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The police wouldn’t have known who they’d had pulled over during the stop, but another plausible case for him not stopping could been that he’d apparently shot Brendon Malutshi twice in the legs in the previous days and didn’t want to face attempted murder charges?

The Mark Duggan case would suggest otherwise, no?

I’d take any allegations about what Kaba had or hadn’t done the day before with a large pinch of salt, as it’s not as if the Met have a long track record of making up allegations to justify their actions is it?

In the US you could probably give cases from last week as an example.
If this this table is correct the situation here is nothing like the US.
https://www.inquest.org.uk/fatal-police-shootings

Mark Duggan case

Yikes:

The taxi driver told the inquest that an armed officer had threatened to shoot him if he did not stop looking at where Duggan had fallen to the ground and was being handled "quite harsh[ly] and callous[ly]" by officers.

If you were driving along and all of a sudden, firearms police were blocking the road and telling you to stop/get out of the car, what would your actions be?

Dangerous whataboutery which leans towards "ignore the police, they'll only shoot you if you give them half a chance".

Fair. In this case, 6 members of his drill crew were charged with attempted murder for their part in it, and testified he shot him. 1 found guilty of possession of weapon and 2 GBH. There was apparently cctv too, of him doing so, but he wasn’t named in the trial for the most part, I assume due to the murder trial going on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68441013.amp

If you were commuting to work, on the Tube, and police officers clearly wanted a word with you (and you had no idea what), what would your actions be?

I'm sorry, but it just seems obvious to me that you don't run away (or in the more recent case, smash your Q8 into the marked police car).

The leaked IPCC documents indicated that Menezes was seated on the train carriage when the SO19 armed unit arrived. A shout of "police" may have been made, but the suspect had no opportunity to respond before he was shot. The leaked documents indicated that he was restrained by an undercover officer before being shot.

During the 2008 inquest into Menezes's death, passengers who were travelling in the same carriage also contradicted police accounts, saying that they heard no warnings and that Menezes gave no significant reaction to arrival of the policemen. One passenger said that Menezes appeared calm even as a gun was held to his head, and was clear that the police officers did not shout any warnings before shooting him.

I have never read this version of events before, and I'm very happy to be corrected. Thanks for sharing.

I'm by no means an apologist for the police - one half of my family were miners in the 70s and 80s...

This is how the Met change how incidents are remembered by the public. As @rhb posting shows, Menezes was never approached by the police, nor did he run away from them, all those lies were briefed to the media in the aftermath to justify their actions.

The supposed reason for the search however was that the officers thought they could smell cannabis.

I was left-hooked by a driver in Brixton, filed a report with an officer on the day (irony, I was riding on the way to see a friend who'd also been knocked off that morning), and didn't hear anything back for about a month.

Then suddenly heard from the police station and they were very keen to get me in (apparently the reporting officer had gone on holiday and the report had been misplaced).

One of the first questions I was asked was if I "smelt anything suspicious from the car" 😂

Pretty obvious why they'd suddenly got interested in my case; I declined to answer their leading questions (#CSB)

I have been in a slightly similar situation but we went in through the doors on each side. The two of us were wearing all the bells and whistles but neither of us were pointing guns and we got the guy out of the car with collateral damage of three cars. But we had no info on weapons only that the vehicle had been driven at officers closing the road for a Windsor guard change. It wasn't dark and there was only two of us so our thought processes were different, we could have escalated if necessary but didn't. Sgt Blake and his people were at the sharp end straight away with no time to plan and the suspicion of a firearm, possibly. With the car being driven at them raising suspicions too. Then it's "me or him" and we know the result.

Ultimately, if he was engaged in criminal activities, then the police should’ve gathered evidence and prosecuted him. I have no problem with that, that’s their job.

Instead they killed him in a situation which they should’ve been highly trained handle, but which it seems they weren’t.

I don't in any way wish to undermine the Menezes shooting. But that is atypical.

