Innocent man shot dead.

People probably would have heard about the bungled bombing attempt this week in london, it came a weak after the very successful bombing attempt we had before..

On friday police had witnessed a man coming from a housing complex used by some of the men responcible to the failed bombing attempt.
As the man made his way to the train station the police followed, he was confronted by police and for some reason he decided to hotfoot it away and make his way, very fast, to a waiting train.

As he got on the train he was tackled by a number of police and shot in the head 5 times at very close range infront of the other people on the train. Technically, he was restrained and under arrest when he was shot.

Now, i don't know about you guys but i don't think the punishment for "failing to stop" should be a nazi style execution.
I understand that if this man had a bomb then the protocol is to shoot them in the head, and i believe that 5 shots is deemed as the required amount to "neutralise" an attacker, especially if they happen to have a suicide belt on.
But it seems to me that the only reason they had to shoot this guy was that he came from the same area as the attempted attackers, he ran away, and he had brown skin.

I also heard (though non-official channels) that the police who shot him were actually SAS operatives, and not police.
The SAS are very good at what they do, but what they do is kill people. They are not trained, in any way, to take prisoners.
I dont think trained assassins are the people we should have "protecting" us.

The police have identified the man as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27 year old Brazilian electrician.

any thoughts?

BBC - full story

He was leaving a house that had been under surveilance for suspected terrorism, and he failed to stop when he was requested to do so. What the hell did he expect to happen?

"Failing to stop - when running from a suspected terrorist's house the day after 4 attempted bombings and attempting to board a train", no, I don't think the punishment was too out of line.

He basically was asking for it, who has a coat on in hot weather under ground?
Who runs from the cops like that?

He had it coming for him.

yeah but the point is he hadn't done anything.
If people get shot 5 times in the head for wearing a coat in the summer and running from police then book me a one way ticket to iraq.
I don't want to live here anymore.

These police (or SAS) seemed too jumpy, and way too trigger happy for my likeing.

what are the consequences if the police wait to act until he had done something? you can't arrest a man after he's blown himself up on the subway now, can you.

I think what people are saying is that he did do "something". He did several somethings, which when all added together made the police response understandable. Whether it was appropriate will be decided later I suppose.

He:

1) Came from a house under surveilance for being associated with the bombing - thereby placing himself under suspicion.
2) He dressed in a manner inconsistent with the current environment, but consistent with someone who might be a suicide bomber
3) He failed to obey police orders to stop, and ran away from then when pursued. What is he running from?
4) he headed straight for the subway - the scene of several previous terrorist attacks
5) He jumped guard rails and pay stations in an effort to get to the subway before the police could catch him

Any one act in and of itself may not warrant a lethal response. but you add them all up and what are people supposed to think you're going to do? no one shot him because he was brown. they shot him because he made very bad decisions and placed himself in a position where he was reasonably beleived to be a danger to others. tackling and subduing a suicide bomber will not stop him. removing his ability to detonate his bomb will. the police - in a effort to protect the public at large - cannot take the time to try to hold him down and figure out how his belt works. they remove the connection between his brain and his detonation device with a well place round to the head.

"Stupid is as stupid does". It's a shame he was killed if he was indeed innocent, the whole event needs to be thoroughly investigated to be sure there was no wrong doing. But he also deserves a big spot on this year's Darwin Awards.

<rant>

Why, in the West, are we in such a hurry to blame the victim? In this case, the British police. When America was attacked, it was American foreign policy that was the reason why Bin Laden attacked. Now, some knucklehead does everything except scream the words "I'm going to blow myself up on the subway" and people are blaming the police - and by extension the British people.

Terrorists don't need an excuse to kill people. They are bullies. The only reason they have to want to kill you is that you won't let them get their way. It's not because they're oppresed, it's not because of western decadence, it's not because of the Koran or Islam. They are selfish, self centered fascists.

Stop blaming yourself everytime your country or someone even marginally related to you takes an appropriate action to protect themselves from these ideologies. Can you imagine what would have happened even 100 years ago to the Muslim community in London if this had happened? A mob would have formed and murdered hundreds and hundreds of innocent immigrants out of revenge. Today, the first thing out of our mouths is calls for calm and jumping to the defense of the Arab community. The next thing is we start looking for what WE did to make the people want to attack us. We just can't imagine that maybe they just were bad people.

</rant>

So guilty untill proven innocent?
Not a good idea when the punishment for being guilty is 5 bullets in your head.
He wouldnt have done anything, he wouldnt have set any bombs off.....
he was a sparky on his way to work.

