A quick search through this blog would reveal that its author is not much impressed by the police. All my experience, as a former lawyer and as a citizen, is that when they are not corrupt, racist and dishonest, they are incompetent and lazy. The following remarks about tonight's verdict by the Mark Duggan inquest jury need to be read in that context.
I'm not at all surprised that the jury found Duggan to have been lawfully killed. Or that it found the gun discovered 20 feet away wrapped in a sock was thrown by Duggan before the police fired the fatal shots. If someone told me that the police had put the gun there to justify their actions that wouldn't surprise me either (although I'd be wondering why they chose not to put it in the taxi, which would have been the obvious place). I believe the police to be capable of pretty much anything.
And yet I think Mr Duggan's family and his lawyers are protesting too much.
It's not surprising that his family now like to portray Duggan as a good man, a pillar of the community rather than a violent and feared drug dealer. That would be the inevitable reaction of people who have lost someone they loved. But I'd like to ask them (from a safe distance), whether they believed Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi. If not, well, the evidence is against them. But if he was, what do they think he was doing with it? And do they not think that someone carrying a gun around with them can't have too many complaints if the police decide that person might just be carrying it to hurt someone else?
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news broke, and the station was clearly caught expecting an Unlawful Killing verdict, since it had prepared pre-recorded interviews with Duggan's mother and with a friend, and also played an actor-voiced exchange between Leslie Thomas, the family's barrister, and a witness who described seeing the killing and said it looked like an execution.
The station did not however re-enact cross-examination of the same witness, reported in the Guardian, in which it was put to him that he had changed his story since he first gave a statement. Why not? I'm guessing because it thought the jury would accept the witness's evidence. Instead it went live to a reporter in Tottenham who was presumably hoping something would kick off down there. It also broadcast part of a statement by Marcia Willis Stewart, the family's solicitor, who declared it was a "murder" of "an unarmed man", a remark that is libellous if false and inflammatory in any event. Radio 5 stopped broadcasting the statement after the "murder" remark. In the circumstances Ms Stewart may well have committed a public order offence. Certainly she brought her profession into disrepute.
The BBC's reporter, Danny Shaw I think, said that the crucial question was whether Duggan was holding the gun when he was shot. This statement, repeated later on PM, is wrong. In the context of the riots which started after Duggan's killing it's also irresponsible. The crucial question was whether the firearms officer reasonably believed Duggan to be carrying a gun. This distinction is crucial to understanding of the jury's verdict, and failure to understand it isn't just confined to the BBC. Diane Abbott has also declared herself baffled by the verdict. That's a shame, because in fact, whether right or not, it's clear and readily comprehensible to anyone of a modest intelligence.
The family complained essentially that the police had imposed their own version of justice on Duggan. But consider this. There is an inquest, held over two months at enormous public expense. Witnesses are compelled to come, and are cross-examined. The Coroner sums up. The jury goes out. There is a verdict. In damning the jury's verdict the Duggans are essentially saying, This isn't the kind of justice we wanted. It didn't give the result we wanted. Ironically, they are guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse the police of having done, which is to say demanding justice to suit their personal needs. But that isn't the way justice works. Justice stands outside the needs of the individual, be they police officers or drug dealers. It even stands, so far as possible, outside the needs of the state. A fair process fairly applied is all that can be asked of the justice system, and I haven't heard any suggestion, from Duggan's supporters or from anyone else, that this Inquest failed on either count. At least not until the jury delivered a verdict they didn't like.
It does not seem to have occurred to Duggan's family that he might have been a drug-dealing gang member who was carrying a gun at a time when he was shot down by a policeman (who knew such things might happen?) Or that, whatever their own devastating loss, the rest of us might be better off without him.
You may say that we don't want a society where people are shot down by the police in cold blood. On the whole I agree. But where the police are pretty sure those people have a gun on or about their person, I'm willing to make an exception.
