John Gardner, Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and occasional Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, comments on the police shooting of an innocent electrician


Here are some other important things he says to remember in thinking about the police :

(1) There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions. (Rice v Connolly 1966)

(2) There are special police powers to arrest and search. But there is no special police licence to injure or kill. If they injure or kill, the police need to rely on the same law as the rest of us.

(3) The law allows those who use force in prevention of crime to use only necessary and proportionate force. It is said that officers are under great pressure. Being under extra pressure gives us no extra latitude for error in judging how much force is proportionate or necessary. (R v Clegg 1995)

(4) Arguably, the police should be held to higher standards of calm under pressure than the rest of us. Certainly not lower!

(5) The necessity and proportionality of the police use of force is to be judged on the facts as they believed them to be. The police may be prejudiced like the rest of us, and may treat the fact that someone is dark-skinned as one reason to believe that he is a suicide bomber. But in court this reason should not count: (R v Williams 1978)

(6) It is no defence in law that the killing was authorised by a superior officer. A superior officer who authorises an unlawful killing is an accomplice. (R v Clegg 1995)

(7) The fact that those involved were police officers is irrelevant to the question of whether to prosecute them. When suspected of crimes, officials are subject to the same policies and procedures as the rest of us.

(8) Some people say: Blame the terrorists, not the police. But blame is not a zero-sum game. The fact that one is responding to faulty actions doesn't mean one is incapable of being at fault oneself. This is the moral position as well as the position in criminal law.