THE fact that armed police used internationally banned dum dum bullets, seven of which splintered, expanded and exploded inside the head of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube on July 22, underlines the illegal nature of the operation and the authority that sanctioned it.
In fact, the shoot to kill policy, and the weaponry that the police were going to use on these operations, was never debated in the House of Commons, but was agreed and regularly approved outside parliament by the country’s police chiefs.
Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police issued a one line statement on the issue as to whether dum dum bullets were used. It said: ‘We have a range of weaponry and ammunition, and we use the most appropriate based on the operational circumstances.’
Completely unrepentant the statement does not even say that the police will no longer use these internationally banned bullets. The statement implies that given similar ‘operational circumstances’ dum dum bullets will be fired once again into the head of a ‘suspect’, with the police having no proof of his or her guilt.
No doubt what goes for the Metropolitan Police goes for the rest of the UK’s police forces.
The police and the capitalist state are now desperate to achieve a situation where their right to shoot to kill, with even banned weapons, is accepted and goes along with immunity from prosecution in the event that an entirely innocent person is murdered.
After all, policemen who are told that they have the right to shoot to kill may well mutiny if they find that they do not have immunity from prosecution.
This is what happened in the case of Harry Stanley, when the armed police went on strike after it appeared that the policemen responsible for killing Harry Stanley, an entirely innocent man, might face prosecution.
This police strike paved the way for a remarkable decision by the Crown Prosecution Service. This was that there could be no prosecution of Stanley’s killers since, bearing in mind the alleged fears of the police that Stanley’s chairleg in a plastic bag was a shotgun, their decision to open fire was ‘reasonable’.
This decision is a precedent but it is still not quite the legal immunity from prosecution for police death squads.
On Thursday the political police chief, Ian Blair, opened a ‘national debate’ on ‘what kind of police force we need’.
Previously, police chief Blair and others had agreed in secret to the shoot-to-kill regime continuing and to the armament of the police forces involved, with parliament kept in the dark.
He also attempted to prevent the CPS inquiry into the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. Only recently he was invited into parliament to tell Labour MPs that they must vote to allow the police to keep people without charge for 90 days.
He lost that ‘debate’ by 31 votes.
Smarting from that defeat, police chief Blair now wants the ‘broadest debate’ and in his Dimbleby Lecture told the people: ‘The citizens of Britain now have to articulate what kind of police service they want.’
In fact, he long ago decided what kind of police force they were going to have. He now calls it a post July 7 police force, dominated by shoot-to-kill.
Giving the Dimbleby Lecture he said: ‘The police face a widening mission’, adding that police forces are more and more being drawn into the political arena.
Police chief Blair and Prime Minister Blair, and newspapers like the Sun want to set the law and order brigade marching under the banner of ‘all power to the police state’, so that it can carry out its ‘widening mission’ to hold down the working class and the youth, using dum dum bullets if necessary.
The working class must take action to smash the capitalist state and its shoot-to-kill police with a socialist revolution that will expropriate the bourgeoisie and bring in a workers’ state to protect the basic rights of the working class.
This is the only way forward.
