triggered his suicide.

Did you listen to any of the evidence, Max?

I reject the view of an anonymous marksman who gave ¬evidence at the inquest, saying his action was ‘absolutely ¬necessary’, as part of the police role in putting themselves ‘between the public and the bad man’.

This was not a bad man but a mad man.

I’ve never seen anything that says a mad man can’t kill just as easily by pulling a trigger as any bad man…

Meanwhile, Richard Preston does indeed remember De Menezes, but thinks that the Saunders case is worse:

The jury in the Saunders case has returned a verdict of lawful killing. They could scarcely do anything else – the idea that police officers put in the line of fire and reacting to a dangerous, unpredictable situation could be guilty of acting unlawfully would undermine much of the bond between the force and the public.

But the gross over-reaction to the situation (59 officers, 100 guns, 12 marksmen with rifles trained on Saunders), the quite shocking failures of communication and command, some of the macho evidence given, anonymously, by armed officers should all worry us deeply.

The fact that several supposedly proficient ‘marksmen’ can’t hit a cow or a horse worries me deeply. The fact that they can hit a man - when he turns his gun on them - not at all.

When Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot the context was a week in which random terror had been brought to the streets of London, the threat of mass murder was very real and officers had, they thought, only seconds in which to stop a potentially deadly suspect.

In contrast, Mark Saunders, the legal owner of a shotgun, was surrounded in his own home.

I remember a siege in – I think – Brixton (am now informed it was Hackney, memory, eh?) a while back, over Christmas.

The police tried containment there. The gunman set fire to the block of flats. So I can see why the fact that he was holed up in his own house wasn’t considered much comfort…

The thread that runs through these columns is, as DumbJon has pointed out, that this shouldn’t happen to them when they act just like a member of the underclass!

“See, it's true - the rich are different. If this case had happened on a sink estate in Liverpool or Glasgow, he'd be 'Mark, who'?”

I thought ‘equality’ was what the progressives wanted..?

And neither of these columns can come up with any new evidence, or anything to dispute the findings of the jury. Just a complaint that the dead man was ‘no threat’. When what they really mean is, he was ‘no chav’.

Well, bullets don’t care about the class struggle.