[Kosh]

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 12:08 pm  

Durham Giant wrote:

Do you want to comment on the fact that the Police kill large numbers of people and very very rarely are successfully prosecuted for their actions.

Do you have any views on this or are you wanting to be a pedant about the way i presented some information.

Should i change it to balance of probabilities add in the word likelihood would that make you happier.

Maybe that would just obfuscate things though and you would have to concentrate on the main point.

Police kill and get away with it FACT

Deary me. Using large font does nothing to add to your argument. In fact it further detracts from it. Anyway...

There is no 'fact' that the Police 'kill large numbers of people'. There is a fact that some people die in Police custody for a variety of reasons. These two things are not the same, no matter how large a font you use whilst claiming so.

There is also the fact that all such cases are investigated, some result in prosecutions, and some result in convictions. Whether or not any Police officers 'get away with it' is not a fact (let alone a FACT) but merely your opinion. Do try and learn the difference between the two - it will help your debating skills no end.

Is the justice system perfect? No. Are the Police perfect? No. Do rants like yours help move the debate on? No.

[Kosh]

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 12:20 pm  

Mintball wrote:

The issue is not whether Duggan himself was a nice person: the issue is whether the police acted correctly.

They do have form – look up Harry Stanley, for instance, an entirely innocent man who was shot dead on the grounds that he was carrying a repaired table leg in a bag (which must have been a gun) and sounded a bit Oirish to someone who couldn't tell the difference between Irish and Scottish but had rung the police with this devastatingly incriminating evidence of terrorism, which they decided was absolutely trustworthy.

Part of the problem is how the courts deal with such situations. In the Stanley case, the coroner had only allowed the jury to return a verdict of either lawful killing or an open verdict. That was changed at a judicial review and a verdict of unlawful killing was returned, leading police to hand in their firearms authorisations in protest. That was overturned in the High Court and returned to an open verdict.

The officers involved were later interviewed in the light of some new forensic evidence, but no prosecution occurred. They stated that they acted in self defence. But given the facts – a man coming home from a pub, carrying something entirely innocent, for entirely innocent reasons (it had been repaired), is challenged by police and turns to face them and is then shot dead – it's rather difficult to maintain that.

So the message that it sends out is that you can shoot dead someone on the grounds of a staggeringly inaccurate 'tip off' and claim you acted in self defence when there is nothing to maintain that.

I'm not suggesting that I know the answer, and I will stress that I do think that the police have an unenviable job, but the issue is not whether society is better off without a Duggan or not, not least because these things do not only conveniently happen to the Duggans of this world.

And here we have the nub of the matter. The Stanley case was (IMO) an outrage, and yet nobody was held at fault and AFAIK nothing put in place to at least try and avoid such a thing happening again. When cases like this occur is it any wonder that people are sceptical (to say the least) of the outcome of the Duggan case?

The key point for me in the Duggan shooting was the testimony of the firearms officers who clearly stated that they were sure he was holding a weapon when the opened fire. This has been shown to not be the case. Which should concern pretty much everyone TBH, regardless of whether you think Duggan 'deserved it' or not.

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:07 pm  

SmokeyTA wrote:

You may have one the lottery of life, not everyone in this country has been as fortunate as you. A little humility and there but for the grace of God go I might be well placed.

A lack of the ability to empathise with others isn’t a symptom a hard-working, tough love, no-nonsense, self-made guy. It’s a symptom of psychopathy and sociopathy.

I won the lottery, you won the lottery, Damo won the lottery. Every poster on this thread won the lottery.
It would be a strange country where everyone had exactly the same level of fortune or mis-fortune.

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:19 pm  

Kosh wrote:

The key point for me in the Duggan shooting was the testimony of the firearms officers who clearly stated that they were sure he was holding a weapon when the opened fire. This has been shown to not be the case. Which should concern pretty much everyone TBH, regardless of whether you think Duggan 'deserved it' or not.

It is a key point and as I mentioned earlier we put our trust in the armed police officers to make the correct decisions whilst also acknowledging that they have to have a fair bit of leeway in their decision to shoot, ie they have to believe that his and/or other peoples safety was compromised by the offender - whether this turns out to be the case afterwards if for others to decide and in the majority of cases we apply this leeway, he believed it to be so and therefore we sanctioned him to take the action.

The alternative is of course chaos and carnage, we could choose not to arm any police officers and either let the armed criminals do what they hell they liked or send unarmed police to apprehend them (as actually happens, nearly all police murdered by criminals with guns are themselves unarmed).

As I pointed out previously, the occasions when a police weapon are discharged are miniscule compared to the number of times they are deployed and that is testament to the procedures for there use and the discipline of the officers, but its also the case that when they are discharged they tend to be fatal shots because they've reached that point where the criminal is now representing a serious threat - its another reason why an armed officer who is pointing his weapon at a criminal will choose to control that person with a series of commands , they don't want any sudden or unexpected movements - to reach that point in a confrontation is something totally alien to you or I or 99.9% of the population, we would have stood still and acquiesced a long time ago, to get to that point and still think that somehow you can ignore what is going on is probably the height of stupidity, but there are stupid people around I suppose.

The bottom line is that we (all of us) don't understand what its like to be in those situations and we (all of us) are happy to sanction someone else to deal with this sort of stuff and in doing so we need to offer some leeway in the decision making because the important point to make is that every bullet that is discharged by a police officer means suspension for him/her and a detailed enquiry into why and how, as a citizen I am happy that they have the checks and balances correct.

