Week 8: Extra-judicial killings

Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper
Awake, arise, it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.

It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day...

Not so much a blog post this week, more a series of questions for you to think about. They follow on from the seminar, which looked at the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in July 2005.

What if they'd got the right man?

The operation which led to the shooting of de Menezes was a horrific example of poor communication and lack of co-ordination. The initial failure to identify de Menezes was compounded by failures of leadership and organisation, culminating in the public execution of an innocent man. Public opinion was outraged, and counter-terrorist policing has never been quite so aggressive since. But what if the man the police followed to Stockwell Underground had been Hussain Osman - perhaps Hussain Osman on the run, unarmed, without any explosive, posing no danger to anyone? Would the police have faced any kind of prosecution, or even criticism?

Shouldn't somebody have said he wasn't the right man?

On the face of it, this seems to be a very straightforward failing: nobody (including Cressida Dick) was willing to step up and say, "I don't think this is our man, everybody stand down". The trouble is that nobody knew that de Menezes wasn't the right man. Members of the surveillance team expressed doubts, but nobody was prepared to say that they were absolutely certain. Back in the operations room, Cressida Dick heard the reports that people were doubtful, but she wasn't prepared to convert that doubt into certainty either. The underlying problem was that the stakes were too high: if there was any realistic possibility that de Menezes was one of the bombers from the day before, and that he was planning another explosion, the police couldn't take the risk of letting him go. But they could only establish that he wasn't Hussain by stopping and questioning him - and they weren't about to do this, because this was a Kratos operation.

Or was it?

Apparently a Kratos codeword was never given, so strictly speaking this wasn't a Kratos operation. However, what happened when the firearms unit got to the tube station suggests very strongly that they, at least, were thinking in terms of a Kratos operation: in other words, intelligence tells you who the suspect is, and you neutralise the suspect without trying to make an arrest (since if you try and arrest a suicide bomber he's likely to blow himself up, taking you with him).

Whether Kratos was officially invoked or not, the de Menezes shooting demonstrates the awful contradiction at the heart of Kratos and similar policies. On one hand, suicide bombers can't realistically be arrested, so identifying somebody as a suicide bomber is essentially a death sentence (something which suicide bombers, by definition, can't really complain about). On the other, suicide bombers can do a great deal of harm, so even the smallest suspicion that somebody is a suicide bomber should make the police take action. But what can that action be? Arresting the suspect or even talking to him or her is a risk that the police can't afford to take, if they're dealing with an actual suicide bomber - but they can't always know for certain whether they are. In effect, Kratos means that the police are committed to using lethal force with or without adequate information. Sooner or later it was bound to go horribly wrong. Perhaps we were lucky that it was 'sooner'.

There's one more unanswered question:

What was actually going on when de Menezes was shot?

We don't know what was going through the minds of the main participants, and it's quite hard to reconstruct. If "Ivor" thought that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he sit so close to him - and why, in particular, did he drag him back onto the seat and hold him down? Wouldn't that be insanely dangerous? But if he didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he point him out to the armed officers (instead of, perhaps, shaking his head) - and why did he then, essentially, hold de Menezes down to be executed? The questions for the armed officers are similar: if they didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did they shoot him repeatedly in the head? And if they did think he was a suicide bomber, why on earth did they get so close? A related question has to do with policy and training. Presumably what they did on the tube train wasn't something the firearms officers thought up themselves on the spur of the moment; presumably they were following procedure. Does police procedure for dealing with suicide bombers involve executing the suspect at point-blank range?

Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper
Awake, arise, it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.

It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day.

Jean-Charles de Menezes, 1/7/1978 - 22/7/2005

Week 7: Anti-Muslim hate crime

Sam Tyler: I think we need to explore whether this attempted murder was a hate crime.
Gene Hunt: What, as opposed to one of those I really, really like you sort of murders?

The term 'hate crime' was coined in 1985; anyone talking about 'hate crime' in the Life on Mars era would have met with something like Gene Hunt's reaction. Of course, we know better these days.

