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People on Internet forums just LOVE taking a pop at the rozzers, don't they?!

Trouble is Alice, the police are in a no-win situation.

If they go in, there are inevitably going to be accusations of heavy-handedness from some quarters WHATEVER they do.

Yet if they have reason to think that they may be dealing with potentially armed & dangerous terrorists (even if this later turns out not to be the case - hindsight being a wonderful thing) they can't afford to fuck about.

But if on the other hand they get a tip-off andthen vascillate about what to do out of fear of upsetting the locals, then a bomb goes off somewhere and innocent people end up being killed while dibble quibble, everyone's going to be quite rightly asking "why the fuck didn't you act on your intelligence"?!

Despite what some people say on these forums, I don't think that the police just went in there for the hell of it. They obviously had good reason to think that something was going on in that house. In fact there may well have been something going on there at one time, and their intel was just outdated. We just don't know, nor can we know as a lot of the details haven't yet been made public.

Sure mistakes get made and it's shitty when that happens. But that's the name of the game. It's an inexact science and it's never going to be 100 per cent.

I think the Old Bill do a very difficult and often dangerous job. I for one don't envy the shit that they have to deal with in the course of their normal working day.

Once ex-coppers (or even serving coppers) start coming onto these forums to criticise police procedure, policy and actions, I might start to take such criticism seriously. But until that happens I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt because let's face it - there's probably no-one here who's been in a situation even remotely resembling the ones that anti-terrorist coppers face every day, so any criticism is most likely going to be based on a personal, inherent dislike and mistrust of the police, some sort of political agenda or biased media reporting. But certainly not on any knowledge of the full facts.

I agree the Police are in a no win situation.

What I would like to have seen is the Police Filming the raid. You often see it filmed when they do a drug bust etc. So why not on something important like a suspected terrorist raid.
At least we would have seen what really happened regarding the shooting.....

PC

How about a bit of gratitude to the people who are risking there lives to protect us.

I very much agree with what you say. I think the Police Complaints Authority is a large part problem. They do not have the confidence of anyone. Certainly not the police or the complainant. Even people who have been critics of the police in the past, have little time for the PCA. The most notable example is Ken Livingstone who has often backed the police against PCA criticism. The problem is that like so much else in this country, the PCA is controlled by a majority of namby pamby middle class hand wringers.

The majority that get to court are convicted. The problem is the ones where no charges are brought and it is impossible to know the strength of evidence against the arrested individuals. Because someone is not charged it does not necessarily mean that they are innocent.

We don't know who made the tip-off do we? Without knowing that, how can we tell if the cops made the right call? Tony Blair asked us to trust him over Iraq, and he turned out to be a lying scumbag, who got Alastair fucking Campbell to write one of the so-called dodgy dossiers based on a student's PhD Thesis. We have no obligation to trust anyone in authority over anything at all, they have been caught out lying far too often ever to be given blind trust. I trust about three people in this nasty old world, and they are not Tony Blair, "Sir" Ian Blair and Cressida Dick.

I can accept that it made sense to question these two brothers if credible information had been given (and that's a big if), but since they both had jobs (one was a postman, one worked at Tesco's) why not just lift them when they were on their way to work? Sending in a mob of armed cops to raid a house in the middle of the night is asking for trouble, and nearly cost an innocent man his life, but it seems that so long as the cops are acting in good faith that's just too bad. Odd how citizens who defend themselves against real as opposed to imaginary criminal scumbags never get cut the same slack by the criminal justice system is it?