It’s a sad day when an armed British police officer, finds himself charged with murder when he is doing his duty protecting the public.
An officer has been charged with the murder of black man Chris Kaba, 24, in south London, a year ago. Dad-to-be Mr Kaba died from a single gunshot to the head after the car he was driving was blocked in by a police vehicle and an officer opened fire.
It later emerged that the Audi which Mr Kaba was driving had been linked to a gun incident the previous day.
The decision to prosecute has prompted dozens of Met police officers to hand in their weapons, saying they do not want to be put in a position of facing a court trial if they have to make a split-second decision to open fire if they believe they or a member of the public is at risk of harm.
This Wednesday a judge is to determine whether the officer concerned should or should not be named, as it the normal case when a defendant appears in court. Currently he is being referred to only as NX 121.
If the officer is named, a large number of other officers on armed police duties are threatening to hand in their weapons too, and this will result in soldiers being deployed in their place.
This sorry situation is alarming because soldiers are trained to kill and arguably could be more likely to respond by shooting someone, they think could be a threat. With fewer armed police on the streets, or available in an emergency, a terrorist or armed criminals could see this situation as an opportunity to commit crime. The sooner the situation is resolved the better.
I also ask the question – had the person who was shot and killed been white, would there have been such a Draconian response? It seems the priority on the part of the authorities is to avoid a mass protest by the black community at all costs.
Of course, until the trial, we do not know the full facts of the case, but it’s clear that officer NX 121 was on heightened alert because of the link between the car in which Mr Kaba was in and a previous armed robbery. What prompted him to shoot we will not know until the trial.
How many of you Leader readers would be willing to become an armed police officer knowing that if you got it wrong and killed someone who you thought was about to shoot and kill you, you would be in the dock charged with murder? And it’s a sad fact that police are putting their own lives at risk every day trying to do their duty under ever greater constraints.
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The Bank of England has just issued the most amazing news – that people in the UK have an incredible 268 billion pounds in banks earning not one single penny in interest.
Every day we hear on the news how people are finding it increasingly difficult to pay their bills – but these are hardly likely to be people who can sit back and, in effect, hand masses amount of money to the banks.
Some of this money might be owned by people who have dementia and have forgotten about their wealth.
And could it be that some are billionaires who so hate the idea of being taxed on their investment income they prefer to let the banks make megga bucks rather than have the money help those less fortunate than them? Yes, I have no doubt there are such people.
It’s a sad indictment that we have so much money just sitting in non interest earning accounts while Britain is desperate for money to heal so many ills – like the NHS, schools, a growing mental health problem, public transport and railways, HS2, etc etc.
It makes me wonder how some of these super rich people sleep at night!
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Over the past few weeks Mrs M and I have had to travel about 50 miles each way on horrible roads and on our journey, we have had to pass five sets of road works, four of which are controlled by traffic lights and generate bad traffic congestion.
On every one of our journeys, we have only seen workmen at one of the road works. It seems we have a new phenomenon in Britain – dig a hole in the road at the most inconvenient spot and then just leave it. What on earth is going on? I can believe councils or utilities have run out of money. I can also believe that there is a shortage of labour. But it is another example of Britain just going to pot!
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Imagine being a teenage girl. You go to school one day and see groups of boys with their iphones, giggling. Then you discover that they are laughing because they are looking at a picture of you, naked.
You haven’t posed naked to anyone. What’s happened is that artificial intelligence has been used to guess what you would look like naked, and then that image has been superimposed on a picture of your face.
That’s just what has happened to girls at a village in Spain. It’s disgusting and must be causing all sorts of concern for these young girls. It’s no wonder that a growing number of children just don’t want to go to school, and as a consequence their education is suffering.
Artificial intelligence may have plenty of uses and beneficial in many ways, but it needs to be policed far more thoroughly, or many people are going to be hurt by it.
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And finally, there is a growing number of people in Russia being killed by stupidity. After Russia invaded Ukraine and the Kremlin realised the war was going badly, they released hundreds of the most hardened criminals from jails and put them on the front lines. If they were not killed, they were pardoned after serving for six months.
The result now is that some are returning to Russia and committing the most appalling crimes. In one village two families were slaughtered for no reason.
What a country to live in. Count your blessings you are where you are!
