I blame the management

I am leaving it in place and unchanged, but I have changed my views on this considerably.

As the story unfolded, I think it became clear that the officers on the ground were following direct orders, and did so with a clear belief that Jean Charles was an immediate threat to others. Further, the information the person who gave the order was such that they were not unreasonable in taking the decision to give the orders on which they acted. The fault lay with the informaton which was passed to them. And fault it was, it cost an innocent man his life. I hope that lessons really have been learned.

A follow up to this post Inexcusable.

I think that when something goes wrong in an organisation it is always fair to expect to blame the management. If there is a strike, there is some manager in the organisation who should have recognised that workers were unhappy and acted in one way or another to communicate better, deal with underlying problems and so on. in the same vein, I believe that, almost without exception if someone is sacked then management is to blame – it can only be poor selection, poor training, poor supervision or some other weakness in management that led to the necessity to dispense with a particular individual. Recruiting replacements is expensive and even redundancies should be avoidable through sound succession planning, retraining and so on.

There will always be exceptions to this rule, but at the end of the day, managers are well paid as much as anything because it is their job to take responsibility when things go wrong. If you want the money, the authority and the privileges, then you must also take the blame when things go wrong.

Today I have been listening to the news, BBC and ITV talking about the murder in London of a young Brazilian electrician by the name of Jean Charles de Menezes by a gang of armed thugs without any cause or provocation (that seems to be plainly the case) This gang need to be rounded up and locked away for the protection of the public. Following due process of law, some or all of them should be convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. That is the law in England.

It happens that these murderers were members of the Metropolitan Police firearms unit and were on duty at the time. This does nothing to mitigate their behaviour, quite the opposite if anything, and they must be held to account for their actions.

It does raise further questions about the organisation’s selection, training, supervision and management of people it is sending out onto the street with guns.

Additionally, the Metropolitan Police seem to have embarked on a programme of disinformation, so that a number of untruths about the behaviour of their victim were circulated, for example, that he had leapt a ticket barrier, was wearing a suspiciously bulky coat. This, makes me question the honesty and integrity of the most senior management of the Met.

In all the circumstances it does seem to me fair to wonder whether the organisation has been so reckless and grossly negligent that it should not also answer collectively to corporate manslaughter charges.

The “war on terror” does not excuse the reckless, random murder of members of the public going about their lawful business.