Police officer cleared

[Toomanywars]

Martin Blake police officer today cleared by a jury of unlawful killing of Chris Kaba

Should police officers get more support. Perhaps not release name until after trial or inquiry.

I agree.

I think he was charged with murder so that so the authorities could show they were 'cracking down on racist police offices'.

The same authorities would have known all the facts and seen all the footage before the decision to charge was made.

Nobody in their right mind could have looked at that thought the officer was guilty. It was a show trial.

Meanwhile the life of a respected officer who bravely did his duty has been ruined and he, and his family, will have to live in fear forever.

I am married to a black man. I am always worried that he will come to harm in the hands of the police.
No, Kaba didn't deserve every shot. He deserved to be answerable for any alleged crimes he committed. He deserved to be innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. No, he did not deserve to be executed.

So I've just heard he can't even go near the expectant mum of his child because of a domestic violence order.
Sky news?

@ItsTheGAGGGGGGGGG You may not like that in certain communities, black men are more of a risk to other black men than other groups are.If white or Asian men for example were the dominant perpetrators of crime against black men, there would rightly be a narrative around that. And I suspect you wouldn't have a problem with that, just like I suspect you have no problem in claiming that the police are a risk to certain communities. Just because the truth is uncomfortable, it doesn't make it any less truthful. There is nuance in violence structures that need to be unpacked to properly address them.

He could've complied and gone for the court of law route. He didn't choose that route.

He choose a different route. He choose to put other people's lives in imenant and immediate danger. It was a choice he made and it resulted in his death.

Should have thought of that before he turned his car into a two and a half ton weapon eh?

Can I ask what will happen to the police officer now? Will he and his family be offered any sort of protection?

Every stabbing of a young person in my community ripples through my school: it's someone's cousin, friend from primary school, brother's friend. And so are the perpetrators. It's so fucking grim. Gang related crime and violence impacts the lives of literally everyone who lives here. I understand that protesters are attempting to call into question the killing of an unarmed man by a police officer, but having read CK's catalogue of priors, I just feel so hopeless. How the hell are violent men like CK stopped or better still, helped to help themselves, before it gets to this point?

I think in part the answer to that needs to come from within black communities. However many within those communities seem to want to blame outside groups.

But they didn't know he was unarmed. The information the police had was that the car had been involved in gun crimes, thus it is reasonable to suspect whoever was in the car was armed.

If the driver had been armed, and the police had every reason to believe this, then shooting out the tyres may have prompted the driver to use their gun. I have no idea about ballistics but bullets from that car may have been able to enter the surrounding properties and harmed innocent people or ricocheted and hit the police or even the driver himself

I am married to a black man and mother to a black son.

It’s not so bad now he is older but I had years of fear that my son would come to harm at the hands of gang members, in various ways. As people he knew at school did. Kaba’s gang members, to be specific, I now know.

Yes, members of the police have been racist. Both DH and Ds have been stopped, but insidiously demoralising and exasperating as that is, neither fear they will come to harm / lethal harm at the hands of the police. Not unless they were 1 in a million unlucky… probably greater odds since we have 15m people in London.

Kaba was not shot because he ‘deserved’ to be shot, and no one should cheer any possibility of the police carrying out sentences on the basis of what people may or may not ‘deserve’.

It would have been better, very much better, had the whole incident been concluded with no one dead

But he wasn’t ‘executed’

@Lndnmummy No one was "executed". Silly

I can’t possibly catch up on this full thread, and I don’t know all the details to make a complete judgement but what alarms me is how many people are saying he was unarmed as if that’s fine. When used as he was using it, a 1.5 ton vehicle really should be considered a weapon IMO.

As a Black woman, I pray for the day that White female partners of Black men claiming to be pro Black....well I pray that they stop low key fetishising Black male criminality and care more about the Black women and children who mostly have to clean up after or suffer for it.
Fact is, your husband has a far greater chance of being murked by the actions of a Black Chris Kaba than the police.
Furthermore, Chris Kaba, the beater of a Black woman was NOT executed.
By any definition.

