We have no idea why he ran, he could have been a shoplifter or something for all we know. "Oh but you'd have to be stupid to run from police in these circumstances" doesn't wash with me, I'm afraid - there could be all sorts of reasons, you just don't know.
i have no problem with loling at life, i do have a problem with making jokes in a thread about what turns out to have been a innocent mans death. they were also plain clothed police, which could mean he did not know they were officers and so run.
Whatever happens the police are in the wrong.. If they shot him and it turns out he was innocent... they are murderers and trigger happy.. If they let him go but had the chance to shoot him.. and he then went on to blew himself up.. the police would have failed their duty to protect the public at large etc etc. They can't win.
Given those two choices, I would prefer our law enforcement officers to do what their job description entails, rather than falling into the "anti-terrorism" trap and killing anyone they don't like the look of. Do we really want to live in a society where we're as scared of getting topped by a gun-crazy police force as getting blown up by the actual bad guys?
He jumped a ticket barrier ffs. He didn't stop when orderd too, after jumping a ticket barrier. He DESERVES TO BE SHOT. Be it suicide by cop, or just a darwin award wannabe. I don't care if he was "only a shop lifter", i support ideas on mistaminers like littering, first offence £50 on the stop fine, second offense, £5,000 fine, third offense summery execution.
i think we still dont have enougth info to tell weather he deserved to have been shot or not. for all we know he had impared hearing and was unable to hear the warnings. in which case i dont think anyone could say he deserved to be pinned down and shot in the back of the head 5 times.
When armed police order you to stop, especially during the current climate, you bloody well stop. To run is nothing other than suicide or plain stupidity.
we know he ran, we know he jumped a ticket barrier. Jumping a ticket barrier is enough to be shot imo. Little sh!ts, when i spend £4.70 on a Z1&2 card, i want space on the tube, i want them to be able to upgrade their signaling to something decent. I also want a single to be less than £2 without having an oyster card.
I fully support the decision the Police made. Its all fine for us to sit here and say it was wrong and the Police were trigger happy, but in real life situations its completely different. The Police had to make a split second decision to make on whether to shoot that guy or not, and from the evidence (not stopping, jumping the barrier etc.) they without doubt made the correct choice. Like I said yesterday in the other thread, this is just going to be a repeat of the SAS situation in Gilbrator (sp?) in 1988. Edit: Link to the SAS story: http://www.totse.com/en/politics/foreign_military_intelligence_agencies/deadterr.html
i think shoting is a little harsh for not paying for a ticket, however that said when it cost me £5 on 2 buses to go 3 miles then some littel bugger pled witht the driver for about a minuit holding up the other people wanting to get on and then the driver let im on for free. i did have a sudden urge to remove the guys balls. as for us this shooting im still waiting befor i decide weather or not to condem the polices actions, that said i dont think anyone should yet be saying "no matter wat they did the right thing"
Something is weird about this. why pin someone down, then shoot them. That seems useless, they could have proved to be a useful source of information. shouldn't they shoot to disarm only etc... still I am all for police having guns, more so as a scare tactic, but that would need the proper training etc.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who is stupid enough to disobey orders and warnings from armed police officers (at anytime, let alone in a tube station a day after four attempted bombings in the same city, two weeks after over 50 people were killed in similar circumstances) deserves to be shot. That anyone should be killed is regrettable, but protecting the majority of citizens comes above other considerations. How were the armed police not to know that they weren't at risk of being blown to bits along with many others in that station? Better safe than sorry as far as I'm concerned - anyone who runs from armed police in a London tube station, disobeys warnings and commands, then gets shot deserves a darwin award. The reason the killing was conducted in the manner it was, whereby the man was shot at close range multiple times when apparently restrained, seems alarming (and it is really), but given the potential for the guy to be wearing a suicide belt, if he attempted to reach for a pocket or inside his clothing (as opposed to lieing face down and spreading his arms and legs out, as the police usually demand - as seen in the arrest of the guy with the rucksack in Downing Street the day before), then in that situation I'd have shot the bloke too.
He wasn't shot because the police didn't like the look of him though - surely you can see that he was shot for disobeying direct police instructions that were probably (as is the norm) repeated over and over. Another aspect which got me was the way in which everybody was clamouring for an investigation into the shooting immediately after it happened - but this is routine. Any firearms officer who opens fire gets suspended pending an investigation and study of the events which led to the shooting, in order to ascertain whether the officer acted correctly and lawfully within the special powers given to him as a firearms officer, and to learn how better to deal with the situation. Our police forces are far from gun crazy - only a very small percentage carry guns and those that do are immensely well trained and highly trained (statistically an SO19, thats the police firearms unit, officer will be involved in more real life hostage rescue situations 'for real' during his career than an SAS soldier assigned to their counter terrorist unit will). Personally I have full faith in their ability, and believe that they excercised reasonable judgement in this case - yes a mistake was made, but in such dangerous situations better a mistake and one man who disobeyed the police is dead, than the chance that many more could be killed and injured.
