Crime prevention and arbitrary government
Following the execution of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in public on Friday, the Metropolitan Police has confirmed its policy of shoot-to-kill against suspected suicide bombers. Politicians have rushed to defend the police and the leading human rights pressure group Liberty has accepted the need for such a policy. These statements indicate the extent of the political consensus underlying the 'war on terror' and just how much of civil liberty that consensus has already destroyed.
It is unlikely that the state agents who executed the innocent Mr Menezes will ever be brought to justice. For the police officers to be liable for murder the prosecution would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did not honestly believe that they had to kill Mr Menezes to prevent him from killing or seriously injuring them or members of the public in a suicide explosion. In the circumstances of the police investigation that will likely be hard to do. There will be an investigation, but a murder prosecution seems very unlikely. The official position in the wake of the shooting appears to be that even though you may have nothing to do with terrorism, if the executive branch suspects that you do, and you then do something, however innocently motivated in itself, which confirms their suspicions then deliberately killing you will not be murder.
However, if the killers are not prosecuted for murder might they nonetheless be prosecuted for manslaughter by gross negligence? They may have honestly believed that Menezes was a suicide bomber but was their belief a reasonable one? What was the basis of the officers' suspicion that Menezes was connected with the London bombers? If the evidence that he was a suicide bomber was only that he emerged from a block of flats where suspects were thought to live, that he was wearing a coat on a warm day, and that he ran away when suddenly threatened by armed men in plain clothes, then it might be thought grossly negligent to execute him on this basis. If the evidence to suspect Menezes was indeed this thin but there is no prosecution, then the law will be saying that it is not grossly unreasonable to execute someone providing there is some evidence that he might be a suicide bomber.
The logic of such a position seems to be the dubious calculation that it is better that a few innocents are executed by the state's hired professionals than that many are killed by religiously inspired amateurs. From the individual's point of view this would be government with very few restraints on its use of coercion, bordering on arbitrary government. It is this sort of government that democratic civil liberties are intended to prevent. Bin Laden and his comrades will doubtless be encouraged by their surrender.