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THE video clipsIOPCCPSIOPCCPSCPSIOPCIOPC CPSYour browser does not support the element. from body-worn cameras will have been seen by millions of Britons. Armed police jump out of their cars and swarm around a black Audi, yelling “show me your hands!” The driver briefly ducks, before lurching his car forward, ramming a police car in front. He then reverses, hitting another police car. After 15 seconds, a single shot is fired.The trial of Martyn Blake, the police sergeant who fired the shot and killed Chris Kaba, the driver, in September 2022, has sparked a storm of controversy. On October 21st it took a jury just three hours to find Mr Blake not guilty of murder. Critics argue that the verdict will further erode public confidence in policing. Many police officers are furious that Mr Blake faced the charge in the first place. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has already announced some reforms; more may follow.The trial hinged on whether Mr Blake’s use of force—he shot Mr Kaba once in the forehead through the car windscreen—was necessary, proportionate and reasonable. On the night in question armed police did not know the identity of the driver (it has since been revealed that Mr Kaba was a member of a south London gang with a string of serious convictions). But they did know that the car had been associated with a firearms offence the previous evening.In court, Mr Blake argued that he did not intend to kill Mr Kaba but that Mr Kaba’s use of his car as a battering-ram had posed a lethal threat to himself and his colleagues. The prosecution argued that, hemmed in by a police roadblock, Mr Kaba posed no such threat. In such events, armed officers have to make rapid judgments on the basis of limited information. The jury decided that the bar for murder—proving that Mr Blake did not honestly believe there was such a threat and had used force unreasonably—was not met.Cases of this sort are very rare in Britain. Armed police attend around 18,000 incidents each year; there have been only 65 in the past decade in which they have fired at people. This is the first police shooting in which video footage from , which have become commonplace in the past decade, has been made public. That has focused attention as never before on the split-second judgments that armed officers make.In retrospect, it seems wrong that Mr Blake was named. That does not usually happen but media organisations argued for it on public-interest grounds. There have since been reports that the gang Mr Kaba was part of has placed a bounty on Mr Blake. On October 23rd Ms Cooper said there will be a presumption of anonymity in cases involving police shootings unless there is a conviction.She also promised to speed up the process for deciding whether such cases should be brought to court, which involves both the Independent Office for Police Conduct (), a watchdog, and the Crown Prosecution Service (). Politicians from both main parties argue that it takes far too long, creating painful uncertainty for officers and victims.Senior police officers question why the decided to pass the case onto the and why the then brought a murder charge against Mr Blake (the may yet hold a hearing for gross misconduct after reviewing evidence from the trial). Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, has called for exemption from criminal convictions unless prosecutors can show that officers “deliberately departed” from their training. Ms Cooper is unlikely to agree to that, but she will raise the threshold at which cases are handed from the to the. Fine judgments everywhere.
