Mark Duggan, shot to death by police, triggering the riots, was not armed

[edam]

bloody hell A gun was recovered but it was 14 feet away on the other side of a fence. So the police were not facing an armed man.

hindsight is a wonderful thing...

they knew he'd picked the gun up & that it was in the car

statement from the police here

news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16113452

Ponders - that's ambiguous, he had collected the gun, it wasn't in his hand. It was still in the box.

Blackout, if it's hindsight to say 'we don't have the death penalty in this country, and even if we did, it wouldn't be up to police officers to execute people' then I'm all for it. Police officers may have to fire in self-defence when facing someone who is armed and poses an immediate threat. It looks highly likely that Duggan was neither.

One particularly worrying aspect is that traditionally when someone is killed, it's the police force that tells lies in the immediate aftermath - remember poor Jean Charles de Menezes? This time it was the so-called 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission. The people charged with investigating...

not in his hand, no, but we don't know the exact circumstances - it could have been in a pocket (& as it was found outside the car, it had been removed from its box, surely?)

I'm not defending the police, I know they do some very dodgy stuff & this was a major misjudgement (just like de Menezes ) but they were trailing him for a reason - valid or not, do we know what it was? - & knew he had the gun, so whoever was faced with him had to make a snap decision.

The report says the gun was in a shoebox,inside a sock. Mark Duggan's prints were on the shoebox...but not on the sock or indeed the gun. The box was found some feet away over a fence.

'A gun collected by Duggan earlier in the day was recovered 10 to 14 feet away, on the other side of a low fence from his body.'

'His fingerprints have been found on the shoe box, which was found in the back of the hired vehicle.'

The lack of fingerprints isn't surprising (fabric doesn't yield them, does it?)

The lack of DNA is, a bit

someone took the gun out of the box though

Maybe the Police took the gun out of the box post shooting? Just a thought....

whatever happened, the police will get away with it. Just as they've got away with all those deaths in custody.

Well that's a shock, isn't it?

if there is any DNA on that sock then it should be compared against all the police who were present, not just Duggan & the other guy in the car & any other civilians who might have touched it

"it was recovered" implies it would have been done correctly, with no human contact when it was picked up, but there's no way of knowing now

As it said in the article, there was "overwhelming evidence" that Duggan had (illegally) acquired a firearm, and "this doesn't prove either way that Duggan was armed or unarmed when he was shot".

The headline was much stronger than the actual article.

Unless he was Mr Tickle, it's hard to say that he was armed with a gun that was 14 feet away...

Or Inspector Gadget.....

Agree that fabric doesn't yield fingerprints, but I have to say that even if the gun hadn't been fired, it looks as if it was 'aquired' to be used at some point. It was loaded, hidden in a sock and 100% illegal. Harsh as it may sound, I don't think the world has lost a valuble member of society here.

Mmm and this is what could happen if you're the sort of person who goes and collects and carries guns. Not that I'm suggesting for a minute that he deserved to be shot. But the police must have thought they had some reason to be concerned for their safety. Now that thought has now been shown to be a mistake but the reasons why they were likely to think it remain.

People who don't swan about in taxis with guns have nothing to fear.

I feel sorry for the coppers involved.

It's never a great thing to theorise on the basis on interim information. Even the original Guardian article says that this does not prove anything either way.

But it does suggest that the Operation Trident information which indicated that Duggan had acquired a weapon was well founded, and that he had it in the car with him (otherwise it would have been no-where near - where is was after the shooting is of course not the key question).

The key question is what was Duggan - accurately known to have a weapon with him - actually doing with his hands or any object he was holding at the time the police directed him to stop?

For only that can show if a fear for life was reasonable. It's a big WWYD - you need to take the gun off the street. The man with the gun is trying to get away. You can't see his hands. There are innocent civilians around. he's still trying to get away. There are children on the street. He's moving erratically. You know the gun is there. Do you let him shoot first?

Oh what a surprise

First they said he shot at them
Then they said he was wielding a gun
And now?
How many people do the police have to kill before people start taking notice?
I was in london a while back (a little while before the riots) and there was a march going on "who killed smiley culture?" - a peaceful march with music to draw attention and raise questions about a man who had died in very peculiar circumstances. And people wonder why the police aren't trusted? They lie and lie and are never held to account for it. They lies over jean charles menezes, they lied about duggan. How many lies have they told over deaths that have not been found out?

smiley culture for those who haven't heard this story.

the truth is we don't know how erratically he was moving or how reasonable their fear was

remember de Menezes- the only reason everybody assumed that their fears were well founded was because the police made up a lot of lies about how he actually did behave, lies that were later totally disproved by cctv evidence

"People who don't swan about in taxis with guns have nothing to fear."

The problem is, there have been so many incidents by now that people are beginning to doubt this one.

Just because some police officers in the Met have lied in the past and/or being trigger happy then it doesn't mean that these different officers will though I do accept it makes you wonder.

He was a criminal, he knew what he was getting into when he "collected" the gun. Ffs he shouldn't have had a gun at all! In his hand, in his car, in his bloody shed. It doesn't matter.

Can any of you honesty say that you would rather have this guy wandering around the streets today with a gun?

Yes I agree guns on the street should be dealt with harshly,indeed I believe sentencing for arms possession should be harsher.

But by harsher I don't believe it should be execution style loss of life....more penalisaltion loss of liberty.

Hi Magneto,

The implication of your question is that everyone in possession of an illegal shotgun should be killed out of hand by the police. This is not a world I want to live in.

You believe that the police should be allowed to shoot people they think might be criminals, magneto?

John Charles Menezes didn't have a bomb. Or jump over the barriers. The police lied through their teeth. Why do you want things like this to happen? If you give the police free rein to kill who they think might be dodgy then innocent people are inevitably going to die. And apart from anything else we don't have capital punishment in this country.

This isn't about the Menezes case though is it? Totally seperate case involving seperate people and circumstances. Yes they fucked up there big time and then tried to cover it up. But I don't think they went out that day and said "lets shoot an innocent person and see if we can get away with it"

The main difference with Mark Duggan is that he was a known criminal who was known to be armed in a public place with people around. AFAIK police policy is shoot to kill if they belive there is a danger to them or the public. So if they believed he was posing a threat then yes what happened is fair enough. We don;t know what happened as we weren't there but I doubt he came out the taxi with his hands up.