Likewise I'm not downplaying racism in the MET, I've seen it in action. But it doesn't mean that the wrong decision was taken, nor that in the UK refusing to get out of the car is not normal.

Tbh I was always told to get out of the car in the UK when stopped. Although Idk if I'd be quite as confident with armed police 🤔

Surely that point is not about whether he deserved to be shot at, but it informs the likelihood of there being guns in the car.

I honestly don't know.

I mean, his mate is having a fight with another lad, they both on the ground, the defendant just "helps out" by booting this lad in the head when he's on the floor. Then he clearly lamps the PC in the head when the police turn up. Its as clear as day.

I don't see the relevance of people saying "why didn't he just stop?" or "I would have done X" or at least I think it's easy to say when they don't have the same background or set of circumstances as Chris Kaba. Fuck knows what he was thinking when he tried to get away. He either feared for his life (justifiably when he is four times more likely to be killed than I would be in that situation before you add on the weapons intel for the car or his history - which I feel was released tactically as the officers couldn't have known who he was at the time, unless I've missed that they did somehow in the reporting) or he just didn't want to get caught and thought he could get away. Saying things like that implies more than a small amount of victim blaming and whatever he was guilty of at the time or previously, he was unarmed and we haven't had the death penalty in this country for a while.

I was always brought up to respect the police (the RUC as they were then). And that was easy to say and do, coming from a very typical Protestant family in a very typical Protestant town. I couldn't understand why they got bad press. Until I actually left NI and started learning more about what it was like to be Catholic and/or Irish in the same place I grew up. Border or random road checkpoints were fine for us. The peeler or the soldier would see my Dad's nice Protestant surname or clock his post code and wave us through. Former RUC or squaddies that I have met since have told that they were ordered to make life difficult for anyone of an opposite persuasion to us; get everyone out of the car in all weathers, empty the boot, make them wait around, etc. Knowing this it's easy to see why people would at the very least, dislike the police back home. And that's the soft stuff. I worked in a 24hr garage during university, across the road from one of the last army barracks in South Belfast. One guy from up the country started working there. Proper culchie name, GAA tops and hold all etc. As soon as he realised the army land rovers would do laps of the petrol station on their patrols, he quit as he was paranoid that "the Brits would get him". As an ignorant prod, I thought he was daft. And I'm ashamed of that now as it it very likely the Brits did get someone he knew or someone in his family in living memory.

Still don't deserve to be shot.

The answers to "did he deserve to get shot" and "did the officer murder him or otherwise act incorrectly" don't have to be the same though.

I get (and agree) that you shouldn't run away. But the point is more that if you DO run away from the police, do you deserve to be killed for it?

There were plenty of other options to take before shooting him in the head imo.

I didn't say he did, to be fair.

But the point is more ... do you deserve to be killed for it?

No. Of course not.

Out of interest, who has been stopped or searched by the police?

I was stopped and had my bag searched at Victoria Station a few days after the London 7/7 bombings. So I understand it as they were stopping a lot of people carrying backpacks, I'm guessing that there presence there was for reassurance to the travelling public more than anything. I was given a bit of a paper as a record of the stop, which recorded the reason for the stop as "terrorism"! I was actually working a Kings Cross station at the time of the bombings (well in a portacabin next door building the new underground station and was evacuated from the area following the bombing).

Another time I was stopped in my car. Driving around midnight. I passed a police car who had just stopped another driver. I slowly passed them, then drove on. I noticed that it was now following me and I also knew that there was a speed camera up ahead, so I drove at bang on the speed limit or maybe 29 in a 30 zone.

They pulled me over and first word they said to me were "driving a bit slowly there weren't you sir?". I mean WTF.

This is a good post.

I'm your common or garden Northern white bloke so I don't envisage ever being racially profiled by the Met Police.

He either feared for his life (justifiably when he is four times more likely to be killed than I would be in that situation before you add on the weapons intel for the car or his history)

We'll never know, but I wonder what caused the flight response more: his race (and the history of the Met's actions with black men); or his pastimes? As a white bloke, I can't answer that.