Justifying Shooting

Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on

Following the revelation that British police gave out false information about the shooting of a terrorism suspect who turned out to be innocent, Simon Hattenstone urges greater skepticism about official police accounts. After the shooting of Brazilian student Jean Charles Menezes, police claimed that he had been wearing an unseasonably bulky, padded jacket that might be concealing a bomb, and that he ran from police and vaulted a ticket barrier at a subway station before being shot dead. But closed-circuit TV footage from the subway shows him "entering the station at a normal walking pace and even picking up a free copy of the Metro newspaper. He was wearing a denim jacket." Hattenstone lists a series of other incidents in which British police have given false information about suspects who died in their custody. "Few deaths at the hands of the police have been as clear-cut as that of Jean Charles de Menezes," Hattenstone writes. "None has been as high profile. But the subsequent police distortion is all too familiar."

Main Source: 
Guardian (UK), August 18, 2005
Topics: 
Human Rights
Media

Comments

ianmoseley replied on

There are some claims that the padded jacket and vaulting the barrier comments did not come from the police, but were artefacts of the media.

kevin s replied on

I have been hunting for some discussion of these "artifacts of the media" -- the ubiquitous reports of and quotes from eye-witnesses who supposedly were on the train right there and then, and told of the big jacket and something like wires coming out of it, and how he came running into the train with a terrified look on his face. These were not presented as police comments, yet suddenly, after seeing the camera footage, there is no curiousity about how such supporting evidence rose up to re-inforce the offical story of understandable police confusion. I would have expected somebody to shine a light on this oddity to try to understand how such inaccuracies or fabrications become the universally received mental impression of the incident for most news readers. None of the articles about the revelations from the cameras have addressed the question of who supposedly gave this eye-witness account, and why was he hallucinating. I know eye-witness reports are known to be unreliable, but I have a hard time believing that an eye-witness gave that report. Did somebody perhaps provide a pseudo-eyewitness to help shape the initial reports?