When a force marksman killed a father-of-two to thwart a jail breakout plot, the Met Police was “delusional, chaotic, and unprofessional,” yet the unarmed man was lawfully slain, an inquest ruled.
In December 2015, Jermaine Baker was sitting in the front passenger seat of a stolen Audi A6 near Wood Green Crown Court in north London when he was fatally shot by police at close range.
He was thought by police to be one of three men who were waiting to try to get Izzet Eren, a prisoner who belongs to the notoriously violent gang the Tottenham Turks, out of a prison van.
The counter-terrorism specialist firearms officer (CTSFO) known only as W80 shot Mr. Baker, a resident of Tottenham, when he was unarmed, claiming to have believed the 28-year-old was reaching for a weapon. Later, a fake gun was discovered inside the Audi’s trunk.
investigation’s head Mr. Baker was lawfully slain, but His Honor Clement Goldstone QC found that there were police errors at practically every stage of the operation, which would’serve as a loud wake-up call’ to the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner when Dame Cressida Dick resigned.
He claimed that police chiefs were “fixated” and “obsessive” about their goal to prevent Eren’s release and crack down on the Tottenham Turks that they were blind to the shortcomings in their strategy.
Mr Goldstone suggested the operation ‘would have little effect on disrupting the activity of the Tottenham Turks or on achieving sustained public protection’.
He added: ‘The idea that this operation could succeed in ridding the streets of North London of lethal firearms was delusional – in reality, one firearm was the best the MPS could hope to recover.’
Bizarre decisions included an insistence not to consult Serco, the firm running the prisoner van, of the operation plans due to fears of corruption within the company, which Mr Goldstone described as ‘unspecified, undocumented and unsubstantiated.’
Had the force included them in planning, officers could have controlled Eren’s van as well as who else was inside and the route it took from the prison to the court, he added.
Reporting on the shooting itself, Mr Goldstone said: ‘I conclude that, when W80 shot Mr Baker, he held an honest and genuine belief that Mr Baker was moving in order to reach for the firearm.
‘As such, W80 perceived that Mr Baker posed a lethal threat… I draw the conclusion, on the balance of probabilities, that the perceived threat from the actions and movement of Mr Baker was such that W80 honestly believed that it was reasonably necessary for him to shoot at Mr Baker.’
Mr Baker’s mother, Margaret Smith, said her son was ‘no angel’, but that he ‘should have gone to prison’ rather than be fatally shot, and called on the inquiry chairman to consider whether her son being black could have been a factor in him being killed.
But Mr Goldstone said he ‘found no evidence to support a finding that race played any part in Mr Baker’s death’.
He also said that W80’s ‘overall credibility’ as a witness ‘remained largely intact’.
The inquiry chairman highlighted a number of failures, including that public safety should have been – but was not – the primary objective of the operation, that intelligence that the conspirators had only been able to source an imitation firearm was not passed on to W80 and others, and the ‘delusional’ idea that the operation would succeed in ridding the streets of north London of lethal firearms.
The inquiry heard that Mr Baker may have been asleep at the time he was shot, and may have misunderstood contradictory instructions shouted by armed officers who challenged the men in the Audi.
A police bug in the car captured a wall of noise with some officers telling the group to raise their hands, while W80 said he had instructed Mr Baker to put his hands on the dashboard.
No live firearm was found in the car in which Mr Baker was a front seat passenger, but a replica Uzi was discovered in the back of the car.
Officers had intelligence that the group had been unable to obtain a real gun, but this information was not passed on to the firearms team who confronted the men.
W80 told the inquiry he was convinced that they would be armed and would fight their way out rather than surrender when challenged by armed police.
The report said: ‘The combined effect of the evidence of Detective Inspector Robert Murray, Detective Chief Inspector Neil Williams and Detective Superintendent Craig Turner reveals a determination – bordering at times on the obsessive – to achieve a successful outcome to Operation Ankaa and with it, if not the demise of the Tottenham Turks, then certainly their emasculation.
‘Whilst this may have been a laudable objective, it should not have been something that was allowed to go ahead at virtually any cost and to the exclusion of proper and meaningful risk assessments and safety considerations as well as compliance with protocols.
‘There can be no doubt that sustained public protection was the prime objective of this operation; the safety of the public was not – and it should have been.’
The most that the officers could have hoped for on the day was the arrest of some ‘small fry’ and the seizure of one gun, the inquiry found.
‘The available intelligence supported the likelihood of a failure in achieving sustained public protection save for the ‘small fry’ who were to be arrested at the scene,’ the report said.
‘The idea that this operation could succeed in ridding the streets of North London of lethal firearms was delusional – realistically one live firearm was the best the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) could hope to recover.
‘Unfortunately, those who decided that the operation should run were unable, because of their fixation on their desire to solve the Tottenham Turks problem at a stroke, to appreciate the flaw in their approach.’
