So the bullet which was recovered from a police radio, supposedly fired during Mark Duggan’s arrest, is now discovered to be a bullet from a police issue gun.
This is how the police and media operate in crisis situations when the police have really fucked up, and particularly when they kill someone. Immediately after the event there is a big, detailed lie. That lie says the police are completely innocent and acted in good faith and the victim was behaving in a way which meant the police had little choice but to use lethal force. The lie doesn’t necessarily come from the official police channels, but unofficial ones, a friendly officer briefs a friendly journalist. Sometimes (as in the case of Jean-Charles de Menezes) the story comes from a supposed witness who imagines a media-friendly version of events with a clear narrative and therefore gets airplay on every media outlet repeatedly for several days.
Everyone hears this story.
Then it becomes apparent, thanks to the persistence of decent journalists and campaigners, that this version of events is completely, or substantially, untrue. But the correction doesn’t appear all at once as a coherent version of events; instead details are ‘clarified’ and corrected one by one until it becomes apparent that what most people understand to have taken place never took place at all. But by this time a lot of people are no longer following the story.
So the public understanding of what has taken place becomes a mass of confusions and misunderstandings; some people know this detail; others think that’s wrong and have heard something else; a proper informed understanding of what’s happened is confined only to people actively following up every connection to the story. The problem is exacerbated by the laziness and irresponsibility of media commentators who don’t make the effort to be fully informed before they weigh in on an issue.
It’s worth noting that the version of events on the Metropolitan Police press page has been simplified over the last couple of days, removing any reference to shots fired on the police. This may be due to the ongoing IPCC investigation. But the IPCC investigates every police shooting, so you would expect the Met to exercise caution in releasing details on the Mark Duggan case.
PS. My sister on facebook on the police:
…I’d like to suggest that it’s difficult to sit in a police car, fire a bullet from your own gun into your own or your colleague’s chest and then make the honest mistake of thinking that bullet came from the gun of a man sitting in a different car and that you must therefore shoot and kill him dead. That is not an honest mistake. That is not only a cover-up but a deliberate lie, and probably a murder.
The IPCC have now made a statement to the effect that they may have misled journalists (possibly due to having been misled by the police themselves?):
The IPCC’s first statement, issued at 22:49 on 4th August, makes no reference to shots fired at police and our subsequent statements have set out the sequence of events based on the emerging evidence. However, having reviewed the information the IPCC received and gave out during the very early hours of the unfolding incident, before any documentation had been received, it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged as this was consistent with early information we received that an officer had been shot and taken to hospital.
From the Guardian