Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

At the moment I’m ashamed to be British. We shoot innocent people. When did that start to make sense?

Now forgive me if my reasoning is broken, but surely threatening suicide bombers with death isn’t much of a deterrent? …if I’m a suicide bomber what do I do? I make some explosives, triggered by a timer. Then I go out with my objective of exploding on Hungerford Bridge, or somewhere, look up the train times and set my timer to go off there. I can make sure I’m in a carriage full of fat bankers and wait for the alloted time.

What happens if I get wrestled to the ground and shot on the concorse (sp?) of Charing Cross Station? For me nothing has changed – I’m still dead when I expected to be. If I’m lucky the timer will trigger just as theres a whole bunch of armed police kicking my head. But maybe it’ll be a while and they’ll have time to get the bomb disposal guys to me. They won’t be able to do anything except close the station around me anyway – that’ll be quite enough disruption that I’ve probably achieved what I set out to do.

Now, what if the police get the wrong man? If they’re uniformed officers they can confront anyone (given probably cause), most members of public would be a bit scared but still talk to them. Some, probably those who for some reason feel guilty, will run for it. This is normally a reasonable thing to do since officers in the UK are rarely armed, but they do have a lot of friends just a radio call away, so sooner or later they’ll get you if you’ve done anything important. So you’re in no immediate danger, beyond a bit of exercise and some minor brutality.

If they’re plain clothed officers with guns, what do you do? First thought is “Some dude just pulled a gun on me”, you run, you’re gonna die anyway (if they’re any good with the gun). You don’t stop to hear about his reason, you panic, he probably wants your money, or revenge for stealing his girlfriend, or something.

Given that they’ve shot someone, there are a number of outcomes. He could be guilty of the crime he was shot for, this would be the best outcome, since there is some excusability here if he were causing an immediate clear and present danger, but I still disagree with this.

He could be guilty of another crime, say fare dodging, which would account for his guilty reaction. Or he could be innocent.

In the later two cases we then need to examine why he aroused suspicion. This could be some particular behaviour, or appearance, or action. Appearance is the easy one, he could have been dressed in a particular way, or have a particular racial origin or hair style – but none of those are specific to bombers, the four pictures they released of the most recent bombers looked to me just like ordinary citizens, normal looking people. There are lots of people who dress oddly, and who have different hairstyles, or carry cumbersome bags. None of this is illegal (though it may show questionable fashion sense). Indeed those who dress differently (or are easily identifiable in some other way) have an incentive not to behave illegally since they are easier to track.

So it must have been behaviour or action. I eagerly await further information on what happened.

The information we have so far is appalling, in no way is this kind of action acceptable in a free society. While I agree that we should have reasonable protection from being blown up while we’re in the city (anywhere, in fact), I also strongly believe that having a police force that is prepared to shoot people without trial is *very wrong*. This turns the police from a force there to protect us from ‘bad people’ into a force that believes all people are bad. Or maybe that some poorly-defined subset of people are bad.


Categories: Memories.

/ 25 Comments

25 comments

  1. beermat

    as I commented to , what if the chap was deaf, or paranoid (or other mental health condition) or didn’t speak english or … loads of reasons. As you say, he’d leggit or something.

    is most worrying.

    Reply
    • neilh

      I’m prepared to believe that this guy did something stupid. In the heat of such an attack (having a gun pulled on you) theres quite a lot of scope for doing stupid things.

      But doing stupid things isn’t punishable by death.

      Reply
  2. neilh

    Re: The Information Problem

    I’ve found it interesting watching the difference between British and American news sources over the past few weeks. It seems the authorities here are a bit jumpy but that the people and the press are pretty much dealing with it. While across the pond they seem to have descended into some kind of hysteria about it.

    Justice cannot be done at the end of a gun, indeed, we have seen some examples where even our lengthy judicial process has failed to provide justice. Tightening security is the wrong answer – we’re already into the diminishing returns part of the graph. The way to stop this kind of attack is to figure out why people would want to make this kind of attack and deal with that.

