Guns, Injustice And The Police

Nationalist commentators complaining about Peter Mandelson watering down the Patten proposals on police reform should note that the British police not the RUC have shot 22 people dead in the past 10 years. More than half of these were unarmed. In only two instances were police officers charged: one was acquitted, the other case is still pending.

In 19 of the 22 cases, the policemen concerned remained on duty while investigations, such as they were, proceeded.
This suggests that Peter Mandelson diluted the radicalism of the Patten Report not as a concession to Orange ideology but because he and the New Labour government are themselves ieologically opposed to making the police answerable for their actions.
Earlier this year, I spoke at a meeting in Belfast with Padraigin Drinan of the Rosemary Nelson campaign and Jim Stanley, brother of Harry Stanley, the last person to die from police gunfire in Britain. He was gunned down in Hackney in London early on a Sunday evening in September last year. Jim told a story which, had it happened in Belfast or Derry, Padraigin and I were agreed, would have made huge headlines and stayed on the front pages ever since, cited in every debate on policing as evidence of the need for a new start.
Harry Stanley was walking home, carrying a blue plastic bag with the leg of a coffee table which he d just had repaired. Some idiot phoned the police and said the object in the bag looked like it might be a gun.
A patrol car rushed to the scene. Two policemen challenged Mr. Stanley. He turned around and, according to their account, held up the bag. Both opened fire. They appear to have been good shots. Each would have killed him even if the other hadn't fired.
In a debate on the adjournment of the House of Commons in April, the left-wing MP Brian Sedgemore said: "Harry Stanley never asked for much. When he left home that morning, his last words to his wife, Irene, who asked him what he wanted for dinner, were, 'I'll have stovies' a reference to a traditional Scottish dish of sausage, potatoes and onions. Hours later, Mrs. Stanley heard a noise bang-bang but had no idea that her husband was lying dead in a pool of blood around the corner".
Harry had never been in trouble with the police in his life. He was physically weak, recovering from an operation for cancer of the colon. He had his passport and other identification in his pocket . But his body was removed to the morgue, and the post-mortem completed which is illegal before anyone got around to letting Irene know she was now a widow.
No charges have been brought, no policeman has been suspended. Mrs. Stanley has received no apology from the Metropolitan Police, or from anyone else. The Met did offer to pay for Harry's funeral. But on the day after his burial, the offer was withdrawn by the Commissioner, John Stevens, apparently although nobody has confirmed this because Stevens feared the gesture might be construed as an admission that his men had been at fault.
(John Stevens is the officer who was called in following the murder of Loughlin Maginn in August 1989 to investigate allegations of collusion between the RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries. At the time, he was deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire. The office he set up near Belfast was to be broken into and torched by members of an undercover British Army unit which had also been colluding with sectarian killers and feared exposure. Stevens' report his key finding was that collusion was "neither widespread nor institutionalised" was a major factor in deepening disillusionment not just with the RUC but with the failure or refusal of the British authorities to confront it. When Stevens was appointed to the most powerful job in British policing two years ago, his stint in the North was widely reported as having been the clinching factor in his selection.)
The Met's handling of Harry Stanley's death is being investigated by the Surrey police. The Surrey police's handling of the investigation is being investigated by the Suffolk police. Last week a spokeswoman for the Met said she had "no idea" when this multi-layered investigation would be complete.
Speaking of the Stanley case and the 21 other police killings over the previous decade, Brian Sedgemore observed in the Commons: The signal that goes out to the public is that the police have a licence to kill .
In relation to the killing of Harry Stanley, he remarked: From what I know of the case, it is my considered opinion as a barrister that a jury should be asked to decide on the evidence whether the two police officers are innocent or guilty of manslaughter or, worse, murder .
But it's highly unlikely they will stand trial. The police do have a licence to kill. In Britain, as in Ireland, the licence is automatically endorsed by every government which comes along, irrespective of what pledges on policing may have been issued in opposition.
The police are often referred to as the thin blue line , standing, it's implied, between democracy and the ordinary citizen on the one hand, chaos and threat on the other. In fact, the basic function of the police in every class-divided society is to stand between the people and those in power over the people.
And so, governments which administer the affairs of State on behalf of people with power have no serious option other than to back the police up, even when they break the laws which, in theory, they exist to uphold, even when they commit murder.
Viewed in this perspective, the policing problem in the North may be more acute than in Britain, or in the South. Feelings about police malpractice may have a more jagged edge. But, really, it's the same problem all over.
The policing debate in the North has largely been concentrated on names, symbols, badges and the like, the issues which divide Unionists from Nationalists, and which enable Peter Mandelson to put himself neatly forward as an honest broker, striving for agreement between opposite extremes.
But by far the most serious dilutions of Patten have to do with democratic control and accountability, with those elements which would have made a difference in the Harry Stanley as well as the Loughlin Maginn case. In wasn't the Unionists who binned the best bits of Patten, but the British Secretary of State, and for reasons which, fundamentally, have nothing at all to do with the specific politics of the North, everything to to with the general politics of capitalism.
It is for all the same reasons, of course, that none of the garda lads who shot down John Carty in Abbeylara will face trial, or even suffer in their careers.
People in the South and across the water concerned about policing in the North should keep in mind that reform begins properly at home. b

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