It’s all about perception and preconception. When we learn of someone/something, we use what evidence we can see or what we’ve heard to make immediate judgments and decisions. You see a bloke on the street coming towards you holding a big knife, you cross the road. But if he’s wearing a butchers outfit and is holding a leg of lamb in the other, you might reconsider. If you’d heard that ‘there’s a lovely butcher who gives meat to homeless people’, you’d think ‘awwww, sweet’, then you might think ‘where they gonna cook it??’

So when we heard that Chris Kaba had been ‘murdered’ by an armed police officer, and that he was ‘about to become a father’, and the photo of his handsome, smiling face appeared on the tv, we thought ‘those total bastard, racist, violent police thugs, showing once again that to them black lives don’t matter; shoot first and ask questions later’. Well, that’s what I thought.

Then we saw the footage of the ‘incident’. When the police ‘hard-stopped’ Kaba’s car, a massive Audi Q8, with a road block. Which was when my preconceptions got a bit of a re-boot. Because rather than stop for, what, 15, 20 police in about 6 cars, most holding guns, Kaba instead tried to ram his way out. Smashing two and a half tons of Audi into whatever stood in his way. I thought: hmmmmm. That’s not particularly ‘normal’ behaviour.

It also changed the way the jury saw things, which is why they delivered their ‘not guilty’ decision in only 3 hours. Because Kaba, at the time, was using his car as a weapon. Fair ruling.

Then we learned that both Kaba and the car were ‘wanted’ by the police. The car had been used as a getaway vehicle the previous day after a shooting, and Kaba had shot a man in a packed nightclub, literally ‘on the dancefloor’, 2 weeks previously, all captured on cctv. So this was not some random ‘stop the nearest black man we can find and give him hell’ operation. It was intelligence led and was intended for the apprehension of a known ‘shooter’ and an associated vehicle.

But the jury in the trial didn’t know that. It wouldn’t have been ‘fair’. Might have been prejudicial. Yeah, a bit.

Yet the Crown Prosecution Service did know that. All of it. And more. And so chose to bring a police officer to the court on a charge of ‘murder’. Not ‘manslaughter’, not ‘causing death in the line of duty’ (if there is such a thing), but ‘murder’. Whilst in the process of protecting the other policemen and the general public from a man known to carry and use a gun, who was engaged as a threat to life.

Why is the CPS doing this? To appease the BLM movement? Was this our ‘George Floyd’ moment? Don’t think so. Yet they pursued a costly case for 2 years, making the policeman’s life pure hell, on top of any PTSD he may be suffering having killed someone, and all for a trial with no merit whatsoever, even when only presented with a quarter of the evidence. The CPS knew the whole story yet still chose to act hound the policeman. In the process causing hundreds of other firearm officers to simply throw in their gun-badge. On the basis that if you use the gun you’ll be treated with no more consideration than a gang-banger.

Its so stupid its almost as if Kier Starmer is still the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx