Britain's Police Are Now A Bigger Threat Than The Terrorists

Vernon Coleman





I am appalled, horrified and terrified that a majority of Britons apparently support the new `shoot to kill' policy arbitrarily adopted by the police. This is an even scarier development than the bombing of London.

Here are some questions nobody seems to want to ask (and which, I suspect, no one in authority will want to answer). You won't see or hear these issues discussed on television or in your newspaper.

1. If policemen shout and tell you to stop then will it not, in future, be logical to run away as quickly as you can? When the police caught their innocent Brazilian `suspect' they shot him to death even though they had caught him. They shot him so many times that I doubt if his family were able to recognise him afterwards. They argued that if they hadn't shot him he might have set off a bomb. But this policy hardly encourages suspects to give themselves up. Why give yourself up to the police if they're going to shoot you eight times anyway? When armed policemen are allowed to dress in jeans how are people supposed to know that they really are policemen? I'm English, white, middle aged and a member of the MCC. I speak English and understand it reasonably well (unless it is spoken by Americans). If a group of rather scruffy men in jeans, carrying large guns, yelled at me to stop I too would run away from them. (How many visitors to London don't even speak English?)

2. Why did the anonymous policeman shoot the prisoner seven times in the head and once in the shoulder? Seven times in the head? How many bullets in the head does it take to kill someone? Is there just the teeniest chance that the policeman who did the shooting panicked? Wasn't this perhaps a teeny bit of overkill? Were more than one policeman involved? Am I not right in thinking that if a murderer shoots his victim repeatedly he is usually regarded to have done so in anger?

3. The Home Secretary (Charles Clarke) has congratulated the police for the shooting. Everyone in the establishment seems more concerned about the mental welfare of the gunman than the fate of the innocent man who was murdered. When is someone going to arrest the murdering policeman? The policeman who executed an innocent citizen should be tried. If found guilty of murder (and I find it difficult to see how he could not be) then he should be sentenced to life imprisonment. The senior officer who gave the order to shoot should also be arrested and tried. (In reality, I suspect that everyone concerned will be given huge amounts of compensation and pensioned off.)

4. Why have we not been given the name of the policeman who shot and killed? The police are always quick enough to release the names of suspects - even if they are innocent. (Ask TV presenter Matthew Kelly.) The policeman who killed the innocent Brazilian is a murderer. Why haven't we been given his details? And why don't we know who gave the order to kill? Don't these people work for us?

5. We are told that we have to carry on as `normal' if we are to defy the terrorists. Changing our society or way of life will, we are warned, mean that the terrorists have won. So, it is now presumably going to be `normal' for the police to shoot innocent people and get away with it.

6. How many of those who voted in support of the `shoot to kill' policy have really thought about what it means. How many would support a policy of `shoot to kill them' or `shoot to kill their friends and relatives'?

7. How come the police are so incompetent that they took days to find the names of any of the four men whose pictures have been plastered over every newspaper in the country? (Maybe if policemen still had legs - and didn't spend all their time sitting in patrol cars on motorway bridges - they would have been able to do a little knocking on doors, to find someone who knew one of the alleged suspects. To say that the police have not come well out of the tragic events in London is something of an understatement.)

8. The role of the media has been a disgrace. The worst paper of all has been The Sun. I am thoroughly ashamed to have been a Sun columnist for seven years. (Though I was not, I am pleased to say, a columnist under the present editor.) The day after the shooting of the Brazilian innocent The Sun ran the headline `One down - three to go'. They ran this even though they must have known that the man who had been shot was not a terrorist. Someone at the paper presumably liked the headline. The editor (a woman called Wade I believe) clearly has the morals of a Blair.


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The really scary thing about this development is that once the police have power, they never give it up. They're like the Government. A power gained is a power retained. The police in England now have the power to shoot to kill. And they will keep that power.

Terrorism may abate (it will probably never end completely). But we are now stuck with a police force who can shoot and kill innocent people and get away with it. Is this really our country? One of the reasons we don't have capital punishment in this country is because of the risk of the State killing an innocent man. The police have now given themselves powers which make them a more serious, long-term threat to our freedom and safety than the terrorists.


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What the hell happened?

I'll tell you exactly what happened.

Tony Blair happened.

The London bombing happened because our lying Prime Minister is a war criminal who took us into an illegal war. In the first six months or so of the illegal invasion of Iraq, British and American troops killed in excess of 100,000 innocent Iraqi women and children. Does anyone seriously doubt that the illegal war is not the cause of the terrorist attacks on London?

So, why did Blair take us into an illegal war?

I believe he did so because he is a vain and greedy man.

Blair is now enormously popular in the USA. Whenever he goes there people cheer him. He doesn't get cheered much in England. He likes being cheered. So he sucks up to the Americans.

And Blair has bought a large house in London which is well beyond his present means.

I suspect that the only way he will be able to pay off the mortgage will be to get good jobs with his American pals. His autobiography won't pay the mortgage. It probably won't even pay for Cherie's frocks. Blair will, I strongly suspect, end up a director of the Carlyle Group (along with John Major).

So is that why we went to war?

Did Blair just want to suck up to Bush and his pals so that he could guarantee himself a wealthy future?

Did our nation get embroiled in an illegal war so that Blair could get rich?

Were Londoners bombed because of Blair's need to pay off his mortgage?

And now the police in England have adopted a shoot to kill (innocent or not) policy. Our freedom, our liberty, our traditional culture have all disappeared in days.

It seems to me that it is all because we have a Prime Minister who wants a house he can't afford.




Copyright Vernon Coleman 2005 Home