THE POLICE STRUGGLE TO LOSE OUR CONFIDENCE

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | November 15th 2007

Jean Charles de Menezes

Annie Mole/Flickr

Londoners have a pretty high regard for their policemen, says Stephen Hugh-Jones. Which makes it all the sadder to the see the city's police chief squander that trust by ducking blame for a fatal fiasco ...

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The ancient cliché calls them New York's Finest. Unlike most American cliches, it hasn't made much mark east of the Atlantic. But if London's police carry on as they have been doing lately, its equivalent may become accepted there--with all the cynicism that can go with it in New York. If these are London's finest, heaven help London.

Most Britons respect, even appreciate, their policemen, as the citizens of many countries do not. Any resident of London knows that its Metropolitan Police Force can be--a nice home-grown cliché--economical with the truth. I was once a juror when an earnest defence barrister read us a five minutes of some judge in the 1890s solemnly hinting so. Why bother, we yawned: this is London and we're all grown-up. But we think of the Met as, by-and-large, honest and most often competent. It's been working hard recently to suggest that it is neither.

Its worst blunder was in July 2005, when a squad of armed police--still mercifully rare in Britain--shot dead, on his way to work, a harmless young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been mistakenly identified as Hussein Osman, a would-be suicide bomber eager to replicate the London bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier.

The ludicrous outcome, British beyond parody, was a trial not of policemen, junior or senior, for murder, manslaughter or even scaring little old ladies with loud bangs. It was a trial of the Met, as an institution--fair enough--under (believe me) "health and safety" legislation. The force was found guilty and fined £175,000. And then?

Then nothing. British policemen do not regularly pump dum-dum bullets into an innocent. If your subordinates, in an operation managed from headquarters, have, however unwittingly, done just that, you might expect shortly to be removed, or at least golden-handshaken, from your job. You might even resign first. Not Sir Ian Blair, chief of the Met. He was going back to his work, he averred after the trial. He said it again, when London's toothless elected assembly voted that he should be sacked. And again when Britain's Independent Police Complaints Commission made public its highly critical version of the shooting and accused him of blocking its enquiry for days after it.

The central government, his ultimate boss, is stoutly backing him. So too is London's elected mayor, Ken Livingstone, on the curious ground that the Met's largely mythical independence would be endangered by giving way to a "media campaign" for its chief to be fired; the elected assembly's vote to that effect merely proved, he said, how right it was that that assembly has no power over London policing.

That's rich from Our Ken, whose favourite persona is tribune of the people against overweening authority. Nor was the media solid: one London Times columnist declared, simultaneously, (a) that it is not really Britain's foreign policy or internal security measures that cause Muslim terrorism, but terrorists, and (b) that it was not really the Met who killed Menezes but Hussein Osman. One or the other, arguably--the first, I'd say. But both in one breath? Another cliché comes to mind, for Mayor Livingstone and the Times's David Aaronovitch alike: having your cake and eating it.

And there, amid much froth about the buck stops here, and current limits to that mantra, the matter, so far, rests; at least, until London's police authority, another cardboard tiger, debates it on November 22nd.

I'm with the froth-blowers. But there's something just as alarming as the refusal of London's police chief, mayor and national government to accept that responsibility really does go to the top. It is the professional sloppiness that has been shown up.

Menezes and Osman lived in the same block of flats in South London. They looked a bit alike. Both were young and brown-skinned; quite a lot of Londoners are. A surveillance team mistook one for the other. Briefing on the operation to catch "Osman" began at Scotland Yard--minus, for 25 minutes, the senior officer named to handle it there; she'd been directed to the wrong room. An armed squad was ordered into place; hours elapsed before it turned up. In South London, two of the surveillance officers doubted that Menezes was their terrorist. Was the officer in charge at Scotland Yard informed? No. And more. In short, a shambles.

Meanwhile, the supposed "terrorist" was watched boarding a bus. Then leaving and reboarding it. Then entering a Tube station. Public transport had been the target of the earlier bombings. Did the surveillance team stop him? Did they even try? (At risk of their lives, sure, but that goes with the job). Seems not. As Menezes, unhindered, boarded a train, the firearms squad were still rushing down the escalators. They hurtled onto the train and (this, paradoxically, may--just--be the one excusable bit), believing its passengers to be at imminent risk, grabbed Menezes and summarily shot him dead.

Leave aside that the Met swiftly leaked lies to the media (Menezes supposedly had vaulted a ticket barrier in his haste to join the train; he hadn't), and now shows no more shame than does a Santa caught by the kiddies putting his beard on. Look only at London's security. One minute more and "Osman" might have set off his imagined bomb. On this form, the city might as well be guarded by the Keystone Cops.

Of course this form may be untypical. Blair's supporters assure us that the Met's, mainly hidden, successes have been legion. Maybe. Pity it's not as smart with its own cash: this week's press alleges that £3 million to £6 million has gone walkabout in Met coppers' personal expense accounts--while three years of warnings from its auditors went unheeded.