This is mass incompetence on the part of the police.
He could have run for any number of reasons.
He could have been mentally ill, or even just frightened at having plain clothed police pointing guns at him.
Armed Police who are not in a uniform look like armed members of the public.
Armed members of the public who are, like you say, in the location of a recent terrorist attack.

He wasn't coming from a house used by terrorists, he was coming from a housing complex.
thousands of people live there.

Which ever way you look at it, they killed an innocent man. So i don't see how they could ever be right in thier decision.

just for the record - not arguing with you and not upset or angry with you *lol* well, I am arguing with you but that's not the point don't want this to come off as a flame war. but it is a good discusion where people have passionate views. I don't think you're stupid just because you disagree with me!

ok, back on topic.

My point is simply that the job of the police is to protect the general public. Due process and "guilty until proven innocent" are great principles, but they only work when other more basic conditions exist in a society or a given situation. When other people's lives are at risk the forces that be do not have the ability to indulge in luxuries like due process - yes, it is a luxury. That's the principle behind marshall law. The sitution has become so bad that restoring order takes precedence over individual rights. Public safety in London right now has deteriorated to the point that we can no longer assume a guy running from the police in a heavy winter jacket in the middle of summer headed for the subway is just retarded.

Or, think of it this way. In this situation, you have competing and incompatible values. You can choose the protection of a clearly innocent person's life (the public) or the protection of a not clearly innocent person's life (our mental genius above). You can only uphold one of the two competing values. Which do you choose?

You have the value of due process vs. the value of public safety. Which is more valuable? One person taking up an inordinate ammount of public resources to preserve his rights or the right of the general pubic to be safe and not dead? Which do you preserve?

Another example: If I walk into your house in the middle of night with a flashlight and gun, and you crack me over the head with a rolling pin and send me to the hospital, would you be wrong? No, because I have no reason to be in your house at night for one, and two - any reasonable person would think I'm a burgler or worse. If later I came up with some excuse - believable or not - as to why i was there, your actions are still justified. Even if you killed me with that big ass rolling pin.

Sentiment is a good thing and it keeps us humane. Sentimentality is bad and is based on a skewed understanding of something's value. Sentiment is when we see a squirrel in the street and we swerve to miss it. Sentimentality is when we see that same squirrel in the street, swerve to miss it but hit an oncoming car and kill several people.

Sentiment avoids the squirrel because we value life. Sentimentality avoids the squirrel because we value that suirrels life above the value of the people in the car.

We have a bad tendency towards sentimentality in the West because we desperately want to preserve our ability to feel sentiment.

yo... i'm all for peace, f'real... as allgoodpeople knows, i think violence is far overrated and overused in our society.

however, it's just common sense that if you're running from someone with a gun and they yell for you to stop, it's really in your hands...

sometimes, it's the right decision to keep running (i.e. busy street, gunman's not a cop, you can bet s/he won't shoot for fear of getting beat down, arrested, killed...)
sometimes, it's the right decision to stop (i.e. gunman's a cop or military, deserted street, etc. etc.)

also, i think it's fsck'd up that we live in a society in which blame is so easy to place, in which violence is seen as the solution to violence, etc. etc.

i also don't think it's the best solution to shoot to kill someone who may be strapped with explosives... in part because, at times, those explosives are rigged to detonate when pressure is release from a trigger (as would happen if the attacker were to, say, die)

further, lethal force is not necessary to stop someone... shooting for the head is never a proper police response...

once again, though, it's hard to place all the blame on the police, who were probably pissing their pants... in part because, as i said before, if you hop a turnstile and continue running from armed officers of the state during a time of state emergency, well...

you take your life into your own hands...

perhaps it's best not to have shoot-to-kill cops out there, but it's a little wild to run from armed men in a crowded metro...

.Oo:.

as far as the comments about terrorists not needing excuses to kill people, well... they may not need them, but they have plenty of them... the surge of arms into iran and iraq in the 80's, the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in sudan, the funding and arming of the mujaideen in afghanistan, etc. etc...

osama bin ladin had a particular incident in mind when he claimed the 9/11 attack - the bombing of two towers in Lebanon in 1982... containing innocent civilian workers... by US planes.

perhaps this whole justification was cooked up to some degree to justify some horrible violence... but so was our invasion of Iraq... or, for that matter, our invasions of Grenada, Panama, Korea, Vietnam, etc. etc. our support of totalitarian regimes in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Panama, Afghanistan (we had just given millions of dollars to the Taliban before our decision to invade)...

so it's best not to try to distance our own military philosophy from that of the so-called 'terrorists'...

peace and blessings

Can we stop with the 500 word essays? Makes me feel like I am in English class

This is a DISCUSSION forum. In order to intelligently discuss things, some reading has to be done. If you don't like reading, or are a bit slow with larger words, perhaps you should spend some more time in English class?

