Editor’s note: Richard Godwin is a writer of crime and thriller fiction, and his debut novel is about to be released in March, 2011. While he is known for his dark fiction, he also writes plays and produces interviews in his Chin Wag series. Regular readers know that he brings an amazing scope of knowledge and experience to his interviews and his sense of humor is conveyed in his conversations. You can check out Richard’s website here.
THE SHOOTING OF JEAN CHARLES de MENEZES
By Richard Godwin
To the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead by the British Police while they fumbled a high profile operation, the horrific incident isn’t old news even though it happened almost six years ago. The problems are still there, the deep seated institutionalized issues are still there and will go on being there until a radical shake up occurs.
I used to walk past Stockwell tube station on my way to work. There once was a time when the air wasn’t full of the acrid smells of wasting flowers at an altar outside it; when there wasn’t the spilt blood of an innocent man on every shoulder badge of every bureaucratically spoiled police officer walking the beat in South West London.
That changed when Jean Charles de Menezes had his life extinguished, on 22 July 2005.
Such a slim life really, a slim volume placed between two large volumes called Law and Order, arguably two obscene lies, fat obsolescent redundant lies within a political programme grown obscene on its own blood. He was a Brazilian man shot in the head seven times at the aforementioned tube station on the London Underground by the London Metropolitan Police. Shot dead after he was misidentified as one of the suspects involved in the previous days’ failed bombing attempts. These events took place two weeks after the London bombings of 7 July 2005 in which 56 people died.
Now stop.
That was terrible.
We’re fighting an enemy right?
Or is the enemy some misinformation about a political programme?
Are all terrorists as Joseph Conrad said of Vronsky the terrorist in his prophetic novel The Secret Agent, small men in a crowd clutching a bomb?
‘He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.’
The threat was there, English colonialist guilt had opened the doors and the bureaucrats were powerless to deal with a situation that was fast while their methods were slow.
While a police officer took a piss after drinking too much coffee he lost the suspect he was following and saw Jean Charles de Menezes emerge from a building.
No doubt with all the unofficially un-confronted institutionalized racism of his forebears deep inside him he went in active pursuit of the target, targets being what the police are told to pursue. These tend to be a van driver at a red light eating a Mars bar or the latest nutter they falsely arrest while the real suspects walk free. Forget the rapists and killers; let the football fans on the terraces taunt the police for their wide ranging failings.
What is really going on here?
When the police let pass placard bearers toting statements like ‘Kill Blair and Bush’ and knock the heads of fox hunting supporters with their batons until their eyes are full of blood you know there is an agenda.
Screw the motorists kick the upper classes in the heads and get a decent pension.
Jean Charles de Menezes had his hand over his head while he was prone on the floor of the static train as onlookers watched the police officer fire seven bullets into his head.
The real culprits must have laughed at the police while their superiors lied and evaded their inadequacy.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick, the officer in overall charge of the operation, failed to take charge.
Sir Ian Blair, the consummate failure in charge of the mess at the time, lied on TV. This was the Chief Police Commissioner who obfuscated and back peddled while his career set fire.
Thankfully Boris Johnson when he became Mayor of London publicly wrote to him saying he had no faith in him and would not back any of his policies and forced the obscenely corrupt individual to resign with his fat pension.
On December 13th 2008 The Sunday Times printed an article by Sean O’Neill crime and Security Editor that read:
‘In one of the most important public examinations of police conduct, the jurors found the testimony of the officers who shot the young Brazilian to be unreliable and concluded that Metropolitan Police commanders failed their front-line colleagues.
Mr. de Menezes, 27, an electrician, was shot seven times in the head by specialist firearms officers who mistook him for a suicide bomber about to blow up a London Tube train.
The jury rejected the Met’s contention that his killing was lawful and that he was the unfortunate victim of an unprecedented situation created by the July 2005 terrorist emergency.
Sir Michael Wright, QC, the coroner, had sparked controversy and cries of “whitewash” when he denied the jury the option of returning an unlawful killing verdict. However, the jurors, sitting in the unusual surroundings of the Oval cricket ground, yesterday delivered an open verdict and used their answers to a series of questions set by the coroner to set out their views.
They did not believe the claims of firearms officers that a warning of “armed police” had been shouted or that Mr. de Menezes had advanced threateningly towards the policemen.
The jury also cited a catalogue of failures by the Met, ranging from poor communications between the control room and officers on the ground to not supplying officers with pictures of Hussain Osman, the terrorist whom they wanted. Those failings had contributed to the death of an innocent man.’
Postmodern French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard warns in his book Simulations that a world of simulation, “is infinitely more dangerous . . . since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really not hinge on more than a simulation” Baudrillard’s philosophies describe a situation in which the inhabitants of a particular society live in a seemingly Utopian state, when in truth their contentment is an illusion.
What I propose is this: A tax on political lies.
Every time a politician is caught lying he is taxed in direct ratio to his earnings, perhaps starting at 42 per cent.
If a police officer behaves in such an evidently criminal way and his superiors are found wanting in command strip them of their pensions.
On 16 August 2005, the Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign, also known as ‘Justice4Jean’, began calling for a public inquiry into the “unlawful killing” of Menezes.
As there has been no legal process to assess the lawfulness or otherwise of the killing, critics argue that the Campaign’s first aim to “find out the truth about Jean’s unlawful killing” reflects a prejudging of the issue.
Jean Charles de Menezes’s cousin, Alex Alves Pereira, said, “I believe my cousin’s death was result of police incompetence.”
To paraphrase Philip Larkin, wasteful weak propitiatory flowers won’t change the situation.
The challenging of the inefficacy of the powers we vote in will.