The inquiry found a series of technical failures in the planning and execution of the armed operation.
It said that officers had failed to consider any possible outcome other than an armed stop, and had not properly assessed the risk posed by Eren’s cousin Ozcan Eren, who was behind the escape plot.
They also failed to engage with the Prison Service about Eren’s escape risk or tell prison van staff of the planned jail break.
The chairman found that failures in the planning and execution of the armed operation should act as a ‘loud wake-up call’ to the next Metropolitan Police commissioner, who is due to be appointed this summer.
He said: ‘I cannot help but believe and observe that if Mr Baker had not been fatally shot, none of the shortcomings in planning and execution which this Inquiry has exposed would have come to light and the operation would have been hailed as an outstanding success by and for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS).
‘If it achieves little else, therefore, this Inquiry should serve as a loud wake-up call to a newly appointed Commissioner.’
Mr Goldstone said in a foreword to the report that previous Met boss Dame Cressida Dick had acknowledged that ‘not everyone has confidence in us to provide a good service when they need us’.
He said: ‘Those within the corridors of power in the MPS cannot expect any increase in that level of public confidence, without a willingness to accept and act upon justified criticism.’
In his conclusions, he added: ‘It is clear that little if any thought was given to the tactic of contain and call out.
‘This brings into focus the question of why there was no serious – if indeed any – consideration given to it.
‘Whatever the higher echelons of the MPS may believe, there is, in my view, a widely held opinion within the MPS that, in an urban environment, the option of contain and call out is unlikely to be practical and can therefore be discounted at an early stage. The way one describes that opinion is less important than its existence.
‘The CTSFOs were deployed to the Audi mission vehicle with a working strategy that increased rather than minimised risk; they did so without even the knowledge of how many individuals were in the Audi mission vehicle and they had no plans for achieving sight into it and for communication with the subjects.
‘This led to an extraction that was somewhat chaotic and unprofessional.’
The inquiry found that failures by Detective Chief Inspector Neil Williams, who was tactical firearms commander on the day, did not amount to gross negligence and did not cause Mr Baker’s death.
Lawyers for Mr Baker’s family had highlighted failures in handling of intelligence and not using available surveillance tools to reduce the risks of an armed interception.
The inquiry found that Mr Williams did not know where Ozcan Eren was in the early hours of the operation and whether he would be involved in the break-out.
The officer also did not think through the consequences of potentially corrupt prison guards altering the route on the day, it found.
Mr Goldstone said it was ‘astonishing’ that this was not considered.
The terms of reference for the inquiry covered the planning of the armed operation, what information was available to those involved, how the operation was led and what the officers did on the ground, an what happened in the aftermath of the shooting.
The CPS decided not to bring criminal charges against W80 in 2017, and the officer is involved in a legal battle over whether he should face misconduct proceedings.
Speaking to reporters in London after digesting the report, Margaret Smith, Mr Baker’s mother, said: ‘Jermaine was dead before he got into the car.
‘The judge has pointed out numerous, really serious failings by the Met. Running the risk that my son’s life would be taken was never justified.
‘Jermaine’s life was taken for no good reason – as I’ve always said, Jermaine should have gone to prison like the rest of the men in the car.
‘I cannot agree with the judge’s conclusion that Jermaine did not die as a result of these failures – that is a conclusion I cannot understand. After seven years of waiting … we deserve more.’
‘We know Jermaine was unarmed – Jermaine complied with the instruction to put his hands in the air… we know this from the forensic evidence.
‘Jermaine was surrendering – Jermaine could not have done more to save his life.’
Tia Demetrio, the mother of Mr Baker’s nine-year-old daughter Alexia, said his death continues to have a significant impact on her life.
She said: ‘There will be moments out-of-the blue, especially if she (Alexia) hears sirens or sees police officers, she’s petrified. She doesn’t know how to react to these people.
‘There is plenty of time throughout her life when she feels different from other people because she doesn’t have her father around, and it’s really misfortunate because he really was a brilliant father to her.
‘I am going to go back and explain to her – no matter what this report says – that her father was unlawfully killed, and I will stand by that for the rest of my life.’
A Met Police spokesperson said today: ‘Our thoughts are with the family of Jermaine Baker as the Public Inquiry into his death publishes its report. We offered every support to the Inquiry and submitted detailed evidence which can be found here.
‘The Inquiry report criticises how the policing operation was planned and carried out.
‘The Inquiry’s conclusions, however, were that these failures did not cause Mr Baker’s death, it was reasonable in the circumstances to assume that someone in the vehicle would be armed with a real firearm, and that Mr Baker was lawfully killed.
‘Since Mr Baker’s death we have made changes to how our firearms command operates in London, including how operations are run and overseen, how we train and support officers involved and how we keep records.
‘We are always open to improving our capability to tackle the threat of firearms. We will now take time to carefully study the Inquiry’s recommendations before responding in more detail.’