CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Death at the cathedral: Are Britain’s trigger-happy police now lethally out of control?  Fri Dec 05, 2008 9:57 pm | |
| For the past three years, since breaking up with his girlfriend, David Sycamore had lodged with his retired parents in a beautifully kept modern semi, close to the centre of Guildford.
He was grateful for their hospitality, of course. Yet the 39-year-old insurance company worker suffered from bouts of depression - and at his lowest ebb, the place where he felt most at home was the nearby Anglican cathedral.
Mr Sycamore would walk a mile or so to the imposing hilltop edifice, whose 160ft redbrick tower dominates the historic Surrey town. There he would sit quietly amid the empty pews or perhaps on a bench in the Seeds of Hope garden.
'David would go to the cathedral because it was so calm and serene,' his mother Linda told me. 'He wasn't deeply religious, but he had his own faith, and he used to say: "It's my place of solace; somewhere I can sit and meditate and find inner peace." '
Tearfully, Mrs Sycamore acknowledges the bitter irony of her words. For last Sunday afternoon, when her son trudged to his cherished retreat, peace was the last thing that lay in store for him. Little more than half an hour after leaving the house - 'humming a cheerful little tune', his mother recalls - David Sycamore lay dead on the cathedral steps.
Having received reports that he had been seen brandishing a gun (which turned out to be a replica, incapable of firing anything but blanks), police marksmen had dispatched him with cold efficiency and speed, with two bullets delivered to the chest and stomach.
It all happened so fast that, much to his consternation, the Dean, the Very Reverend Victor Stock, was not even warned that a police operation was under way, even though he was at his residence within the grounds at the time.
Nor was the cathedral evacuated, and at least one bullet passed through the window of an unoccupied creche and ricocheted inside the main building, where more than a dozen people, including several elderly female cathedral guides, were preparing for the first Advent carol service.
'It was just near where the guides were sitting, and I did point out [to the operational commander] that if they had killed an old lady inside the cathedral, it wouldn't have looked very good for the police,' the Dean told me with ill-disguised anger.
'It all happened extremely fast. You would have expected some negotiation to take place; some attempt at conversation with the man.
'If that failed, then I understand the difficulty of making split-second decisions when you think a man is dangerous. However, is it not possible to stun someone or disable them?'
The haste with which Mr Sycamore was killed is by no means the clergyman's only grievance. Although the shooting took place on consecrated ground, he says police appeared utterly insensitive to the sanctity of the setting.
Mr Sycamore's body was not removed from the cathedral steps until the early hours of Monday morning, but when the Dean requested permission to recite a prayer over the dead man, he was told he must do so from 20 yards away.
And when he reminded the police of where they were, and attempted to explain the gravity of killing a man in any church - let alone a cathedral - one officer remarked crassly: 'We would have done exactly the same if it happened outside Tesco.'
'The point I made is that if this had happened in a mosque, we would have been walking on eggshells,' said the Dean. Since the police officers had been on cultural awareness courses, they appeared to understand this all too well, he says.
But when the Dean asked the young officer in charge of the operation whether he understood the significance of a cathedral in the Christian faith and the role of a dean, the officer said he didn't - although saying he was nominally a Christian himself.
The Dean fears that the sorry handling of this affair is indicative of a disturbing shift in the relationship between police and Church - one which has been evolving over many years and reflects changes in wider society.
He is so perturbed that, in the restrained language of the clergy, he intends to 'make representations' to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and the temporary Chief Constable of Surrey, Mark Rowley.
Meanwhile, as they told me in an exclusive interview this week, Mr Sycamore's grieving family have their own questions about this disquieting affair.
They are demanding to know why a man they say abhorred violence and had never been in trouble appears to have been executed with the same speed and precision as a dangerous terrorist. And why more was not done to save him from himself.
In a week when elsewhere a coroner ruled that no individual police officer can be held to account for the mistaken Tube killing of John Charles de Menezes, their questions carry a particular resonance.
Mr Sycamore is the eighth person to be shot dead by police officers in the past two years - including the controversial shooting of 32-year-old Chelsea lawyer Mark Saunders - and his death also comes amid fears that the police are becoming too trigger-happy; shooting to kill when non-lethal methods of restraint, such as Tasers and CS gas, could be used.
The Police Complaints Commission is investigating these incidents. Mike Franklin, the IPCC commissioner in charge of the Sycamore case, promises that the Dean's concerns will also be examined thoroughly, and, where necessary, 'lessons learned'.
These lessons will come too late for David Sycamore. So who was he, and why was he gunned down with such haste in the place where people seek sanctuary?
In some newspaper articles this week, he has been depicted as an unstable loner with a fetish for replica guns and other weaponry. It was also suggested that he had provoked the police deliberately into killing him, committing 'suicide by cop' to use the jargon.
His family - solid, working-class people - are deeply offended by these stories and do not recognise the character they portray. 'David was shy, and he was very kind and soft,' says his younger brother Mark, 34.
'If someone picked a fight with him he wouldn't hit them back. He was never in trouble in his life.' His mother nods. 'He was a real old-fashioned gentleman. But he had plenty of friends and went out a lot to the pub or the cinema.
'He also had a wicked sense of humour, just like Rowan Atkinson's. Even when he was feeling depressed, he wouldn't moan - he would make a joke out of it.'
Born in November 1969, his battle with manic depression began in his teens. Mrs Sycamore traces it back to the loss of a much-loved girlfriend, who died in a car crash when he was 17.
Young David's agony was made worse when he was told she was on a date with another boy when the accident happened, she says. He had never enjoyed school, preferring to educate himself by reading classic novels and history books. He also loved classical and rock music, and was something of a film buff.