But perhaps there's more to it than changing trends. Perhaps the fictional Gene Hunt has a point. We all know that there is such a thing as racist crime, for example, but does it really make sense to apply the label of hate crime to any crime which expresses hatred of a particular group? Many drivers have an entrenched hatred of anyone inconveniencing them by driving slowly; does this mean that road rage incidents should be classified as hate crime? When the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984, was this an example of anti-British hate crime - or anti-Tory hate crime? To say that 'hate crime' can apply to any act of violence against members of a particular group isn't very far from saying it can apply to any act of violence - and that would effectively make it meaningless.

Barbara Perry suggested a way out of this dead end when she described hate crime as a way of 'doing difference'. According to this argument, we all have identities made up of our membership of social groups, which in turn are defined in terms of their differences from other groups: male/female, straight/gay/bi, White/Asian/Black, student/employed/unemployed, working class/middle class and so on. We 'do difference' every time we act 'as a' member of a particular group in distinction from other groups - 'as a man', 'as a student', 'as a working-class northerner' and so on. Power in society is differentially distributed - some groups have much more of it than others - and this also affects the ways that we 'do difference'. Hate crime in particular is a way of 'doing difference' from the perspective of a more powerful group: a violent attack on a gay man, a British Asian or somebody who is identifiably Muslim is a way of communicating hatred and contempt for that group, and a way of asserting the social superiority of the attacker's group.

The other major theme of today's lecture was the interaction between politics and hate crime, particularly Islamopobic hate crime. We saw that anti-Muslim attacks become more frequent in the aftermath of events which make the Muslim community seem threatening - and that includes the threat of social and cultural self-assertion. Events like the protests against The Satanic Verses or the 2001 riots are also ways of 'doing difference': the message they carried was that British Asians were refusing to be ghettoised and demanding the right to speak 'as an Asian' (and 'as a Muslim'), on equal terms with the White and non-Muslim majority. The reaction of the government, the mainstream media and the courts left something to be desired; despite an official commitment to opposing racism and Islamophobia, actual self-assertion by British Asian communities still seems to be widely feared and distrusted. The danger is that the interests of the majority community are implicitly defined in opposition to that of ethnic minorities. The underlying assumption is that security for the majority can be obtained at the cost of the liberties of the minority; we've seen how fallacious - and dangerous - an argument this is.

Week 5: Islamophobia

Does Islamophobia matter? What is Islamophobia? Does it even exist?

I'll answer the last question first. Many people argue that there is no such thing as Islamophobia. They generally use one of two arguments. The first argument says that there is no such thing as prejudice against religion generally: racism and sexism target aspects of a person that they can't change, not religious or political choices. According to this argument, what appears to be prejudice against Islam is actually racism in disguise: people who say they hate Muslims are actually just racists, who use 'Muslim' as an alternative label for Asian people. Sikhs as well as Muslims were attacked after 9/11: what this shows isn't that the racist attackers got the wrong targets, but that the attackers were using religion as a pretext for targeting Asian people.

The second argument against 'Islamophobia' starts from an explicitly secular (non-religious) standpoint. According to this argument, there is such a thing as prejudice against religion, and it's a good thing: religions are irrational sets of beliefs, and rational people should be prejudiced against people who choose irrationality. This argument implies that 'Islamophobia' is a rational and non-violent set of ideas - an ideology rather than a prejudice; the kind of thing that Richard Dawkins might come out with.

These two arguments face one major challenge, which is whether they can account for what actually happens. According to the first argument, racist attacks don't take the form of attacks on Islam; according to the second one, there are such things as attacks on Islam, but they take the form of newspaper columns denying that there is a God. Are these arguments sustainable? I don't believe they are. Muslims and Islam have been subjected to a variety of attacks over the last decade, going far beyond legitimate criticism of religious beliefs. White Muslims as well as Asians have been subjected to violent attacks; the outward signs of religious observance attract as much hatred as signs of ethnic origin. Subtler attacks have been mounted by the government and the media: Muslims in Britain have been stereotyped as potential terrorists, as holders of antiquated and reactionary beliefs, and above all as being somehow un-British.

The greatest irony is that the government's own policy for cultural integration is based on the presumption that British Muslims are defined by their religion, and that they are not integrated into society - and that the government effectively needs to tell them to integrate, or else. It would be hard to imagine anything more calculated to promote alienation from the government and its idea of 'Britishness'.