no wonder some people post anonymously
because to suggest that somehow de Menezes brought it on himself by overstaying the terms of his visa is pretty dam' low; there's thousands upon thousands of people in this country working contrary to terms of their visas, or without visas at all. Do they deserve to be shot because of this? I think not.
But that's not really the point that I want to make. It's interesting to not that the Police defence, quite apart from the slurs on the victim's character and the doctored photos, has excused what happened on the basis that the Police couldn't possibly be expected to co-ordinate all that information and that Cressida Dick (and she really is one even if she hasn't got one) didn't have the necessary information *at her fingertips* (sic)
So what exactly have we giving the cops millions upon millions more every year to do? There's CCTV all over London, it's quite possibly the most camera-filled city centre in the world, we have all the so-called experience from the IRA bombing campaigns, there's all the *intelligence* that our delightful US friends share with us after they've tortured it out of Gitmo prisoners in the name of freedom and demawcracy, and so on - yet the Met with all it;s resources and training and so-called *professionalism* can't establish the identity of one Brazilian electrician.
factoid 1 - when he was spotted coming out of the flats where he lived, he was identified by cop survelillance as Western European/Mediterranean male, but somewhere along the line this got turned into North African. This has not been satisfactorily explained yet.
factoid 2 - when he got off the bus at Brixton tube, he found the station was closed and got back onto the bus after phoning his friend. The copper following him didn't notice that the station was closed, and the phone call and re-boarding the bus were thus deemed as "suspicious" - if a supposed cokehead foreign electrician could notice that a Tube station was shut, I don't think it's unreasonable to hold that a supposedly highly-trained (but definitely overpaid) surveillance plod should have noticed that as well, if he was doing his job properly.
factoid 3 - he wasn't challenged. Armed officers burst into the carriage shouting "Armed police!" but didn't directly challenge de Menezes, the surveillance man grabbed him before he could respond, threw him down onto a seat so that the trigger-happy thugs of SO19 could pump dum-dums into his head.
But then, no-one's actually personally responsible, are they? I hope none of the officers concerned takes a holiday to Brazil soon, I'd imagine that Mr Menezes family might want to take a little personal revenge - I know I would. It's his own dam' fault for overstaying his visa and being a darkie, after all? Isn't it? Couldn't possibly be the Met's fault, could it?
but it WAS. And the real tragedy is that it will just happen again, and again, and again, and we'll here the same excuses over and over just as we've heard them every time in the past. It's perfectly ok for the cops to f*ck up and pump innocent people full of bullets because after all, they're protecting us, so it's ok that they f*ck up.