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.