The judicial system's handling of the shooting of Chris Kaba has been woeful.
Let's get something straight from the word go: the appalling blunders made by any and everyone involved in decisionmaking in our judicial system concerning the lawful shooting by a police officer of wanted gangster Chris Kaba has been beyond woeful.
It seemed, at some points, as if our courts were being run by Kenny Noye – or, for older readers, Ronnie Biggs. In the most inexplicable of circumstances we arrived at a virtually dystopian position in which the law moved to protect a wanted man with a criminal background dating back to as soon as he entered his teens from having his gangland past put before a jury who was to judge him, but was happy to shred any hopes of anonymity that could have been afforded to the brave police officer who was found ultimately to be doing nothing more than carrying out his duties.
The result: the officer now has a £10,000 “bounty” on his head funded by gangster colleagues of the dead villain. And the recruitment of cops ready to carry guns is at crisis point.
Credit where credit is due. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has moved to ensure that in the future no other officer will have to endure what came the way of officer NX121 – as he should have always been known through ALL legal proceedings.
However, this lamentable chronicle of judicial ineptitude has helpfully exposed a fault line that runs frighteningly deep in our society: the inexhaustible appetite for the liberal Left to use each and every opportunity they can seize to try to undermine the institutions upon which we all rely.
One principle in life I’ve followed, which has yet to let me down, is that if the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Sadiq Khan are for something, my default position has to be one of staunch opposition. And, again on this occasion this has not failed me. That politically gruesome group championed the slain gangster and poured dangerous scorn and unfounded lies on the police, all while relying on the scantest of information.
On this occasion they were backed up by the University of Greenwich which, inexplicably, sought to draw parallels with the murder of George Floyd by a US police officer (Note to self: a degree from Greenwich is to be treated with the same caution as a dose of Novichok) assisted by the predictably dreary classridden guff from MP Kim Johnson.
That particularly misguided Labour Leftie decided the media used “racist gang tropes to justify the killing of Chris Kaba”. Clearly, for her, someone with convictions for knife crime and GBH who was wanted over two shootings and is trying to flatten officers by driving a car weighing two-and-a-half tons directly at them, is some kind of modern day Robin Hood.
Perhaps the MP for Liverpool Riverside should focus on the constituents in her home city, where there has been a worrying 18 per cent increase in knife crime. Anything to say about that disturbing trend, Comrade Kim? While Kaba, just 24 but with an 11-year criminal record, did not deserve to die in this fashion, he was clearly no angel and would have been able to answer all and any charges if he’d just switched off the engine of his car.
Not that hard, surely? The hand-wringing, virtue-signalling, police-hating Left must answer this question: why do you so readily seek to undermine those brave enough to put their lives on their line to defend us? Political gain, perhaps?