And theres more:
– 20 Plain clothed officers.
– Block of flats, not a house.
– Poison gas at Kennington.
– 68% of Daily Mail readers think shooting is too good for ’em.
“We chained down the lion
And let the world sit in
We build up our armies so destruction can begin
But will we ever learn the enemy lies within?”
“Hi Jim,
I am mailing again to express my concern at recent events in London. I would also like to thank you for your communication before the election – I received no information at all from any of the other parties, and while I don’t agree with many of the policies of the Conservative party I do appreciate that you took the time to respond to my mail.
I have again written an article in my weblog where I ponder the value of the apparent shoot-to-kill policy, the original article can be found here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/neilh/258851.html
I reproduce the full text below. I would appreciate your comments on this incident, and would like to know what you believe can be done to prevent this country sliding further down the slippery slope of illiberalism?
With thanks.
Neil”
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.
I, for one, welcome our new powered-exoskeleton geriatric overlords
“Decomposing grassboxes, Carnage, blood and gore, Satanistic lawnmowers, Craving for more”
NSK are releasing Trans Slovenia Express Vol 2, featuring Laibach covering one of their own songs in the style of Kraftwerk and the Internationally Famous (in Belgium) Anne Clark. Among others. Looking forward to a return to the happy days of my Slovenian Techno phase.
I’m in the room at the top corner of the 70s concrete building stood atop one of the few hills in Norwich – our view covers the city centre, giving us a perfect vista for spotting fires in the city. There are six of us there, my boss, Simon, and a co-worker, Teresa, have already shown something of an enthusiasm about firemen. We’re setting up a new system for the council, collecting data and importing into the new database. Very occasionally we’ll get a call, mostly they’re from database support people returning calls made by the team leader.
One day, I don’t even remember what day it was, I take a call from a guy with a heavy Irish accent – “Theres a bomb”, he said, “lots of people are going to lose their lives”. This is not something I’d ever been trained for, but I knew that you were supposed to keep them talking. I don’t know that you can ever really deal with these kinds of things well, even if you’re trained for it. Its not like its something you get to practice much.
So I try to keep him talking. And while I am doing that I write the word ‘bomb’ in big letters on the jotter pad next to the phone to show to someone else in the room. My mind isn’t enough on what he is saying to remember it all, those words above are all I can remember now. He hangs up.
I’m shaking, and I try to explain to Simon what just happened. He calls the police, who come and evacuate the building – we share it with Norwich Union (I think, since I used to take great pleasure in walking in with a Legal and General umbrella, its the small things that make life interesting).
Outside, once they’ve made sure the building is safe, I talk to the police who take a statement from me. Not that I’ve really got much to say. We file back in, life goes on.
The next day I find out that seven or eight other council and utility buildings in the city had similar calls, nothing suspicious was found in any of them.
“I don’t know why we need to tolerate the cheap artwork of a gadfly with a world view that is so offensive to a majority of the people”…couldn’t’ve said it better myself, but I’m not sure the works of Bush are within the realm of what we classically consider ‘art’, and its not that cheap.
I’m surprised theres enough data for them to say that “Start the riot” by Atari Teenage Riot is an unsafe song….thats gotta go on the ‘must have’ list.
This follows on from a conversation I was having at the weekend…the details of which will remain undisclosed to protect the guilty.
Oh, and, beermat: The infinite cat project starts here
“The blaze engulfed a car, burnt one building and scorched the giant teapot itself“