Cleaning up the mess

From The Scotsman:

THE family of Jean Charles de Menezes accused the Metropolitan Police of "getting away with murder" yesterday after 11 officers escaped punishment over his death.

The officers who mistook the Brazilian for a suicide bomber and shot him will not be disciplined, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said.

But the threat of a disciplinary tribunal still hangs over four senior officers, including Commander Cressida Dick, who authorised the shoot-to-kill policy.

The IPCC said that one surveillance officer will be given "management advice" over action he took after the shooting at Stockwell Tube station.

Patricia da Silva Armani, Mr de Menezes' cousin who lived with him at the time of his death, said her family was bitterly disappointed.

She said: "It is disgraceful the IPCC can make such a decision - they are letting the police get away with murder.

"First officials killed my cousin, then they lied about it and now the officers are walking away without any punishment.

"It is a travesty of justice and another slap in the face for our family. The police officers' lives go on as normal while we exist in turmoil, fighting to get the answers and justice we deserve."

Mr de Menezes, an electrician, was shot seven times in the head after being mistaken for a suicide bomber at Stockwell tube station on 22 July, 2005.

His death came in the aftermath of the 7 July London bombings in which 52 people were killed and hundreds injured in the worst terrorist atrocity in British history.

If you don't remember this there is a good article about it on Wikipedia. Briefly this is what happened:

On 22 July 2005, London police were searching for four suspects in four attempted bombings carried out the previous day; three at Underground stations and one on a bus in Hackney. As the perpetrators had not died in the failed suicide bombing, a large police investigation began immediately, with the aim of tracking them down. A written address on a gym membership card had been identified from materials found inside the unexploded bags used by the bombers, located within a three-storey block of nine flats in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill.[2]

At around 9:30 a.m., surveillance officers observing the address saw Menezes emerge from the communal entrance of the block. The officers were watching three men who they claimed were Somali or Ethiopian in appearance.

Menezes, an electrician, lived in one of the flats with two of his cousins, and had just received a call to fix a broken fire alarm in Kilburn.

An officer on duty at Scotia Road compared Menezes to the CCTV photographs of the bombing suspects from the previous day, and felt "it would be worth someone else having a look", but "was in the process of relieving [him]self", and was thus unable to immediately turn on a video camera to transmit images to Gold Command, the Metropolitan Police ("Met") operational headquarters for major incidents.

On the basis of this officer's suspicion, Gold Command authorised officers to continue pursuit and surveillance, and that the suspect was to be prevented from entering the Tube system.

At this point the die was cast. The police who were following him and the special unit that would be sent to handle the actual apprehension could only know what they had been told by their commanders. As far as they knew the man they were after, Jean Charles de Menezes, was a terrorist suicide bomber and everything they did that day would have been the correct thing to do if de Menezes had been a terrorist suicide bomber.

But he wasn't. He had nothing to do with terrorism. It was a case of mistaken identity on the part of a surveillance officer and a failure on the part of supervisors at Gold Command to acknowledge the fact that the identification was far from certain.

The cops who actually pulled the triggers were just doing their jobs using the best information they had. The problem, and there was a problem, was higher up the organizational chart.