http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/20/mark-duggan-shooting-watchdog-panel
Two people have resigned from the Community Reference Committee set up by the IPCC after the killing of Mark Duggan and the riots sparked off by the event. The allegations in the post above are dismal if true.
Perhaps the most damning is the statement that the IPCC Commissioner involved told CRC members 3 police officers gave a statement that a sergeant had been seen to throw the gun Duggan was supposed to be carrying to the spot where it was later found and later told them no such statements existed. It’s more or less impossible to think of any reasonable excuse for the sergeant’s actions or to explain the lack of an arrest of the sergeant. Quite how you can mislead someone on such a matter is also inexplicable.
We now seem to know that a potential murder scene (almost one of a police officer too) was easily compromised by the taxi Duggan was traveling in being moved and the brought back – flouting everything I know about crime scenes and yet apparently ‘authorised’ by IPCC investigators who hadn’t even made it to the scene, and that Duggan was under some kind of surveillance and allowed to pick up a weapon and travel with it. Though we can’t be sure.
About the only thing we do know for certain nearly 4 months on is that Duggan’s death and the piss poor handling of the investigation caused riots across our cities.
This is not, as the IPCC would have us believe, a complex enquiry. The players and the scene have been known since the outset. A detective sergeant and a couple of jacks plus a SOCO should have been enough. Early individual statements from officers at the scene (not colluding) should have been a must (the IPCC is so toothless it can’t even do this). If a cop had been shot by Duggan most of the non-forensics would have been done within hours, statements within 24 and a charge read out the morning after. The Commissioner seems so hapless she didn’t know even essential features of the investigation weeks into it and made up some that were untrue.
You wouldn’t find me anywhere near community referencing, but you could get me out of the office or bed to talk to a crowd of people in the circumstances of August 4th. I wouldn’t do the job at all under the obvious remit for pussies in effect.
What I’d suggest is the scraping of elected police chiefs and letting us elect some regional oversight people to direct complaints and improvement with a small number of hardened investigators who would nick any “sergeant seen throwing a gun into a crime scene periphery”. Of course, some will think we are getting no more than the usual community referencing porkies, but those of us who do think like this from time to time don’t go a-rioting. I would say though, that police and IPCC people had enough time to spin false tales to the press and this means there was time to put together a truthful story to tell the putative rioters and the wider public. If the nonsense on an exchange of fire and the rest came from officers involved in the incident, there is more gloom ahead.
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