London under siege?
So, it appears that this rather cynical post at Shot By Both Sides was correct, and the police messed up big-time in Stockwell yesterday. The guy they followed from a flat they’d been watching in a housing estate in Tulse Hill, challenged at the entrance to the tube station, who fled onto the tube and got five bullets in his head from police who assumed he was a suicide bomber, is totally innocent – at least, unconnected to the recent bombings or any other bomb plot. I just heard on the ITV news that the guy was of South American origin, and was therefore quite possibly not even a Muslim.
The rumours have been flying around London. As ever, the Evening Standard passed judgement on the man, calling him a “bomber” (dead men can’t sue), which no doubt sold many papers to people who then got the “suspected” bit in the small print. In a particular restaurant I went to, I heard it from someone who thought he knew what he was talking about that the staff had been tipped off and that the police had got their man. Then we hear that he was thought not to have a bomb, and now we know they got the wrong man.
Well, you can never be too careful, can you? I mean, never mind a bomb, the guy might have been carrying a table leg.
In the wake of a second set of terrorist attempts on London, the rhetoric of pulling-together and Blitz spirit have given way to the suggestions that a crackdown on civil liberties might be inevitable and justified. A classic example of this is the twaddle in the Daily Mail today. Stop and search in the streets and on the Underground, police road blocks, snooping, increased detention powers … oh, and don’t even think of listening to the anti-racist crowd. Never mind treading on the toes of ethnic minorities or invading their “family sanctums”. This is the war on terror.
I actually went back to the bookshop to get a picture of the guy who wrote the piece in the Daily Mail. He seemed to be a middle-aged white man, which means he has no excuse for not knowing why stop-and-search became unpopular with the so-called race industry and why it was abandoned: it was used in a malicious and racist way by police and ended up causing a riot – along with the shooting of an innocent black woman which left her paralysed for life. Harrassing people in the street because of their ethnicity, or because they drive a car too flash for their apparent station in the world, is just wrong.
Who is going to be “under siege” here anyway? Eight small bombs, only four of which actually explode, is not a siege. People who cannot go out to do their lawful business without being hassled by the police (perhaps more than once per journey, rather than once every few months as is currently the case) are the ones who will feel under siege. Of course, people will usually consent to having their bags searched by the police, as long as the police are courteous, and do not betray malice, hostility or racism.
The problem is when you startle people, and then assume that their lack of co-operation constitutes guilt. People from third-world countries, or from ethnic minorities with a history of suffering police harrassment, are much less likely to trust the police than middle-class people who might perceive the police as on their side and out there to protect them. In Northern Ireland, I remember very clearly an incident of a man who was shot dead in the street by the army after refusing to stop when ordered to; this man had suffered prolonged harrassment from the army. (Cases of this happening to deaf people are not unknown either.)
One of the first things Tony Blair said in his speech after the 7th July bombings was that we would not let them change us, but the imposition of something like martial law, with a shoot-to-kill policy in the streets, would be doing just that. Londoners might get on the tubes as normal after a bombing – after all, you have to get where you’re going, don’t you? But the story would be different if this country starts looking like a locked-down military dictatorship and the people who are supposed to be protecting us from the terrorists end up shooting us in the streets themselves. Terrorists, unlike the police, don’t get the benefit of the doubt when they kill people.
