Your Prejudices Are Showing, Gaby...

And they aren't, of course, as the total waste of public money that was the trial of an armed officer for shooting dead a deadly threat has shown...

For Kaba’s grieving family, this latest in a string of acquittals was proof the police “can kill with impunity”, as a campaigner said.

Funny sort of 'impunity' that puts you on trial for following your training. Are you sure you know what that word means, Gaby? Will this help?

Police chiefs, conversely, have responded by demanding more safeguards against prosecution. Though the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has agreed to demands that officers in such cases remain anonymous until convicted – not unreasonably, given the threats reportedly made against Blake and his loved ones – she has ordered an independent review into some of the more questionable asks on the National Police Chiefs’ Council wishlist, alongside a crackdown on police vetting and an overhaul of CPS guidance on charging officers. It’s time to get to the bottom, once and for all, of why successful prosecutions are so rare.

Because every member of that jury would have put themselves in the place of that officer facing a man using a vehicle as a deadly weapon and wondered just what else he was supposed to do, Gaby.... 

The home secretary cannot, however, let herself be held to ransom.

The Home Sec has already been held to ransom (by the racehustlers) many times, what's one more? 

...let us also hear from those who think justice is already almost impossible to get and who understand the human consequences of some of the NPCC’s more technical-sounding demands, such as making it harder for inquests to return verdicts of unlawful killing against police officers.

I think we've heard quite enough from that quarter, with their selective outrage when blacks are harmed by someone not also black, don't you? 

It’s true that we expect extraordinary things of firearms officers. Of the two other fatal shootings investigated in the year Kaba died, one involved a white man with a knife who attacked a police station and charged headlong at a Derbyshire firearms officer, who held off firing until the man was barely arm’s-length away. The other was a white man in Cumbria, holding a knife to a young child’s throat. He was shot after repeatedly refusing to drop the knife, and the child survived. The skill and steadiness under pressure involved in both cases is astonishing, and the consequences of a mistake unimaginable. I certainly couldn’t do it. But the same is true of brain surgery, and that doesn’t render surgeons above the law.

It does mean that it seems to take an extraordinarily long time to bring them to justice, Gaby. And I'd bet there's far more surgeons than AFOs in the country.