Revving the engine of a very weighty vehicle, hands on steering wheel, high off cocaine with the law standing right in front of you, telling you to get out of said vehicle after being tailed from one borough to another is as far away from an execution as possible.

Trust and believe; Black people in Black majority countries are wondering how the police let him get so far, so uncooperative, knowing that the vehicle was involved in a firearms incident the previous evening.
Funny how I and all the Black women that I know who obviously have Black male loved ones do not have "death by police" anywear near our mind fronts amongst any everyday thoughts about them.

Shit, even my distant cousin, a now dead member of the "Lettsom gang" ...his mother wasn't worried about the police.

Maybe if she was worried about anything, she'd have fixed him up before he did gun shit that got him murdered in retaliation.

It's beyond me why force teaming one's "pro Blackness" with seeing oneself in a career criminal who happens to be Black and male has become a hill to die on for a certain type of Black or White person...usually the types that will never move in the same circles...what with one side usually being criminal adjacent and another tertiary educated or other Middle class signified.

Great outcome - one less violent criminal on the streets. His family should be ashamed they raised a thug.

I think it was a murder charge because when he aimed the gun and fired the likelihood was that Kaba would die. So manslaughter isn't that the likelihood is that the victim will die. IYSWIM.
And I agree that the police officer should not have been charged. It was Kaba or a police officer who would die and I know who I would choose.

Agree. It's quite perverse that nobody seems to be asking how the gang violence of Kaba and associates gets tackled, and instead the attention is focusing on the police response.

The gang crime is a far bigger problem with a far worse impact.

I have zero sympathy for Kaba. What does trouble me is the decision to name the policeman who killed him. He and his family will now need protection for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of his life. I don’t understand why his right to safety didn’t outweigh the decision to name him, which was apparently made after various media challenged the application to keep his identity anonymous?

This is interesting too - I wonder what the jurors wanted to say.

On Monday, the jury in the case took the unusual step of asking Mr Justice Goss if they could say something to the court when delivering their verdict.

Permission was denied, and an application by Jude Bunting KC on behalf of media organisations including the Daily Mail, Times, Telegraph and the BBC, to see the note was rejected.

www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/media-audi-cps-times-bbc-b1189392.html

You’re making a LOT of presumptions there but go off

Murder doesn’t need to involve premeditation or planning, it just means that up to or in the moment of the killing, the perpetrator intended to kill or cause grievous bodily harm to the victim. Manslaughter is where the perpetrator didn’t intend this.

So for example if I walk out my front door, a random man calls me a fat cow and I go back in, get a knife and stab him to death, that would be murder as although I haven’t preplanned it, i intended to kill/GBH him. If I punch him in the face and he hits his head and dies, that’s manslaughter as I didn’t intend, or reasonably believe my punch would kill him.

I can't believe people are trying to spin the yarn that Chris Kaba was trying to drive away as he may have been fearful after what happened to Sarah Everard.

That is disrespectful to Sarah and Sarah's family. It's a totally different set of circumstances and shouldn't be compared.

Funny how the picture shown of Chris Kaba is one of a happy looking smiling guy when truth be told he was a ruthless gang member with a serious violent crime. Didn't put a picture of him in his gang gear did they and now his history is coming out.

As for his family outside court of course they are sad that he has been shot but that doesn't pardon his violent history and for my part good riddance.

My sympathy lies with poor police officer and his family.

The Mayor of London is a disgrace all round. I can only imagine it’s people like CK who vote for him time after time.

@Blankscreen they would have done better to admit what he was and defend that somehow.

Trying to portray him like Stephen Lawrence is not on.

Where can you show he was even interested in rehabilitation? Who exactly was going to rehabilitate him? If anything, this individual was on his way to more and more crime.