This is one of my main reasons for being so strongly against the police carrying guns - they're supposed to be acting in our best interests, but it seems that very often I would have preferred that they had taken a different option. I just don't trust the police enough to be happy with giving them lethal weapons. Indeed, there are very few times that I would be happy with the police killing someone, especially when they already had him as good as in custody, and this isn't one of them. I would seriously rather be killed by a suicide bomber than watch an innocent man be blown away by the police because he might be dangerous. I'll say again, we have no idea why the man ran (from 20 people brandishing guns in plain clothes, I wonder) - even if he was just involved in something minorly criminal he may have felt the need to try and escape, and under the circumstances probably wouldn't have been thinking "hmm, I wonder if they'll mistake me for a terrorist". We simply don't know, so saying "he was stupid, he deserves to die" is just idiotic. Just because in that situation you wouldn't have doesn't mean he didn't have a perfectly sane reason to at the time.
a lot of people are saying 'disobeying armed police' and stuff... but as far as i know, the cop was plain clothed. so imagine some random guy just says to you 'STOP', would you listen to him? i sure as hell wouldnt... and then if he pulls a gun on you lol i would pebbledash whatever happens to be behind me, and run like hell... im sure the cops are trained to identify themselves etc but from what ive experienced, cops are more worried about doing what they are doing, than following textbook procedures. right now, all of us with a bit of intelligence knows how stupid pulling this kind of stunt would be, and we know if jump gates and do runners we might end up getting shot. but we are not the type of people that would do that anyway. the type of person that would jump gates at a tube station is gonna be the type of guy that doesnt realise hey if a cop placed plain clothed at a tube station tells me to stop and i run away he might shoot me. i dont think that means he has to die. also, are we even sure he was jumping the gates and stuff before he was being chased? because cops always turn stuff around like that... he could have seen a plain clothed cop pull his gun and crapped his pants before the cop even had a chance to say 'stop, police!'. the guy might even have thought the cop was a terrorist, u never know. then after he was being chased, nobody would stop and put their card in, he would have just jumped over it for his life and kept running. but im not saying thats what happened, im just wondering if anyone does actually have more info? the only thing i saw was on google news it said 'cops admit shooting wrong guy'...
well going by the info iv been reading/watching on news it happend something like this- they had survalance at his house. then we dunno what happend we know he jumped the barriers and was being chased by plain clothed police they shouted a waring at him, and also at the people around him - to get down etc the there was then a warning shot fired. he was running towards the train. he half fell, half pushed to ground. he was held restrained by 3 officers. he was then shot in the back of the head 5 times with a pistol. but thats about as much detail as we know, which tbh isnt enought to say weather they were right or wrong in what they did.
its so sad this happened. as we dont know the full circumstances and that there will be an inquiry. i think we should wait until we start to blame the police. I have just seen a picture of the guy on the BBC, cant see how he looked like an Asian guy like the eyewitness said? update of events Mr Menezes had come out of a house in Tulse Hill, south London, which had been under police surveillance because of a suspected link to Thursday's attempted bombings. Police said Mr Menezes clothing and behaviour added to their suspicions. After leaving the house he caught a bus to Stockwell Tube, where officers told him to stop. He then ran down an escalator and tried to board a train before being shot, witnesses say. from : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4711639.stm
I would put money on it that if that guy WAS carrying a bomb the Police would be hailed heroes. Like I said previously, unfortunately the Police don't have 2 days to carefully consider the facts about whether the man did have a bomb. They have a split second to make a decision. I know this is irrelvent really, but Will, the Police don't have anywhere near the counter-terrorist training as the SAS. I wouldn't be suprised if the SAS actually trained them. About 40 odd other countries have had training from the SAS both for counter terrorism and special forces.
No, the police don't have the same level of counter-terrorist training as the SAS, but the point I was making was that they're still pretty good, and experienced - the comparison with the SAS (about the police firearms unit being involved in more hostage rescues per year than the SAS) was merely to illustrate this, not suggest that they're trained in the same fashion or possess identical skills Back to the main topic anyway, I'm sure there will be a full investigation...the Brazilian government will most probably demand it. At the moment I still side with the police, based upon what I've read...
Let's look at this from Joe Public's point of view. You're in a fairly crowded place, busy going about your business, and you hear shouting. Why should you assume it's directed at you personally? You haven't done anything. You look round, and see a bunch of guys, no uniforms, waving guns and dashing in your direction. Why should you immediately think, "Oh, it's some policemen"? First instinct is to get out of the way, fast. In other words, to panic and run. Add in a poor grasp of English, the simple fact that nobody can shout clear instructions while running fast (and being a bit tense themselves), and you end up with a tragedy.
