WHO’D BE A POLICE MARKSMAN?
With the arrest of an armed officer over the death of a black Londoner, there are troubling questions about plunging morale among gun police — just when we need them to protect us against terror
With its curved ceiling and italian mosaic floor, the Moselle Room at tottenham town hall is an Edwardian relic of the area’s prosperous past. it has survived German bombs from two world wars and was where the Spurs football team celebrated their historic league and FA Cup double in 1961. that was a peak, perhaps unmatched, of local harmony and pride.
tottenham’s recent history is more troubled, and on thursday night this week the Moselle Room was a seething cockpit of bitterness, suspicion and hate. Violence was in the air. ‘F*** the police,’ someone shouted from among the public seating in the packed body of the room. ‘Murderers,’ another called out.
‘Liars’ was a familiar term of abuse aimed at the senior police officers and other public officials shifting uncomfortably at the front. When they spoke, the officers were interrupted by sardonic laughter.
Of course, many in the hall remembered the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985 — sparked when tottenham resident Cynthia Jarrett had a fatal heart attack after police raided her home and resulting in the horrific mob murder of PC Keith Blakelock. More recently, there were the scars inflicted by the major rioting which followed the fatal police shooting in tottenham in August 2011 of the gangster Mark Duggan. they are still very raw.
So it was that on thursday, for the third time in three decades, the North London suburb appeared to be on the brink of serious public disorder following a police operation which led to the death of a member of the local black community. Perhaps only the fact that December is not the ‘rioting season’ has so far prevented further disturbances.
Nevertheless, the situation badly needed defusing. the public meeting to explain what was happening was one method. But the authorities had already gone much, much further than that. to quite extraordinary lengths, in fact.
hours earlier, a member of a Metropolitan Police firearms unit had been arrested, having already been suspended pending the result of a ‘ homicide’ investigation by the independent Police Complaints Commission (iPCC).
the officer, who was interviewed under caution, had fired the single shot which killed Jermaine Baker at approximately 9am on December 11.
At the time of his death, Mr Baker, 28, the father of two children, was apparently sitting in a black Audi car parked close to the rear of nearby Wood Green Crown Court.
the shooting took place shortly before the arrival of a Serco prison van containing two prominent local gangsters, Erwin Amoyaw- Gyamfi, 29, and Erun izzet, 32. the pair were due to be sentenced, having earlier pleaded guilty to a range of offences, including possession of a submachine gun.
it is the police contention that Mr Baker was one of a gang waiting to ambush the van and free the prisoners. A ‘non-police issue’ firearm was found inside the Audi, a commissioner of the iPCC, Cindy Butts, told those assembled in the Moselle Room.
the Audi itself was stolen, it has been reported. Locals maintain that Mr Baker and two others in the car were asleep when the shot was fired without warning.
Chief Superintendent Victor Olisa the ( black) tottenham police commander, was roundly jeered when he spoke about the police providing a ‘public service’.
he was also cheered ironically when he told the meeting that Mr Baker did not appear on any police lists of known gang members. Some reports had suggested his involvement in gang criminality.
Several members of the public demanded to know why the firearms team were not wearing the recently introduced ‘ bodycams’ which would have recorded the events for evidence.
Race relations activist Lee Jasper — a former senior adviser to ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone — who had earlier blogged that ‘London will burn’, wondered, sarcastically why, if a monkey could take a selfie, then a police officer couldn’t carry a video camera.
Amid these heated claims and counter- claims, one thing is clear: with Britain at heightened alert against a Paris- style mass casualty terror attack, the death of Jermaine Baker couldn’t come at a worse time for the Metropolitan Police, and its firearms units in particular.
the circumstances of the alleged attempted prison break also pose serious questions about the home Office’s ability to police our borders against a potential jihadi threat.
incredibly, one of the two prisoners being driven to court to be sentenced last week was deported to turkey two years ago, yet had been able to slip back into Britain undetected.
What has been apparent this week is that the delicate balance between placating the local black community and preserving the morale of the firearms units — upon which the Met relies in the event of a terror attack — is under serious strain.
Both the police and the iPCC have been careful not to reveal on what grounds the police officer who shot Mr Baker has been arrested.
On thursday night, after news of the arrest was revealed, Scotland Yard issued a carefully phrased 11- paragraph statement which offered support to the officer and their family, and stressed the important job done by police marksmen who ‘now more than ever before . . . provide an invaluable service in keeping Londoners and their own unarmed colleagues safe’.
the statement highlighted just how nervous police chiefs are about low morale in general among police marksmen. Worryingly, the numbers of police officers in England and Wales trained to carry guns has fallen by some 15 per cent since 2009 to around 6,000 last year.
theirs is a voluntary, high- risk specialism, and on a number of occasions in the past, members of such units have threatened to down arms after what has been perceived as unfair treatment by top brass.
With these men and women, decisions are usually split- second and almost always life or death. When it comes to shooting people, they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
ten years ago, a firearms team shot dead the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in the wake of the July 2005 terror attacks. those officers were simply moved to other duties pending an inquiry which exonerated them.
