At least no one was seriously injured or killed this time.

We have to say that it's more by luck than judgement though. The policeman wasn't going to be trying a warning shot in the shoulder, he would have been aiming generally for the body. A couple of inches the other way, and we'd have ourselves another de Menezes.

The head of the UK's black policemen's association was on the radio yesterday saying that basically the police *should* have mistrusted the info, on the grounds that "golden nuggets" like that are fantastically improbable in policework and are usually fictitious. In other words, if all you've got to go on is one anonymous tip-off, you might want to do a bit of double-checking before you go in mob-handed. IIRC, anonymous phone-calls from a faker delayed the capture of the Yorkshire Ripper by several months and directly caused the deaths of another couple of women. And fake 999 calls cost the services millions every year, besides delaying response to real incidents.

If they had what they thought was good info, then I don't actually think the Met were wrong to raid these people's home. But they *were* wrong to shoot without warning, and to drag people out of their house without identifying themselves as policemen. And whoever was the source of the info needs some serious (and public) investigation to find out how they screwed up so badly.

Graham.