Month: May 2013

The Terror of Hatred

It was in work, a normal mundane Wednesday afternoon shift in South Liverpool the usual jobs, the usual people, when a Sky News notification came through – that’s the thing with live media, you can be anywhere in the world and it will find you – “Police are treating killing of man in Woolwich, SE London, as terrorist attack”.

A quick glance hardly aroused an interest – that’s how things are, terrorism is everywhere, worldwide. We’re fighting a war on terrorism, not exactly big news, just another attack… But wait, in LONDON? That’s here, home IN THE UK!

The details start to filter through – a serving soldier leaving his barracks; run down and hacked at with machetes and meat cleavers while his attackers film each other; this is sickening. More details: The killers ordering passers by and witnesses to film and take photos; possible links to extremism; shots fired, 2 men believed to be the offenders taken to separate hospitals treated with gunshot wounds; got them? YES! Rolling news at its best, coming up with a result for the boys in blue.

But what is more important? We don’t at this stage even know the name of the victim. What we do know is that he was innocent; a man walking along the street. It is believed that he was a soldier and we know that he wore a Help for Heroes t-shirt which may have singled him out as a potential target for those responsible. That’s what hits home: This young man supported those wonderful people who freely give up their lives, putting themselves in grave danger to protect the interests of the people in this country.

Upon hearing/seeing some of the details it is truly difficult to understand the mixture of feelings. Shock, horror, disgust, aberration, disappointment, concern, sympathy, sadness; all of these certainly. How about fear? Is it ok to say that? We’re supposed to show these people that we in this country and throughout the western world that we will not stand for terror, for criminality or extremism; are we allowed to be frightened of what is to come of this?

The short answer is yes. Not only that, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us to fear the consequences of this attack. This attack was borne out of hate. Whatever motive can be dreamed up, the people responsible believed that they had reason to hate a total stranger. Reports have shown that the men who carried out this attack were vocal about “starting a war in London”. The one thing that will enable this is hate. Hate will cause revenge attacks, which will breed more and more hate, backwards and forwards we will go, as each new attack is revenged on the other side of the fence. Links to extremist groups are being discussed. Other reports suggest the men were self-radicalised by social media and other sources. Whether this is true, or whether any other explanation can be found, will only return the same result: Hate.

Already as I write at 1 in the morning, unable to sleep because of the thoughts running through my mind, I can see more reports: Mosques being attacked; extreme right-wing groups confronting Police and security services; talk of retribution, of revenge, on whom? The mosques did not commit this crime. The police certainly didn’t.

Twitter, Facebook and the whole social media are alive with comments about immigration, religion, race, nationality, politics, government and belief. None of these issues caused this attack. This attack happened because two men hated. What, who or why they hated I can not explain, but they hated enough to commit a brutal atrocity that will be remembered forever.
No doubt more information will come out over the coming days and weeks. We will hear all about how the attackers became educated in extreme beliefs, how they trained to commit murder, and how they wanted to draw attention to their agenda.

So what can we do? The scene is set for these men to win; war in London, hate breeding hate. Can we stop the momentum these men have started?

Time for one more thing: Hope. Britain is great. The nation will not stand for its people being needlessly killed because of somebody’s hatred. This great nation will and must rise up against those people who hate. The police have a saying: “We do not run away from danger, we run towards it”. This must be true of everybody who loves this great country. We cannot allow knee jerk reactions, talk of religion, immigration, race… Great Britain exists because of diversity. Our strength relies on tolerance, harmony and understanding, which has been built over thousands of years.

So what can we hope for? Well, one newspaper reported that following the murder of the young man, a middle aged lady, a mother and Cub Scout leader, confronted the attackers, telling them to stop and drop their weapons, warning them that they would not gain anything. This lady had just witnessed these men brutally murder an innocent man, but feared not for herself. This is an amazing act of bravery and compassion, and gives hope that ordinary people are willing to stand up and fight against those who hate.

