Should the killing be called an 'execution'?
According to Oxford Concise execution means 'infliction of capital punishment'. The point of the piece is that if as is probable on past experience no prosecution results from the police killing then capital punishment for acting suspiciously is what this will amount to and the error is to have omitted the word 'summary'.
How putting eight shots, all but one of them into the head, at point blank range can be called an 'accident' is beyond me.
However Wotjek is right that execution in the opening sentence is inflammatory and that it might have been wiser to use other words in the first sentence - 'brutal termination' come to mind
On whether the British police are trigger happy:
37 people have been shot dead by the British police in the past 15 years, and Britain is a country with few confrontations between police and armed criminals. For example, Harry Stanley was shot dead in the street by Metropolitan Police officers solely because he was carrying a chair leg in a plastic bag which police believed (on no grounds other than an erroneous phone report from a member of the public) might be a shotgun. The CPS has refused to bring charges and the High Court has overturned an inquest verdict of unlawful killing (although a new criminal investigation has recently begun).
Would anyone have stopped?
The police were wearing plain clothes and suddenly drew guns on the guy. Any one of us might have done the same.
Richard Harris writes: "anyone in England has the right to use such force as is reasonable in the prevention of crime or in the apprehension of an offender ... etc":
True in general, but do we and ought we to have such a right in the circumstances as they were in the shooting of Mr Menezes? Moreover, although we can't yet know, I very much doubt the same sort of public sympathy as has been extended to the police would have been shown to a member of the public who might have shot or otherwise killed in an innocent in comparable circumstances. On the contrary I suspect that vigilantism and prejudice would have been loudly denounced.