The IPCC’s Stock­well 2 report is undoubtedly the best account of the man­age­ment con­fu­sion sur­round­ing the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Well, it’s the only one.

There is a key prob­lem. The cent­ral claim in all police com­mu­nic­a­tions was that de Menezes was chal­lenged, refused to com­ply and was then shot. This, Stock­well 2 tells us, is a mat­ter for the unpub­lished Stock­well 1 report. In fact we still don’t know who shot de Menezes — police officers, sol­diers, whoever.

The risk to the gen­eral pub­lic remains infin­ites­imal, but the les­son is simple — don’t walk out of a build­ing under haphaz­ard sur­veil­lance and use pub­lic trans­port, or you are liable to be executed.

The con­clu­sions paint a grim pic­ture of inform­a­tion man­age­ment within the Met and the degree of trust that can be attrib­uted to police state­ments in a crisis. In future, per­haps all such inform­a­tion should come with a “health warn­ing.“
Here’s a key excerpt, my ital­ics:

Fol­low­ing the shoot­ing of Mr de Menezes, inac­cur­ate inform­a­tion was released by the MPS [Met­ro­pol­itan Police Ser­vice] on the 22 and 23 July dur­ing a press con­fer­ence given by the Com­mis­sioner and in a num­ber of media releases.

There is no evid­ence that the Com­mis­sioner or any other mem­ber of the MPS know­ingly released the incor­rect inform­a­tion to the media and pub­lic that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged and that his cloth­ing had added to their sus­pi­cions. Whilst they did release this inform­a­tion it was believed by them to have been cor­rect at the time. [On what basis? See below…]

Those within the MPS respons­ible for pre­par­ing the media releases and state­ments, sanc­tion­ing them and actu­ally releas­ing the mater­ial should have ensured that the proven­ance and vera­city of the inform­a­tion they con­tained had been estab­lished. [What else are they there for?] Whilst they could be con­sidered to have been neg­li­gent in not doing so [Yes…] account must be taken of the extraordin­ary pres­sures under which the MPS were oper­at­ing at the time [Don’t trust inform­a­tion in a crisis].

Inform­a­tion that Mr de Menezes was wear­ing unseason­able cloth­ing ori­gin­ated from officers engaged on the anti ter­ror­ist oper­a­tion at Stock­well and mem­bers of the pub­lic. That inform­a­tion is not cor­rect, but it was passed on and became part of the MPS media releases. The inform­a­tion that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged was also released by the MPS. Whether or not that was actu­ally fac­tual is a mat­ter for the Stock­well 1 invest­ig­a­tion. Mr de Menezes was not given an instruc­tion by police officers that he could have chosen whether to obey or refuse.

Ms de Vries in the MPS DPA made a genu­ine error when she included in the 11:41hrs 22 July 2005 press release that Mr de Menezes had been chal­lenged. She wrongly based it on her assump­tion that a chal­lenge would always be made. Her text was not changed when it was checked prior to release.

Pub­lic wit­nesses who gave early tele­vised state­ments con­trib­uted to the release of incor­rect inform­a­tion when they stated that Mr de Menezes had been wear­ing sus­pi­cious cloth­ing and had jumped a ticket barrier.

Their actions were based upon what they had per­ceived occurred in a very stress­ful situ­ation and they were genu­inely mis­taken. The inform­a­tion they provided to the media was out­side the con­trol of the MPS.

MPS staff and wit­nesses from other agen­cies were mon­it­or­ing 24 hour tele­vi­sion news cov­er­age fol­low­ing the shoot­ing. It is believed that some of them may have been influ­enced by the inac­cur­ate accounts that were being reported.

More cor­por­ate cock-ups and half-baked assump­tions than con­spir­acies, then. But the police are no nearer telling us who killed Mr de Menezes. It’s ironic really, an anonym­ous death squad seems so…South American.

Con­trast the Met’s enthu­si­astic invest­ig­a­tion of ITV News journ­al­ist Neil Gar­rett (dis­clos­ure: he once worked for me) who was passed leaked IPCC doc­u­ments from Stock­well 1:

I opened the front door to dis­cover that my flat had been raided and searched. Laptops, mobile phones, cam­eras, CD-Roms, even press cut­tings from around the time of the De Menezes reports had been taken.

The flat was a com­plete mess, and only the most curs­ory effort had been made to put things back. Oddly, a chair from the bed­room had been left in the bath­room. A car­bon copy of a war­rant was cas­u­ally left on the fridge…

Inter­views made it clear the police had delved into our bank accounts and credit records. Text mes­sages retrieved from our phones were read out to us. Silly every­day emails about money, or the lack of it, were twis­ted and inter­preted as a fin­an­cial motive for the alleged crime.

The police were thor­ough, I’ll give them that — but they just could not seem to coun­ten­ance the idea that the only motiv­a­tion was a desire on the part of our IPCC source to get the truth out. The only solace was that we hadn’t been arres­ted under the Ter­ror­ism Act. One day in a police cell is bad enough, 28 days must be a nightmare.

Indeed.