In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
by vimothy
The Guardian report that the IPCC have just released a statement in response to an inquiry by one of their journalists:
Analysis of media coverage and queries raised on Twitter have alerted to us to the possibility that we may have inadvertently given misleading information to journalists when responding to very early media queries following the shooting of Mark Duggan by MPS officers on the evening of 4th August.
The IPCC’s first statement, issued at 22:49 on 4th August, makes no reference to shots fired at police and our subsequent statements have set out the sequence of events based on the emerging evidence. However, having reviewed the information the IPCC received and gave out during the very early hours of the unfolding incident, before any documentation had been received, it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged as this was consistent with early information we received that an officer had been shot and taken to hospital.
Any reference to an exchange of shots was not correct and did not feature in any of our formal statements, although an officer was taken to hospital after the incident.
Shock! Horror! Who could have predicted such a thing, etc, etc, etc.
Before we draw a veil over the whole sorry affair, let us briefly recap: The public is apparently told by the police that Mark Duggan was killed resisting arrest and firing at an armed police unit. The IPCC, the public’s champion, then contradict the police and release a statement saying that, on the contrary, Duggan never fired a shot. The public, understandably rather miffed at being led astray, very reasonably smash and burn London to the ground in a weekend long festival of violence and destruction. The pigs lied; people died. We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take this any more!
Only now it appears that the IPCC were the source of the rumour that the police were fired on first, as well as being the source of the statement that they were not. So far from protesting against a police cover-up, the rioters were, at best, protesting against the IPCC contradicting and then correcting itself. Oh, noble cause! Oh, noble work!
Update: The Guardian adds,
Many of the first media reports specifically attributed the line about Duggan firing first to the IPCC. And our crime correspondent Sandra Laville tells me that Scotland Yard did not on any occasion brief her that officers were fired on first…
The first trouble began in Tottenham on Saturday evening after a vigil in support of Mark Duggan outside the local police station. One of the Duggan family grievances was poor communication from the authorities in the early stages. They were particularly upset at suggestions in media reports that Duggan had fired first.
Yes, but irrespective of the details of this case, it’s clear the Met has a propensity for acts of murder, and fundamental issues with the truth. It also still isn’t clear why they killed this guy… Finally, or afaik, the confusion which you note wasn’t the mobilizing rumor: this was that Duggan was assassinated, execution-style…
“it’s clear the Met has a propensity for acts of murder”
What do you mean “propensity to murder”? And how is this propensity “clear”?
“the confusion which you note wasn’t the mobilizing rumor: this was that Duggan was assassinated, execution-style…”
The cold-blooded assassination of Duggan in police custody was certainly one rumour swirling about before the riots sparked, it is true. However, many older, wiser people that I spoke to about the riots would admit the fantastical and unlikely nature of this rumour, but affirm that the police were lying nonetheless, as proved by the IPCC’s statement that only the police had fired shots, which explained the rioters grievances. The police lied; of course the rioters were angry–This was the conventional wisdom amongst the intelligentsia in the early stages of the riots.
It is clear because the police have murdered several people in the last few years, most prominently Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, and NOBODY has been held accountable.
As far as I can tell from my lonely perch far in the Northern wastelands, both deaths were certainly tragic, unnecessary and the fault of the police force. I’m not sure that it follows that they were murders or that nobody had been held accountable, though. I’m pretty sure, e.g., that the officer responsible for striking Tomlinson at the G20 protests is facing disciplinary charges has been charged with manslaughter. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson
Of course, the distinction between murder and manslaughter is a legal distinction. I remember feeling furious about Menezes at the time (I still somehow feel angry about it) that nobody involved was held to real account. The inquiry was under the auspices of health and safety! Cressida Dick, the commander of the operation, is now one of the candidates to be Commissioner. It’s also relevant that the Metropolitan police lied repeatedly on both occasions, before being defeated by the revelation of recorded footage. Add to that the corruption exposed by the phone hacking scandal. I know that all this is extremely obvious, and I am naive to even entertain ideas about a competent and ethical police force. But either way, I think that is reasonable to think there probably are substantial long-term political and institutional issues with the way that Tottenham, etc is policed, and that this has had causal effects. But maybe we should widen this conception of ”police” to include more then the repressive function…
The problem with this line of analysis is twofold:
1, The chief threat to Londoners, or ethnic minorities or poor people or whatever, is not the police, but the people the police are supposed to protect them from. We saw this writ large in the riots. Repressive police state? Chance would be a fine thing.
2, Given the fact that, by any objective measure, standards of policing are so lax as to be almost non-existent (still too fascistic for some, of course–but this will always be the case), making policing even more so can hardly be expected to produce some miraculous outpouring of community spirit. If it could, then we would be there already. And, as have seen (again, the riots), liberal policing implies neither competence nor the absence of violence, necessarily.