Little Green Footballs

Thursday, October 27, 2005

'No shoot-to-kill policy' says Met chief

Eh? What is the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Steve House on about?

Scotland Yard gave a robust defence of its tactics for dealing with suicide bombers, insisting its policy was not "shoot-to-kill" but "shoot-to-incapacitate".

[...]

"It may seem like semantics, but it is not. If you speak to anybody in central operations, they do not shoot-to-kill - they shoot to incapacitate people. The first action they take after firing a shot is to try to save the life of the person they have shot. There is no intention to kill people.
If shooting someone in the head seven times isn't shooting to kill I don't know what is. As for shooting once and then trying to save their lives, this is obviously a bald faced lie in the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes incident. I hope he explained the policy in a far better way to the de Menezes family.

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