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:22 pm  

Richie wrote:

I won the lottery, you won the lottery, Damo won the lottery. Every poster on this thread won the lottery.
It would be a strange country where everyone had exactly the same level of fortune or mis-fortune.

So then knowing we dont have all the same level of Fortune or Mis-fortune have we all won the lottery? Are we saying some win a tenner, some win £100m but they should all be thankful for that? I dont know about you but i would be pretty dissappointed if someone were to run up and tell me i had won the Euromillions then hand me a cheque for £2.80

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:30 pm  

Durham Giant wrote:

[size=150]Do you want to comment on the fact that the Police kill large numbers of people and very very rarely are successfully prosecuted for their actions.

How do you define / judge a "large" number?

Can you link to statistics to support your assertion?

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:32 pm  

SmokeyTA wrote:

Doesn’t matter though does it. Whether or not he was a ‘gangsta’ is a bit irrelevant, we have a process for dealing with that. His death is no more justified if he were Tony Soprano incarnate than if he was the new Ghandi. His death is only justified by the officer who shot him having and honest and reasonable belief that he or the people around him faced an imminent threat.

If that is the case, what happened is fine. If it isn’t, what happened is murder. Everything else is irrelevant.

.

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:03 pm  

In the Stanley case, it is not correct that nothing was put in place to prevent a repetition, on the contrary, many changes were put in place, and apart from that, the PCA, IPCC, police and CPS batted the case around for many years (the 2 officers were arrested on suspicion of murder, manslaughter and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice several years later and a file was passed to CPS - but CPS ultimately decided not to prosecute). The key point to me in the Stanley case (which may have similarities with the Duggan case) is the method chosen by the officers to challenge/apprehend the "suspect". In Stanley's case, having made the decision to position themselves as they did and challeneg a surprised Stanley in such a way that when he reacted they were only a reported 15 feet away with no cover, meant that they had put themselves in a position where if indeed he did have a shotgun, effectively if he seemed to be raising it to shoot, they would have no alternative but to immediately open fire or risk being killed themselves. Why they could not work out a way to challenge him from some position of cover, so he had time to assimilate what was happening and they had time to assess the situation better, I will never understand. I accept entirely that if I have a gun and I am convinced a man has a shotgun in a plastic bag and is turning it to shoot me, then I too would shoot him first. And so would you. But IMHO I would be in the wrong for having put myself in that position in the first place. It should surely have been avoidable. We are talking about highly trained firearms officers, with the full advantage of surprise etc. In the interests of accuracy, when the unlawful killing verdict was quashed, no further inquest was ordered and so basically that amounts to an open verdict in the Stanley case. If I were a friend or relative of Stanley I would not be at all satisfied with that, but then I would probably not be satisfied with anything unless it was somebody paying for Stanley's death; a reality very apparent to the IPCC in their final report. It shows an extremely unfortunate combination of events and, no doubt, some unsavoury and other unacceptable aspects, but as to the meat of it, I'm not sure it is fair to call it an "outrage".

In the Stanley case, it is not correct that nothing was put in place to prevent a repetition, on the contrary, many changes were put in place, and apart from that, the PCA, IPCC, police and CPS batted the case around for many years (the 2 officers were arrested on suspicion of murder, manslaughter and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice several years later and a file was passed to CPS - but CPS ultimately decided not to prosecute). The key point to me in the Stanley case (which may have similarities with the Duggan case) is the method chosen by the officers to challenge/apprehend the "suspect". In Stanley's case, having made the decision to position themselves as they did and challeneg a surprised Stanley in such a way that when he reacted they were only a reported 15 feet away with no cover, meant that they had put themselves in a position where if indeed he did have a shotgun, effectively if he seemed to be raising it to shoot, they would have no alternative but to immediately open fire or risk being killed themselves. Why they could not work out a way to challenge him from some position of cover, so he had time to assimilate what was happening and they had time to assess the situation better, I will never understand. I accept entirely that if I have a gun and I am convinced a man has a shotgun in a plastic bag and is turning it to shoot me, then I too would shoot him first. And so would you. But IMHO I would be in the wrong for having put myself in that position in the first place. It should surely have been avoidable. We are talking about highly trained firearms officers, with the full advantage of surprise etc. In the interests of accuracy, when the unlawful killing verdict was quashed, no further inquest was ordered and so basically that amounts to an open verdict in the Stanley case. If I were a friend or relative of Stanley I would not be at all satisfied with that, but then I would probably not be satisfied with anything unless it was somebody paying for Stanley's death; a reality very apparent to the IPCC in their final report. It shows an extremely unfortunate combination of events and, no doubt, some unsavoury and other unacceptable aspects, but as to the meat of it, I'm not sure it is fair to call it an "outrage".

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:17 pm  

Isn't the number of fatal police shootings (exc. NI) 10 since 1980 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use ... _incidents

Isn't the number of fatal police shootings (exc. NI) 10 since 1980 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use ... _incidents

Re: The Mark Duggan verdict. : Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:21 pm  

shinymcshine wrote: Isn't the number of fatal police shootings (exc. NI) 10 since 1980 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use ... _incidents Stats on deaths in custody. This seems to be for all forms of state custody, so presumably includes anyone who died in prison of, for instance, a heart attack.

shinymcshine wrote: Isn't the number of fatal police shootings (exc. NI) 10 since 1980 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use ... _incidents Stats on deaths in custody. This seems to be for all forms of state custody, so presumably includes anyone who died in prison of, for instance, a heart attack.