MET officers refusing to carry out their duties because a colleague has been charged with murder have a message for Chris Kaba’s family: the life of your son and brother doesn’t matter.
Proceedings have barely begun, so police can hardly claim their still anonymous fellow officer hasn’t had a fair hearing. They simply object to their being held to account at all for shooting an unarmed man dead.
If the Met is to rebuild any credibility with the communities it supposedly serves, its response should be blunt: officers who are not prepared to be held accountable for using deadly force should not be carrying guns in the first place.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman says armed police need to make “split-second decisions” and must “have the confidence to do their jobs while protecting us all” (note that a young black man, followed by an unmarked car with no lights or sirens then shot through the window, is not included in “us all”).
But nobody who is less worried about killing an innocent person than about being held responsible for doing so can be trusted with a licence to kill.
Braverman’s decision to launch a review into armed policing off the back of the murder charge has rightly prompted a storm of outrage from lawyers and MPs, many pointing out that as a former attorney-general the Home Secretary should be well aware that she risks prejudicing a trial.
But she is well aware. The politicisation of a young man’s death is of a piece with her railing at the European Convention on Human Rights and her calls for international agreements on refugees to be torn up.
This Conservative government is consciously changing the rules. Through its Public Order and Policing Acts it is denying citizens protest rights long taken for granted. Through its bids to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda it hopes to establish a new, crueller international norm.
Legal niceties don’t matter to Braverman when she scents an opportunity for the sort of culture war that might mobilise the angry, nationalist right — that wing of the Tory Party that organised the National Conservatism Conference earlier this year.
The Tories have flirted with the idea of morphing into a Trump-style nationalist party that poses as anti-Establishment for years — as far back as David Cameron’s alignment with far-right groups rather than the traditional centre-right bloc in the European Parliament from 2009. Braverman is the foremost advocate of this strategy in the Sunak Cabinet.
The left’s response should be robust. Met Commissioner Mark Rowley’s insinuation that officers are plagued by unwarranted lawsuits for doing their jobs is out of order.
Despite 1,871 deaths in or following police custody or contact since 1990, only one officer has been successfully prosecuted for manslaughter and none have been for murder.
And yet the police have not earned our trust. Leaked WhatsApp messages exposed a culture of bigotry among officers based at Charing Cross police station. Over 1,000 Met officers are currently suspended or on restricted duties for various forms of misconduct.
Are armed officers some unusually pure elite? Hardly. Rapist murderer Wayne Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick were firearms officers.
The Met has thrown wobblies before. It sought — with Tory connivance — to accuse London Mayor Sadiq Khan of intimidating former commissioner Cressida Dick into resigning.
Dick, of course, enjoyed promotion after promotion despite herself having been responsible for the operation that killed an innocent man, Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes, in 2005.
But after the global eruption of Black Lives Matter, amid waves of authoritarian legislation further empowering this entitled, corrupt and — according to an official report it commissioned itself — institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic police force, we cannot tolerate these officers’ self-indulgence.
We need more accountability from the police, not less. Another lawyer turned politician currently leading the Labour Party should be pressed to make that clear.