    Reply
  4. neilh

    But surely the detonators are on timers – the point of the bombers is to get the bombs to a reasonable target ‘audience’. Shoting bombers just means they don’t get to their target location, just explode surrounded by police. Or if we’re lucky the bomb disposal guys will have been there.

    My point was that it wasn’t a threat to them – the possibiility of being shot isn’t going to prevent suicide bombers from suicide bombing, since by definition they’re not afraid of dying. But that it does pose a huge threat to the rest of society.

    Reply
    • jarkman

      I think you’re reading this wrong.

      The intended purpose of this shooting, it seems to me, was not to deter other bombers but to prevent this particular presumed bomber from setting his bomb off.

      So, they really did (for reasons we don’t know) think that he had a bomb and think that he had the means to detonate it by hand. If they’d been right, I can see why shooting him would seem like a very good decision. It’s nothing to do with deterrence.

      Reply
      • neilh

        Absolutely, theres no way it can be justified in terms of deterrent. Theres also *very slim* evidence that it can be justified in any other way – thats what I was trying to explore with this post, is there any other way to justify it? As far as I can work out its just a bunch of jumpy cops with guns and a head full of prejudice.

        Reply
        • jarkman

          I don’t think it’s so slim. Obviously, in this case, they got it wrong.

          To me, if he’d actually had a bomb, they would have been completely justified.

          And if (a) they already had some reasonable suspicion that he was a bomber and (b) he ran into a tube station when challenged, what else were they going to think ?

          Reply
          • neilh

            If you’re going to kill someone you need to be *very very* sure you’ve got it right. Which doesn’t seem to have been the case.

            Now I’d still be worried about it if he had been a bomber presenting an immediate danger, but given that he wasn’t I’m furious. Allowing the police to dole out justice in this way destroys the freedoms our society is built upon.

            I’m not sure the value of our freedom to go about our business without fear of being blown up is worth exchanging for a fear of being shot by the police….as a British white person I suspect I’m not high on the list of shootables, but you can never tell what prejudices will be in force with a particular officer….indeed, I think my argument is that it is more important that we continue to let people go about their business without being in fear of our own authorities – that alienates the people from the police, reducing trust and cooperation which would be essential if another attack were to succeed. There is already a lot of cultural tension, lets not make it worse, we could end up with a riot on our hands when the next ‘incident’ occurs.

          • jarkman

            You’re talking as though it was a new thing for the police to shoot people who were presenting an immediate danger. It’s not. It’s been going on for a long, long time.

          • jarkman

            Maybe it helps to separate the questions a bit:

            – Should the police shoot people who seem, quite convincingly, to be an immediate danger ?

            – Did this chap really seem to be an immediate danger ?

            And, for the second question, you don’t get the benefit of hindsight.

          • neilh

            My personal view is no to both, but I understand that there are people who would argue for a yes to one or both.

            They /should/ be able to incapacitate someone who is obviously about to be a danger. Lethal force is too much, though.

            Lets explore the second question a little more (based on what little information has managed to leak out into the wild, and which I’ve picked up)…the man was seen leaving a house that was under surveillance in relation to some attacks.

            There are any number of reasons why someone would leave a house, perhaps they were delivering something through the letterbox for a friend, or they were passing and saw that someone had left their car lights on, or whatever.

            So this leads to further questions – does anyone who is associated in some way with houses under surveillance automatically start presenting danger to the public? I think the answer should be no.

            If that is the case then there must be some way of making a stronger association between the people associated with the house and activities which are being surveilled.

            Further, if the house is known to be in some way associated with the attacks why are they letting people come and go at will rather than raiding the house now?

            If the answer to that is that they wish to obtain more information about the communications network of the people involved with the activities in the house then they should be tracking the people associated with the house, and watching their associates.

            Whichever way you look at it waiting for the guy to get to the station then shooting him is the wrong thing to do.