Police, security and emergency services give hope. There is a strong affinity between the armed forces and the emergency services. Both often put their lives in danger to protect others. Both often have to act in a professional manner when every fibre of their being is urging them to act otherwise. Today armed police officers had to use their ultimate power – use of lethal force. This was to protect the public in a busy street. To protect themselves against armed killers.

Their actions were carried out in an exemplary manner. The men were immediately given emergency treatment and rushed to hospital. There is every chance these men will survive to face trial for their crime. In contrast, the police officers, paramedics and other emergency personnel who were charged with saving their lives will face a rollercoaster of emotions, questions, actions and interviews. And they will face up and carry on. Tomorrow there may be another incident, another ordeal, another atrocity. They will respond, and they will overcome.

As for me, I am off duty tomorrow. My thoughts and prayers will still be with the family, friends and colleagues of the young man who lost his life, and with those brave professionals who face the challenges of dealing with the aftermath of this incident. Be it the ordeal of being restricted from duty after using lethal force; the ordeal of having to tend to the remains of somebody who was so brutally attacked; or having to deal with the so-called “retribution” attacks, we may rest assured that our emergency services have it covered, and will be running towards any danger that we face.

As for me, I’ve just ironed my Help for Heroes t-shirt…

THE WOOLWICH MURDER, AND THE ABYSMAL COWARDICE OF KEITH VAZ MP.

May 25, 2013 · by AdemanDeloya · in Uncategorized

With the tedious predictability that has become the hallmark of what the UK newspaper industry is pleased to call ‘journalism’, the first article criticising the police response to the shocking events in Woolwich has appeared. Like the first crocus heralding the dawn of spring, any hope of discussing, and thereby making some progress in dealing with, whatever might have caused two young men to hack off a soldier’s head with machetes, will slowly be lost amongst the same, tired, lazy, cliché-ridden wittering contest about what the police did and did not do.

For a change, the Guardian has been beaten to the punch by its unlikely ally in the beat-up-the-cops-at-all-costs stakes, the Daily Telegraph, which echoes Labour MP Keith Vaz in demanding to know why the unarmed police officers who attended the scene within nine minutes chose not to engage the machete-wielding terrorist murderers, and instead ‘allowed’ several women to walk up to them and try and talk to them. Mr. Vaz, we are informed, will be asking for a “full explanation why this was the case.”

Well, Mr. Vaz, permit me to explain. I know it may come as something as a shock to someone who ‘works’ in the House of Commons, but the police officers who turned up first, armed only with a collapsible metal stick and a tin of hot sauce, were not actually little mobile law enforcement drones. They were human beings. They were men and women who, despite wearing the uniform that makes them such an easy target for your cowardly rear-echelon sniping, are actually capable of the full range of human emotions. I imagine that they didn’t wander up to the – dare I use the phrase again? Yes, I think I do – machete-wielding terrorist murderers because they were afraid. Unfortunately the world most of us have to live in – those of us who don’t flit between constituency offices and lavishly-appointed palaces in Westminster while surrounded by a ring of armed guards – is a dangerous and violent place, and the wearing of a police uniform does nothing to make it any safer. We in the police are constantly reminded of the need to be circumspect when dealing with any suspected terrorist incident, and even with non-terror-related murders, because apparently it is becoming fashionable to lure police to a scene with the express intention of murdering them. We are just people, doing an impossible job the best we can, and we like everyone else would rather like to get home to our families at the end of the day in our cars, rather than boxes. It would be wonderful if we didn’t have to count that as a consideration, but in that make-believe world in which people never deliberately lure the police to their deaths, PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes would still be walking the beat. The police officers at the scene were not equipped to deal with the suspects in front of them, so they had to wait for those who were.