Significantly, Scotland Yard was criticised only two weeks ago when it emerged that officers had to rely on taser stun guns, not firearms, to overpower a man who lashed out with a knife at Leytonstone tube station, apparently in revenge for UK air strikes on islamic State in Syria.
When they do pull the trigger, officers are often dragged into long litigation which can blight their career.
this year, for example, a top police marksman was cleared of murdering suspected armed robber Azelle Rodney in North London in 2005, but only after a ten-year legal battle.
Rodney was the back-seat passenger in a Volkswagen Golf that was stopped by police as part of an operation to foil a robbery.
An exhaustive three-and-a-half year investigation by the police watchdog
The UK is facing an unprecedented
jihadi threat Every decision officers make is
life or death
this year also completely exonerated of any wrongdoing the firearms officer who shot gangster Mark Duggan in 2011. The 500- page report concluded that the marksman, known only as V53, used ‘reasonable and proportionate force’ and said there is no ‘reliable evidence’ to undermine his account.
It backed V53’s version of events: that he shot Duggan because he saw a gun and thought the gangster was about to open fire.
Last year, an inquest ruled that Duggan was lawfully killed — but the jury concluded that he had dropped the gun some time before he was shot.
Retired Metropolitan Police detective Chris Hobbs, who spent 11 years working on Scotland Yard’s ‘black-on-black’ gangland violence unit Operation Trident, said of last week’s shooting: ‘ The circumstances must, of course, be fully investigated, but the fiasco over the officer’s suspension and the decision to dramatically announce a “homicide inquiry” will be a huge blow to the morale of the armed SCO19 unit, who, of course, are also facing an unprecedented terror threat.
‘Officers will remember only too well that the police shooting of Azelle Rodney resulted in legal proceedings that continued for ten years before the officer was charged with murder, and subsequently acquitted.
‘ Those activists, so quick to criticise armed police and indeed all police, need to be careful what they wish for and remember that individual officers who carry firearms are volunteers who can hand back their firearms authorisations at any time.
‘Armed officers know they must account for their actions, but they have a right to be treated equitably and not subjected to a lifechanging legal process which can last for years.’
What then of Jermaine Baker, who was killed just over a week ago?
It is clear that for all the rumours of gang membership that caused so much fury among those attending the Moselle Room, he was no Mark Duggan. His sporadic Face- book posts suggest a ‘ bored’ and feckless young man whose main interests in life centred on smoking drugs and getting high, rather than major crime.
Indeed, a Mail examination of the records of a number of London magistrates’ courts reveals that Mr Baker’s known criminal acts were at the very trivial end of petty.
In April this year, he pleaded guilty at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court to the theft of a PlayStation from a house in Tottenham, and was given 60 hours’ community service and ordered to pay compensation.
He was also twice caught travelling on trains without a ticket, and once driving without insurance. The records show a number of other alleged offences, such as stealing a bike, which were dismissed.
Hardly Al Capone. Still, you might wonder why, asleep or not, Mr Baker was sitting in a stolen car in broad daylight with others, and why a ‘ non- police issue’ firearm was apparently present.
It has been reported that police had bugged a phone that had been smuggled into prison so that the would-be absconders from court could communicate with the gang who were allegedly planning to free them.
The two prisoners being transported to the court were very serious criminals, make no mistake. But perhaps the most pressing question is how one of them, Erun Izzet, came to be in a British prison awaiting sentence at all.
What has been largely ignored in the fallout from the Jermaine Baker shooting is that Izzet, a Turkish national who had 11 previous convictions, had been deported to his home country from the UK in July 2013, and ordered not to return for ten years.
And yet he had done just that, almost immediately.
The Home Office said last night that they could not be sure how he had achieved this as there were ‘many routes’ back into Britain. So much for national security at a time of heightened terror alert. Izzet and
‘Remember, all armed police are volunteers’
his co-defendant Erwin AmoyawGyamfi, who had convictions for heroin trafficking, were both jailed for 14 years within hours of Baker’s shooting.
Four men have now been charged with conspiracy to aid the criminals’ escape from lawful custody. Two were also charged with possession of an imitation firearm and driving a stolen vehicle.
These details were of little interest to those who attended the Moselle Room meeting in Tottenham on Thursday.
It almost exploded when a Met Assistant Commissioner, Helen King, invited a friend of the dead man to see the training that armed officers received.
The audience was in no mood for such public relations stunts.
‘When there is a black suspect [it’s a case of] “bang”, shot in a second,’ one man accused her. ‘ Whenever there is a white perpetrator who is actually firing a gun, [the police] want one-on-one negotiation.
‘You officers do not identify with black suspects. You don’t see them as human beings; you see them as something alien.’
Another speaker said: ‘ Would Jermaine Baker have been shot if he was white? We don’t think so. We think the Metropolitan Police is still institutionally racist. If we want to stop the police shooting black people in Tottenham, isn’t it about time to take the guns from the police — the biggest gang of them all?’
The mood of the room was ugly, and certainly not conducive to calm, rational discussion.
For the police, it was ‘heads you lose, tails you lose’. But in the cold light of day, one thing seems clear: surely this is not the moment, after the blood-soaked mass murders in Paris, for serious talk about taking guns away from the forces of law and order.