So just to clarify, snafu, you would conclude, if you were the jury, that the guilty party was the police and that Duggan was completely innocent?
Just asking as everyone else, including me, think the police did the right thing whereas you don’t.

No, read what I wrote.

Duggan was, according to information supplied by the police, a nasty piece of work; I said that early on.
Two members of the jury were not convinced enough to agree with their fellow jurors so the court had to take a majority verdict.

There is a hole in the basic story that shouldn’t be there – the gun in the sock – yet how it came to be so far away without anybody seeing it being disposed of (when you would imagine they would be very focused on where this gun was, in case it was pointing at them) allows an element of doubt to enter the proceedings when it needed to be clear cut and fully explained. You cannot claim that it was thrown there when he got out of the taxi or that it must have been thrown there when he was shot whilst (initially) claiming that he was firing his gun at the police was the reason to fire on him. The marksmans accurate description smacks of conferring with his colleagues, which must be a little like getting the answers to an test by consulting with school friends actually in the exam…

The Met was told several years ago that the hard stop tactic was a high risk option, with the target liable to be shot unless they reacted to what the police wanted immediately – something rather unlikely if they
are not fully focused on the idea that the men surrounding them with guns are actually police and not some drug gang or similar (the Met was recently found to have unlawfully killed Azelle Rodney in a similar situation, even down to the false claim that he was holding a gun when shot six times in the head and upper body. The claim that he was a major crack dealer en route from his factory to conduct a deal – something the police have since played down – was countered by his family’s claim that he had accepted a lift from two men he hardly knew since they would pass the hairdresser he was going to visit).

In fact it is the last point that niggles me – if armed police accidentally hard stopped me later today then I will almost certainly be dead – they might be shouting ‘armed police’ but in all the excitement and fear am I going to hear them and understand what is happening? The cars are unmarked, the cops are in civvies, they might be wearing bullet proof jackets and police-marked baseball caps but I am not going to be the quickest off the starting block and won’t have a clue what is happening. So since this tactic is deemed to be high risk (probably to the police as well as the target) then is the risk necessary? And all along I have been harping on about this in case it is an innocent, rather than an apparent gangster, who is inadvertently the target; on this occasion it was someone they could point a finger at and claim he was a naughty boy, but they need to be lucky on every occasion – and that doesn’t always happen.