An inquiry into the fatal shooting by police of Azelle Rodney has concluded that there was “no lawful justification” for killing him.
I blogged about this case in March. The fact that this finding has taken eight years since his death is in large part down to delays caused by police trying to obstruct the need for an inquest by claiming such a hearing would compromise intelligence-gathering information that was used as officers tracked Rodney and two colleagues.
This move always seemed like delaying tactic designed to avoid questions in a public forum as to why Rodney was shot four times in the head during a “hard-stop” by armed officers in broad daylight on Edgware Road in 2005 while not threatening the cops.
The Rodney inquiry managed to navigate around such objections and found that the shooting was not proportionate. Just as concerning, the inquiry chairman Sir Christopher Holland ruled that the firearms officer E17’s evidence was not credible and ”accounts of what he saw are not to be accepted.”
Coming so soon after the controversy over police attempts to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence – which has led to calls for a public inquiry – this inquiry could not have come at a worse time for the police and will lead to more demands for a wide-ranging probe that investigates the force.
What Holland didn’t investigate was whether the decision to kill Rodney was in any way influenced by race-based fear of three black men in a car, who were known to be en-route to rob a gang of drug dealers. This was an underlining question many in the community asked themselves back in 2004 when police shot dead a dread-locked Derek Bennett after he was spotted carrying a gun-shaped cigarette lighter.
Bennett was shot several times in the back as he was running away, an inquest into his death heard. Rodney was shot in the face while getting out of a car unarmed and apparently surrendering. And Mark Duggan, whose death sparked the 2011 London riots, was also killed while not having a gun at the time police shot him.
Of course each case is different in its’ own way but one question that remains unanswered in all three deaths was whether the fact that police confronted black men made them in some way more anxious or fearful and therefore more likely to squeeze the trigger.
We may never know but I suspect it may be a factor in at least some of the cases. It is an issue that needs to be explored and the only way to do that is to have a separate and more general inquiry into Scotland Yard’s SO19 firearms unit which fully explores ’race’ as a contributing factor.
Such an inquiry should not just be limited to the firearms officers themselves but also investigate the command structure above them.
Exploring these issues is an important way to increase confidence in the force because then race will no longer be the unspoken question in police shootings.
By Lester Holloway