            Even if he did something stupid, like faredodging or somesuch, you might start to feel a bit paranoid if you’ve just figured out you’re being followed by a number of strangers.

          • jarkman

            I think you left out the bit where he ran away from armed police onto a tube train. Can you see what impression that might have given ?

          • neilh

            I covered that to some extent in my original post:

            “Some, probably those who for some reason feel guilty, will run for it. This is normally a reasonable thing to do since officers in the UK are rarely armed, but they do have a lot of friends just a radio call away, so sooner or later they’ll get you if you’ve done anything important. So you’re in no immediate danger, beyond a bit of exercise and some minor brutality.”

            Today I read something that suggested that he was followed by 20 plain-clothed officers. In that area of London anyone confronted by that kind of situation would associate a group like that with gangland rather than police, and the right thing to do would be to run for it, try to get onto a train and out of there asap. And, even if he thought they were police most people in the area have something to be guilty about and would really rather not be stopped.

            So it strikes me that those officers weren’t particularly sensitive to the nature of the area. And that they weren’t really clued up about what behaviour they were looking for. Surely if you are an officer in that situation you don’t shoot first and ask questions later, you try another way.

            Theres a lot of guilty people. Most of us aren’t guilty of anything that needs stopping by bullets. We got rid of the death penalty because it makes it too easy to make mistakes even if we’re going through a lengthy judicial process.

            Summarary executions for behaving in a guilty way at a tube station is not the right answer.

          • jarkman

            Right, but:

            – That’s largely supposition. Perhaps the police gave the proper warning, and he ran anyway. Perhaps they didn’t. If you *know* that they didn’t warn him, you know they did it wrong. Otherwise, your indignation is mostly founded on a story you made up.

            – You pretty much have to assume that when an armed policeman points his gun at you and tells you to stop, he’s doing it because of a reason that would make it worth shooting at you. You might not know the reason, you might be perfectly innocent, you might be guilty of some irrelevant offence. It’s still a good idea to stop.

            – Yes, obviously it would be better to find another way. I’m guessing no better way presented itself.

          • neilh

            Innocent until proven guilty. RIP.

            English was not his first language.

            He might not have recognised them as policemen.

            I’ll await the outcome from the enquiry, see what that says.

            My worries are really that we have to draw a line somewhere between our old freedoms and a police state. As far as I’m concerned this incident is on the wrong side of that line. It seems to me that these incidents will get more and more outrageous. You are, of course, welcome to draw your line in another place.

  5. neilh

    Re: Dead Man’s Handle

    Depends – you become a danger to the organisation at that point, the authorities know you. The organisation behind you wouldn’t want anything to do with you any more (you are disposable), so you won’t get another go.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Re: Dead Man’s Handle

    Especially if they’ve had to close the station while you’re exploding. Thats quite enough disruption.

    Reply
  9. aperrott

    No, it would be just as bad. :(

    Remember the hysteria about paedophiles a couple of years back; with angry mobs on council estates harrassing people who looked a bit funny and that poor woman who works as a paediatrician…

    Stupid people don’t necessarily deserve to die, but they do need to be told that they are stupid every time they do something dumb.

    Reply
  10. ulfilias

    Hmm…If i was a suicide terrorist bomber, i’d link the bomb to me anyway, i get shot, i go boom.

    To be fair if you’ve got nothing to loose, you can be exceedingly dangerous as it doesn’t matter.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Nothing so dangerous as a man who has got nothing to lose. Which is why a shoot-to-kill policy is only ever going to hurt innocents without actually advancing the cause against the bad people.

      Reply
  11. neilh

    no, almost certainly not, because you end up in more trouble if you do kill them – at least if you’re expecting to use lethal force then theres no surprise when they die.

    What would be non-lethal for one person might be lethal for another, its a difficult line to draw, and the majority of people who are in need of stopping are going to be on the fitter end of the spectrum.

    Reply

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