actually, that's looking like tripleplus ungood

[rm]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1535246,00.html

A young Brazilian man, living and working in London as an electrician, emerged last night as the innocent victim shot dead by police in their hunt for the suicide bombers targeting the capital.

Comments

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Aaargh. My apologies for excessive crankiness and obnoxiousness. I would delete that post, on the theory that probably no one has read it yet -- so as not to needlessly offend anyone, not to remove evidence of my being a jerk -- but I have encountered commentators who feel that deleting obnoxious posts is bad form and the appropriate thing to do is leave them up and apologize.

Anyhow let me try again to state my point of view with less unnecessary antagonism...

First, I am interpreting media reports such as this (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050723.w2brit0723/BNStory/International/), which says

The Guardian newspaper said that after taking guidance from Israeli counterparts, British anti-terrorism police had devised a new strategy in dealing with suicide bombers, including instructing officers to shoot to kill, aiming at the head. Scotland Yard would not comment on the report.

But police sources and security experts said it was clear from the incident that officers were operating under revised guidelines.

to mean that there were in fact guidelines in place for the officers that told them to do what they did, and I conjecture that the shooting was a case of an officer following such a guideline, not the case of an officer acting out of anger contrary to the guidelines he had been given.

Second, I don't think the fact that some of the bullet wounds on the victim could be described as being "in the back" implies that the officer doing the shooting was not attempting to act according to the guidelines. It could be, for example, that he aimed at the head but missed. I conjecture that it is likely quite difficult to hit a thrashing, moving target a few feet away from one particularly when one has to act quickly. I suspect that it is much more difficult than hitting a stationary target at the same distance when one can aim at one's leisure. Further, "in the back" could mean "just below the neck" or "in the shoulders" or "in the upper back", all of which could be consistent with an officer trying to avoid the main bulk of the torso where one could expect to find explosives. Finally, even if, in the worst case (i.e. most difficult to defend), the officer did aim at and hit in the middle of the torso bulk, this doesn't establish that the officer's intent was revenge rather than merely to incapacitate the suspected bomber. That is, it may have been an attempt to render a suspected bomber harmless, by shooting to kill as per policy, but executed badly/stupidly/incompetently or with forgetting of the key "aim for the head part" given the somewhat frantic and sudden nature of the action. Or maybe the officer felt that risking setting off the explosive by shooting at the back was less dangerous than leaving the suspected bomber alive, which he believed would be more likely to lead to an explosion.

I continue to suspect that the officers were acting in the genuine belief they were dealing with a suicide bomber, or that they felt the risk was high enough that they weren't willing to take chances. If they actually had been dealing with a suicide bomber, shooting to kill even once he had been tackled would arguably have been the best way to protect the public.
I suspect (given that the facts are still unclear) that the big problem with what the police did was that they didn't make it clear to the victim that they were police. In deciding who is dangerous and who is not, knowing failure to heed police orders to stop is probably a good first criterion to apply in the decision-making flow chart. It seems to me likely that the victim was not knowingly refusing to obey police orders. It also seems to me likely that the police did not appreciate that they had not effectively conveyed that they were police, or that they were aware of the possibility but had no way of knowing if they were dealing with someone who was unaware they were police or with someone who was deliberately fleeing, and, the risk of another suicide bombing being uppermost in their minds and not wanting to take chances of another one, they assumed they were dealing with someone who was deliberately fleeing.

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Pfft. Apparently there's a limit to the length of a comment. Here's a postscript to the previous:

I don't see anything to suggest that the officers were acting out of anything other than a desire to prevent another suicide bombing, and that's different in intent from a revenge killing. Note that I am not saying that because the intent may genuinely have been public protection that there are therefore no grounds for criticism. One could well argue that they were unacceptably stupid, misguided, displayed poor judgment, got carried away by their fears and weren't objectively evaluating the evidence, should have known better where to draw the lines on when to act on suspicion, were unwittingly influenced by the ethnicity of the victim, etc. etc. etc.