THERE is no need to change the strategy police use to deal with suicide bombers – to put as many bullets into their brain as possible – despite the killing of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, on July 22, 2005 at Stockwell tube, the Association of Chief Police Officers said yesterday.
The Acpo police chiefs’ review judgement once again reveals their extraordinary cavalier attitude to the lives or deaths of ordinary people.
Not even the Israeli police, who are supposed to be their role model in this respect, take that attitude.
Major General Mickey Levy, the police commander in Jerusalem between 2000 and 2004, has told the BBC Panorama programme that Israeli officers had to be sure a person was carrying a suicide belt or bomb before taking action.
British police officers do not have to be sure before they pump seven bullets into an ordinary person’s head, they only have to have their suspicions.
The Acpo diktat is that the state has the right and the duty to take the lives of people that they adjudge to be terrorist suspects on the grounds that if they are right they may well have saved the lives of innocent people.
If their suspicions prove to be groundless, Acpo thinks that citizens should be grateful to the police because the law of averages dictates that one day their suspicions might prove to be correct.
The Acpo review found that the existing policy – known as Operation Kratos – had been deemed ‘fit for purpose’. This policy, to begin with, was the brainchild of the chiefs of police, and was never even discussed, no mind voted on, in the House of Commons.
The fact that the chiefs of police decided yesterday, once again, that the policy fits the bill and must be proceeded with, without any reference to the Houses of Parliament, show their contempt for bourgeois democracy. They think that police chiefs should decide on life or death questions, not the Houses of Parliament.
Following Acpo’s finding, gangs of police gunmen will consider that they have the right to continue with that policy, to shoot people dead on suspicion that they are terrorists, without alerting the victim that they are stalking – on the grounds that he or she might set off an explosive charge – and without fear of criminal charges.
The message to the urban population of Britain is, be on your guard, especially if you are brown skinned or a Muslim. Make sure that you do exactly what police officers tell you to do. Do not, whatever you do, excite their suspicions, because they have the right to shoot you dead.
Acpo’s shoot to kill dictat does not just make armed policemen into potential murderers, it also creates the conditions for cover up operations if the suspect is revealed after his or her death, not to have been a terrorist.
Police, to avoid public retribution, will have an incentive to alter log books, to draw up statements that they have worked out as a group, to synchronise evidence, lose cctv evidence, and even to plant or destroy evidence to clinch a case that their suspicions were correct.
Some of these antics allegedly took place in the de Menezes case, where the police took a very long time to admit that de Menezes was innocent.
The police strategy that Acpo has just renewed its support for is a civil war measure. Its real purpose is to try to fill the working class with a fear of the power and ruthlessness of the state.
It is essential preparation by the ruling class for the battle directly ahead to destroy the Welfare State and all the basic gains that the working class has made since the Second World War.
The only way to deal with this state apparatus is to smash it and destroy it with a socialist revolution that will expropriate the bourgeoisie and bring in socialism.
