When a force marksman killed a father-of-two to thwart a jail breakout plot, the Met Police was “delusional, chaotic, and unprofessional,” an inquest determined.
However, the unarmed man was lawfully slain.
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 guys 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.
According to Mr. Goldstone, “disturbing the Tottenham Turks’ activity or establishing continuous public protection” would be difficult goals for the operation.
The MPS could only hope to retrieve one firearm, he continued, therefore the notion that this operation would succeed in purging the streets of North London of lethal firearms was naive.
Unusual choices included the request that Serco, the corporation in charge of the prisoner van, not be informed of the operation’s preparations owing to suspicions of corporate corruption, which Mr. Goldstone described as “unspecified, unverified, and unfounded.”
Officers could have controlled the van in which Eren was placed, who else was placed in that van, and the route it followed from the prison to the court, he added, had the force engaged them in the planning process.
In his account of the actual incident, Mr. Goldstone stated: “I find that, when W80 shot Mr. Baker, he held an honest and sincere belief that Mr. Baker was moving in order to reach for the pistol.”
Due to Mr. Baker’s actions and movement, W80 “felt that he posed a serious threat… I make the finding, on the balance of probability, that W80 honestly believed that it was reasonably required for him to fire at Mr. Baker.”
Margaret Smith, the mother of Mr. Baker, said her son was “no angel,” but that he “should have gone to prison” rather than being shot to death.
She urged the investigation chairman to take into account if the fact that her son was black would have contributed to his death.
However, Mr. Goldstone claimed that his investigation “found no evidence to support a conclusion that race had any influence in Mr. Baker’s death.”
W80’s “overall credibility” as a witness, according to him, “remain[ed] basically intact.”
The inquiry chairman emphasized a number of failures, including the fact that the operation’s primary goal should have been public safety but instead it was not, that W80 and others were not informed that the conspirators had only been able to obtain a toy gun, and the “delusional” belief that the operation would be successful in clearing north London’s streets of deadly weapons.
According to testimony given at the inquiry, Mr. Baker may have been dozing off when he was shot and may have misunderstood conflicting orders shouted by armed officers who confronted the guys in the Audi.
The group was being told to raise their hands by some cops, according to a police car bug, while W80 claimed to have told Mr. Baker to place his hands on the dashboard.
The automobile in which Mr. Baker was riding in the front seat had no live firearms, but a replica Uzi was recovered in the trunk.
The guns squad that faced the men didn’t receive information from officers that the group had been unable to acquire a genuine gun.
When confronted by armed police, W80 said to the inquiry that he was certain they would be armed and choose to fight their way out over surrender.
According to the report, the testimony of Detective Inspector Robert Murray, Detective Chief Inspector Neil Williams, and Detective Superintendent Craig Turner taken together “reveals a determination, bordering on the obsessive at times, 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 investigation discovered a number of technical mistakes in the organization and conduct of the armed operation.
It said that officers had miscalculated the risk posed by Eren’s cousin Ozcan Eren, who was responsible for the escape plan, and had failed to consider any scenario other than an armed halt.
Additionally, they neglected to inform the prison van crew of the intended jailbreak or communicate with the Prison Service about Eren’s likelihood of escaping.
Failures in the preparation and execution of the armed operation, according to the chairman, should serve as a “loud wake-up call” to the incoming Metropolitan Police commissioner, who will be chosen this summer.
‘I cannot help but believe and observe that had Mr. Baker not been fatally shot, none of the planning and execution flaws that this Inquiry has revealed would have come to light, and the operation would have been lauded as an excellent success by and for the Metropolitan Police Service,’ he added (MPS).
“If this Inquiry accomplishes nothing else, it should serve as a loud wake-up call to a newly appointed Commissioner,” the author writes.
Former Met chief Dame Cressida Dick recognized that “not everyone has faith in us to offer a decent service when they need us,” according to Mr. Goldstone, who forwarded the study.
Those in the MPS’s power structure, he claimed, “cannot anticipate any improvement in that level of public confidence, without a readiness to accept and act upon fair criticism.”
He continued, “It is evident that little, if any thought, was given to the tactic of contain and call out,” in his conclusions.
This emphasizes the question of why it wasn’t given any serious consideration, if any at all.
Whatever the upper echelons of the MPS may think, there is, in my opinion, a widely held belief within the MPS that the option of contain and call out in an urban context is unlikely to be realistic and should thus be disregarded from the outset.
The existence of that opinion is more significant than how it is expressed.
“The CTSFOs were sent to the Audi mission vehicle with a working approach that raised rather than minimized risk; they did so even without knowing how many people were inside; they also had no plans for gaining sight into the car or for communicating with the subjects.
This resulted in a somewhat frantic and unprofessional extraction.
The investigation concluded that Detective Chief Inspector Neil Williams’ mistakes, who was in charge of tactical weaponry on that particular day, did not amount to gross negligence and did not contribute to Mr. Baker’s passing.
In order to lessen the likelihood of an armed interception, Mr. Baker’s family’s attorneys emphasized errors in the management of intelligence and the failure to use available surveillance capabilities.
The investigation concluded that Mr. Williams was unaware of Ozcan Eren’s whereabouts throughout the first stages of the operation or if he would be taking part in the breakout.
It was discovered that the officer did not consider the repercussions of potentially dishonest jail guards changing the route on the day.
Mr. Goldstone called it “astonishing” that this wasn’t taken into account.
The scope of the investigation included the preparation for the armed operation, the information available to those involved, the management of the operation, the actions of the officers on the scene, and the events that followed the shooting.
In 2017, the CPS declined to file criminal charges against W80, and the officer is now embroiled in a court dispute about whether he should be subject to disciplinary investigations.
The mother of Mr. Baker, Margaret Smith, testified during the inquiry that the police officers participating in the operation had overlooked the importance of her son’s life.
She said, at testimony hearings held last summer, that her son had struggled to obtain employment after completing a prison sentence and had been written off by teachers in school.
This could happen to anyone, she warned. Although Jermaine’s life was remarkable and odd in the manner it ended, many black boys and young men might relate to his experience of being written off as a child.