Shoot first, ask questions lie later.
Azelle Rodney was killed by a police marksman in Edgware last April after twenty five police officers were involved in an operation following the car he was a backseat passenger in. His family are now asking why the officer in question (known only as E7) has not been questioned in the IPCC inquiry.
As is now apparently the norm the first step the police took was to claim that the man they killed had been armed. Once that turned out to be bollocks they failed to retract the statement.
The family's solicitor Daniel Machover said: "The bottom line is they put out this misleading statement which was interpreted in exactly the way they expected it to be." Mr Rodney's mother Susan Alexander said: "The family have today challenged the IPCC to answer how can it ever be right for the police to shoot someone when the suspect does not present a visual threat to anyone? "The Crown Prosecution Service should be asked if there is evidence to support criminal charges of murder or gross negligence and manslaughter. "If an officer makes an honest mistake and others have made mistakes along the way in a police operation, a criminal jury should decide whether the mistakes amount to gross negligence, not an independent 'police expert'."
The more high profile case of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes has also had its inquiry criticised as first they failed to speak to Iain Blair in person and then in an apparent attempt to be more transparent held a media briefing that angered the de Menezes family. It's still possible that officers involved in that incident will face criminal charges.
Ed209 was snapped by jurvetson and taken from his Flickr stream under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license