Classic "blame the victim" mentality. Take that kind of thinking to it's logical extreme. I suppose the Iraqis in Abu Ghraib deserved to be mistreated because they had gotten themselves arrested for breaking the law? And that guy in prison, he deserved to get raped because he got himself arrested? "It's not ok, but it's understandable." Malarky.

And those folks who died in (insert the city with the latest suicide bombing in Iraq) because they should have known better than to be out in public in the Sunni Triangle? Unfortunate but hey, those "resistance fighters" have to strike somewhere.

The failures of US foreign policy (or any other country) do not provide justification for the actions of terrorists. If Bin Laden hit the WTC because we bombed some factory, then what was his justification for the first WTC bombing? What about the Embassy bombings in Africa? What about Richard Reid? What about civilian westerners beheaded in Iraq? What about Egyptian ambassadors being kidnapped and murdered just for being in Iraq? Were you even listening when Zarqawi announced it was ok to kill Shiite women and children in the effort to resist the Infidel?

Stop making excuses for other people's poor behavior. For the sake of discussion, lets say it's as simple as to say that the big bad USA went and blew up an innocent target for no good reason (although it rarely is that black and white). Does the evil of the US justify the evil of terrorists? Is this really what you're saying? Are you saying you understand and sympathize with killing innocent people in response to the killing of innocent people? I don't think that's what you mean to say, but the principles you're espousing lead to that conclusion.

I think you know I'm in Iraq, and to be honest with you - to a degree I don't blame the insurgents for attacking US soldiers. We invaded their country and at least at first they were fighting back. But the insurgency has demonstrated that they are no longer interested in just resisting an occupying force. When they bomb a US humvee that is clearly surrounded with young children who are getting candy from the soldiers, doesn't this tell you an awful lot about their motivations? When they bomb civilian targets with no military value at all what does this tell you about their intentions? When they send a suicide bomber to the opening of a new water plant where the towns folk have gathered with their wives and children and celebrate the opening, what does this tell you?

OK, well, this is getting off topic What is this inbred sense of shame we have? Do western nations commit atrocities? Yes! Do you know the difference between western nations and other countries who commit atrocities? We have systems in place to punish those who commit those atrocities. We at least TRY to do the right thing. Terrorists don't even care. They just want to lash out like deadly spoiled two year olds.

I once heard a great quote. It was something along the lines of "In the west, we violate human rights all the time, to our great shame. In other countries, they never violate human rights - because in those countries there are no human rights." Try carrying on this discussion in a society run by Bin Laden or his ilk. There are no debates or arguments in those societies. You don't get to point out the failures of the powerful in those societies. I'm sick to my stomach of hearing detached westerners try to defend them because we feel guilty about our own mistakes.

you always make good points roarmeow, but they always strike me as being based on an empty philosophy *trying very hard to avoid the L word *

ugh, i'm sorry, i hate to keep posting on this topic but i just feel so strongly about this.

it is an absolute shame that a seemingly innocent man was killed in london - whether he was asking for it or not. but this is what terrorism does to a society. A month ago would this guy have been killed? I don't know, because I'm not in London. But my gut says no. Terrorists created the environment of mistrust that caused the police to feel that they had to shoot this guy in order to protect the other subway passengers.

Western citizens just have not figured this out yet and it's maddening! Islamic militancy is not something that is "someone else's" problem. We go around buying our PSP's and ordering broadband and as along as the Islamists are oppressing someone else we can just ignore it. The affect of this mindset that the radical Islamists have is just pure poison!! Blair is 100% right when he says we're engaged in a war of ideals and principles and values. It just happens to express itself in violent terms.

i read an essay over at Time.com written by a Muslim scholar that said it so well. i hope you might take a moment to check it out (hint hint roarmeow )

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083918-1,00.html

I think it's a real shame about what happened, but HUH? Why the heck did he start running? He obviously had done SOMETHING if he decided to run...

well, like some of the other folks have mentioned, he may have just gotten scared. who knows. but his flight certainly did not help his situation.

i'm sure we'll get more details as to what happened as the days go along.

i'm curious as to how much of the original story of what happened will change as more information comes to light as well.