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Ever since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 we’ve been living with an increased security presence everywhere. This is understandable. Those attacks heralded a new era of global conflict – one of surprise terrorist atrocities in public spaces across the world which are still happening with terrifying regularity.
These are the sort of acts that governments and security services will always struggle to deal with. But for all the measures put in place, do we feel much safer? Or are we just living in greater fear, with those fears likely to result in panic responses and more tragedy for innocent people?
Although the UK police force are not regularly armed, we’ve always had special armed response units here for dealing with extraordinary events such as armed sieges. The concern should be that in a new atmosphere of fear of an unprovoked terrorist attack, innocent people will become entangled in situations where armed officers are working on faulty information, where they don’t believe they have sufficient time to verify facts, or where they simply panic themselves.
The likelihood that someone will become misidentified as a potential terrorist is vastly magnified if they are not white. In June 2006, Mohammed Abdul Kahar was shot and injured in a raid on his home in Forest Gate in London. This raid involved 250 officers and was the result of an entirely false accusation that Mr Kahar was a terrorist who had a chemical weapon at his home. Of course, the police should take such accusations seriously, but the fact that Mr Kahar was not a threat but was still shot suggests that the police on the scene were so nervous about potential danger that they believed to be there that they couldn’t respond appropriately. Mr Kahar was lucky to survive.
Jean Charles de Menezes was not so lucky. A Brazilian man living in London, in the aftermath of the July 2005 bombings in the capital he was misidentified as being an Ethiopian-born terrorist suspect and shot eleven times at point-blank range by armed police as he boarded a tube train. Although he posed no threat, the imagined one in the minds of the officers was enough to end his life.
In this heightened atmosphere of fear, can we always rely on being considered innocent until proven guilty? With the erosion of civil liberties being justified on grounds of national security, are we just expected to accept that some innocent people will pay the heaviest price imaginable? It could be any one of us…
lyrics
Do you have something to hide? Do you?
The so-called “security” measures
That the Government’s introduced in the last few years
Have the effect of making us feel less secure
And of compounding our fears.
Do you really feel safe in the knowledge
That loaded guns are being placed in the hands
Of potentially trigger-happy undercover police
With fallible chains of command?
Don’t give me that shit about having no fear
If you have nothing to hide.
Had Jean Charles de Menezes done anything wrong
Right up to the time that he died?
When civil liberties campaigners have become the object of scorn, and “liberal” and “do-gooder” become terms of abuse, then a new fascist state can be born.
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