The Judge RANTS!
Date: 08/01/14
Lawful...Something Or Another
So, let's go through this again, shall we? And again, shall we?
An inquest jury determines that:
- A young man in a taxi had been armed,
- He had disposed of the weapon before being confronted by police, and that - in effect - the police officer who then shot him dead was lying when he said under oath in court that the victim was armed when he was shot,
- The police's procedures failed in a number of key respects,
- But that - in an act of pretzel logic only usually encountered in Government-sponsored inquiries - Mark Duggan was still 'lawfully killed'.
That the Mayor of London - probably the most ludicrous figure in municipal politics in the developed world after Toronto's Rob Ford - wants to buy water cannon for the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club (© Philip Challinor) to keep the lower orders down may now be given a more kindly construction, in that it will save all the expensive, time-wasting and thoroughly unseemly process of finding out that the police were not to blame for killing someone else; presumably because deaths caused by hypothermia following a jolly good soaking and kettling on a winter's day can be ascribed to 'natural causes'.
