Everything, and I do mean everything that has gone wrong in Policing and Law and Order under Labour is epitomised by Blair, namely the politicised police forces and skewed priorities of police forces.

If you need a crack team to go in and run a “Diversity” seminar Ian Blair and Brian Paddick are just the type of Politically Correct Stormtroopers you need, if there’s a real civil emergency or criminal to be caught, god help ya!

…….Indulge me a moment please:

…..Sir Ian Blair is transported by Time Machine back to the time of Sir Robert Peel’s “Bobbies” (Clearly far too sexist and paternalistic a term!) to run the force ‘properly’; of course, London in this time has crime issues Jack-the-Ripper and Gin-alleys, but let that not distract from the real issue confronting a true “Lefties-Copper” like I-B namely the instutional sexism (attitude to prostitutes, flower sellers etc) and racism endemic in the Peelers, thankfully there is a copper out there who knows how to run a diversity seminar.

With Kim-Brown-ill pushing for 56 or 90 days detention without trial purely as a populist political stunt (or Government-by-Daily-Mail-reader if you will!) would you trust the police to have such powers, with crass, political incompetents like Ian Blair at the helm?

An innocent man was shot to death, and, frankly, that isn’t the issue.

The issue was the attempted cover up thereafter. We heard lie after lie about the events – leaping barriers, puff jackets – we had spin over a tragedy.

We had Cressida Dick, who was directly in charge of this, promoted. As if the death of an innocent weren’t a black mark in the Metropolitan Police. Maybe two innocent deaths gets you the jackpot.

We had the IPCC denied it’s role with Government approval.

This is a Police Force, and a government, that has lost the plot. That thinks we are stupid, or at the very least forgetful.

Firstly, within an hour of shooting of de Menezes, he illegally attempted to stop the IPCC from investigating. In the IPCC’s own words, this attempt to stop an independent investigation only harmed the Met in the long run. That alone ought to be a resignation matter.

Secondly, despite almost everyone other than himself knowing by the end of the 22nd of July that an innocent man had been shot dead, including his own secretary, he remaining completely oblivious to that fact until the following morning. Either that means that are huge communication problems within the Met or other higher-ups didn’t bother to tell him, for whichever reason. He simply wasn’t in control on the day in question.

Thirdly, he has presided over a police force that could have made clear to the public that the story which emerged in the media and which continued until part of the IPCC’s investigation was leaked to ITV was completely and utterly untrue. Those following de Menezes all stated that he was wearing a light denim jacket, as the IPCC report makes clear. Somewhere along the line this was concocted into a “bulky jacket”, with the witnesses who saw the police vaulting the barriers chasing him mistaking them for him, something the police could have corrected. Despite de Menezes never being asked to stop, the story was that he had either ran from the police or that he had disobeyed orders when he did neither. Again, the police could have corrected those reports. Instead, they included all those incorrect details in their own press releases. We wouldn’t have known the truth about what happened until the health and safety trial if it hadn’t been for the leak.

Fourthly, not content with the above smears on de Menezes’ character, Ian Blair personally decided to contest the health and safety prosecution when others urged him to plead guilty. The prosecution case was so damning that the Met’s defence was left to resort to further smears and lies, putting together a misleading comparison between Osman and de Menezes, claiming that he failed to obey orders when he did not and that he might have done so because he “thought” he had drugs on his person when he did not.

Fifthly, Blair has since then refused to accept the IPCC’s and judge’s conclusions that this was a corporate failure, claiming that what happened on that day was not “systemic”.

Forget all the other arguments about what he’s done for London, whether he’s a “liberal” cop or whether the alternative might be worse, if he doesn’t resign or be sacked for any or all of the other above reasons the police is quite simply utterly unaccountable.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying he should stay or he should go, rather that the decision should be taken in the light of what he has learnt from the affair.

We expect – no, we NEED – armed antiterrorist police to be able to remain calm under extreme pressure, to make snap judgements on the basis of their own observations and act accordingly. Particularly when communications have broken down, it’s imperative that they can exercise their own judgement as to who is and is not a valid target, rather than just being taken over by a red-misted desire to execute the last order given.

It’s equally imperative, for all our sakes, that officers whose judgement in such circumstances is proven to be dodgy – to the extent, remember, that an innocent journeyman sparky was shot seven times in the head while already immobilised – should be held personally responsible for that failure. It’s no more than the flipside of the medals they’d have received if they’d got the right guy after all; and even with an innocent man dead, if the narrative Sir Ian Blair gave the media had been true – with the padded jacket, and the running away and all the rest of it – a reasonable jury might still have been minded to acquit.

But that whole version of events was a pack of lies. And for that reason alone, whether he lied deliberately or was fed misinformation from below, Blair too must be held culpable.

It isn’t the fact that the police shot an innocent man in stressful circumstances, bad as that is. It is the fact that rather than face the problems present in their operational procedures that day, they tried to change the story to excuse their manifest flaws. They tried to cover it up: http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2007/11/the_systems_abs.html

If the police attempt a cover up over something as important as this, that calls into question whether they can be trusted to protect us at all.

” and more generally as a force for “modernisation” and “reform” in a force that, not so long ago, was found to be institutionally racist.”
–a) he may be, but is not the only such policeman
–b)his actual competence must be called into question. Incompetent reform is not better than slower or lesser but effective reform. More pointedly, the jury is very much out as to whether his modernisation extends beyond self-aggrandising PR
–c) how modernising or reformist is smearing a casualty of police mistakes, deliberately feeding false information to the press and public (‘jumping’ the barrier etc) obstructing an investigation (by the IPCC)? At least in these tactics he is a (New) Labour man

“Therefore he must not be allowed to be forced out by nasty reactionary elements.”–like a stopped clock, even David Davis can be right on occasion. Furthermore I think you’ll find that an awful lot of people on the left-liberal side of things back his departure.

I simply fail to see how backing someone in the face of a court’s findings and those of an independent investigatory commission simply on the grounds that ‘he’s one of us’ (allegedly) is in any way liberal or indeed moral.

Oh, and Innocent Abroad, the combination of Blair himself making misleading statements to the press, and the sheer scale of the systemic failings found by both the court and the IPCC make this very much an instance where the chief must carry the can.

Blair, like anyone in any job, should be sacked if he has committed an act of gross misconduct. And I’m not coninved he has. Certainly the investigations don’t seem to suggest that.

For those in power its a different matter though. They would struggle to sack a man (or have him stand down) knowing they would then have to work with his replacement. They need the new man to have confidence in them as well as the other way around.

So we can’t expect the government (labour now but perhaps tories next time) to ever turn on a copper while in power.

But is it a resignation issue? Occasionally, police cars run over innocent people; people die in custody for want of proper medical care, but we don’t jump up and down demanding Chief Constables’ heads on those occasions – where’s the difference between that and the De Menezes case?

Broaden it out. If a child dies in care, should the Leader of the Council concerned quit as a matter of course? Should top management be culled every time there’s a fatal train crash?

The question surely is, do we believe that Blair has put in place systems to prevent a repeat performance. If we think he has, he can stay. If we think he hasn’t, or believe he thinks he doesn’t need to, then he needs to go.