So much for why we didn’t march onto the points of the machetes. The reason we ‘allowed’ people to walk up to the suspects is as follows: there was nothing we could do about it. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to close off a busy London street with a school on it in the middle of the afternoon, but it’s very difficult and it takes quite a lot of police officers. You can create a perimeter and stop people from entering if you have enough officers, which of course, this being the UK, we don’t; but to clear out the people that are already in there takes an awful lot of time and, ultimately, if passers by don’t want to leave, and you can’t go in after them (for reasons I think I mentioned somewhere above) then in they stay. As we never tire of being reminded, we don’t live in a police state. If people want to walk up to blood stained extremists with machetes in their hands, there is only so much we can do to stop them, especially from a distance.

So instead of charging merrily to our deaths, we took the only option available to us. We set up at a safe distance, did what we could to keep innocent people out of harm’s way, and waited for armed backup to arrive, which it did within five minutes, during which time, happily, no other lives were lost. It could easily have been otherwise. So if you genuinely want to avoid seeing the dispiriting picture of police officers standing back from a life-threatening incident, there is one option available to you. Arm all police. It really is that simple. There are precisely zero other ways of stopping what we saw in Woolwich. You will never, no matter how much you whinge about law changes and ‘full explanations’, be able to order police officers to commit mass seppuku. You give us the equipment we sometimes need to do our jobs effectively, or you stand back and watch us not do our jobs effectively. Those are your choices.

Unfortunately, we all know which choice Parliament will take. Arming all police requires politicians to face up to the reality that there are people on our streets filled with murderous hatred towards us, our people, our women and children, our institutions, the fabric of our society, and that protecting yourself from such reasonless and violent hatred sometimes requires nothing more or less than being able to kill those people before they kill you. It isn’t pretty, it isn’t pleasant, and it isn’t easy. And because it isn’t easy, no politician will do it. Instead they stand back and snipe at men and women far braver, more hard-working and more principled than they are, they make fine speeches and fancy themselves statesmenlike. They vacillate, they prevaricate, they shift whenever the wind does. Arming all police requires them to stand up to the loud, intolerant, impossibly right-on centre-left Twitterati who simply cannot be convinced that life isn’t an Islington dinner party, and are willing to sacrifice seemingly limitless numbers of soldiers, police officers and ordinary members of the public to preserve their agreeable little fantasy. We do not have politicians of the calibre required to do this.

So here ends my explanation of why the police stood back: we used to have statesmen, who looked unblinkingly at reality, and saw it look unblinkingly back. Now we have Keith Vaz.

Ademan Deloya is on Twitter. Follow him on @AdemanDeloya

Jason Fyles, 19, from Bowsden Court, Gosforth, was last seen at an address on Helmsley Road, Sandyford, Newcastle, at 2.45am on Thursday May 16.

He was last seen wearing a blue t-shirt, grey jumper, beige chino trousers and brown leather shoes.

A drunk, unhandcuffed man pulled gun from his pants while sitting in a police squad car. Those are two lucky police officers.

12/19/2012

An intoxicated man pulled a loaded handgun on two Metro Transit police officers while in the back of their squad car, after a pat-down by the officers failed to find the weapon.

The man, identified by authorities as 21 year-old Wesley Rogers, had been seen “harassing” a woman at 7th St S and Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon on Dec. 4, officials said. Metro Transit Ofcs. Jason Malland and Adam Marvin,
assigned on a detail in the area, responded and found Rogers “obviously
intoxicated.”

A pat-down search of Rogers by the officers found “an open bottle of liquor.” Rather than arrest Rogers or take him to a detox facility, the officers decided to take Rogers to his North Minneapolis home as a “courtesy,” according to Metro Transit.

Officers “heard a metal clunk” from the rear while driving, pulled over,
and found Rogers had pointed “a loaded .38 revolver” at them “while in a
squad.”

The incident was captured on a rear-facing squad surveillance camera.

The gun was not fired and Rogers was “subdued” and taken to the Hennepin County Jail.

Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=126_1367960229#fTkY8Q6CmeBdrqy7.99