He trained as an auto electrician, and later worked as a lorry driver before getting a job at Zurich Insurance, where he was employed until his death. 'He never stopped working, even when his depression came on,' his 61-year-old mother says proudly.
For six years during his early 30s, she recalls, he lived with a girlfriend. About three years ago, however, the relationship fizzled out, so he returned home.
According to a lifelong close friend, local pub boss Peter Lee, he and Mr Sycamore shared an interest in replica guns. However, Mrs Sycamore insists that she never saw any when she cleaned his bedroom.
'David just wasn't interested in Peter's weapons collection,' she says. 'He said that instead of maturing, Peter was going back to his second childhood.'
In a rare interjection, her husband, Roy, aged 69, agrees. When police searched the house, he says all they found was one gun-box. Marked 'BB', it had presumably contained the imitation pistol - the replica of a Glock 8mm - which he took to the cathedral.
'We don't even know if it was David's,' says the retired lorry driver. 'We don't think it was. Anyway, the police say it didn't fire anything, not even pellets. It was totally harmless.'
Mr Sycamore's most recent descent into despair came in August, after he heard that another close friend had died prematurely. As the friend had lived a lonely existence, his body was not found for three months.
The news affected Mr Sycamore deeply. But by last week, his family says, he appeared to have recovered his spirits and was looking forward to Christmas.
'On Saturday morning he came with me to the supermarket as usual, and he bought presents for his three nephews, which he later wrapped, and a pack of 50 cards for his friends,' says his mother.
'He was his usual caring self, too. A little old lady was having trouble reaching a packet of cereal and David reached up and got it for her.' She wipes away a tear: 'It just doesn't make sense.'
The couple last saw their son at about 2.30pm on Sunday. He was wearing a hooded top beneath his favourite red and cream jacket, a baseball cap and jeans.
'I'm off out. See you!' were his parting words. He walked out of the house, humming a tune - something he never did when he felt bad, says his mother. They saw him making a mobile phone call as he walked down the drive.
The IPCC investigators were this week trying to establish a timeline of events. Beyond confirming that the gun recovered from the scene was, indeed, a blank-firing replica, they decline to discuss details of the case.
As Surrey police also refuse to comment, we must, for now, rely on the family's recollections, aided by those of Peter Lee and people who live beside the cathedral. Mr Lee appears to have been the person Mr Sycamore phoned as he left home. The call was made at 2.36pm. Fatefully, however, Mr Lee was in his noisy pub and failed to hear the phone ring, and so his old school pal could leave only a voicemail message.
'Thank you for being my best friend, mate. You were always there for me,' Mr Sycamore intoned plaintively. 'You have been a good friend. I will never forget you.'
Sadly, it took Mr Lee 20 minutes to get back in touch. In the meantime, he had called the Sycamore household and warned David's mother that he feared something dreadful was about to happen - but, of course, no one knew where.
At 2.55pm, when Mr Lee finally got through to Mr Sycamore, he found out. His friend told him he was at the cathedral and about to kill himself.
'What are you going to do?' the pub boss asked. 'You'll see,' came the reply. The phone went dead.
Mr Lee raced to the cathedral, arriving shortly after 3pm. By then, however, the police had placed a cordon around the perimeter of the cathedral grounds and refused to allow him through, despite his pleading that he knew Mr Sycamore well and could 'talk him down'.
He now believes that he may have reached the scene just moments before his friend was shot, and might have saved him, if only he had been allowed to try.
The exact same possibility torments Mr and Mrs Sycamore. Arriving in their white Ford Escort van around the same time, they told an officer they thought their son was involved in the incident, and asked to be allowed through to him.
Strangely, the officer simply instructed them to park inside the cordon and wait. To keep his wife warm, Mr Sycamore left the engine running. So they are unsure whether its sound drowned out the crack of gunfire at around 3pm - or if their son was already dead when they got there.
In their minds, this is the most salient question of all. For as Mr Sycamore's brother Mark says with absolute conviction: 'I know David would never have done anything to harm mum and dad, and if he was holding a gun I'm sure he would have put it down if they had asked him to.'
In any event, they sat in that van for almost two hours. Darkness descended, a police helicopter whirred low overheard, radios crackled, people arriving for the Advent service were turned back . . . yet no one told them anything.
They were at the bottom of the steep hill leading to the cathedral, so they couldn't see what was going on, either. And even when the policeman did bring them news, they were terribly misled. A man had been shot, he said - but only in the arm, and not fatally. Was it their son? He claimed not to know, and so they went home, still hoping.
It was only at 5.30pm, as police searched their house, that a call came through confirming their worst suspicions. 'Bastards!' Mr Sycamore exploded, and threw the officers out of the house.
But it was a freezing night, and despite their shock and grief, they sent cups of tea out to their patrol car. The Sycamores remain - convinced that their troubled son never intended to die when he left home last Sunday afternoon.
They believe it was all one long cry for help, right down to his last dramatic messages to Peter Lee, and if the evidence suggests that he was killed unjustifiably, they want the officers who killed him to be prosecuted. 'For murder,' his brother says emphatically.
Others may form a different conclusion, believing that, in his depression, Mr Sycamore did orchestrate his own end; behaving in a manner which left police with no choice but to shoot him - aiming for the centre of his body, as their training dictates.
Until the independent inquiry is complete and we find out whether he pointed the imitation gun at the officers, fired blank cartridges or failed to respond to a warning - if one was issued - we cannot know the truth.
What we do know, though, because the IPCC has confirmed as much, is that the police were first alerted by a call from member of the public at 2.47pm - and that a very short time afterwards, perhaps as little as 13 minutes, Mr Sycamore was dead. Was this really enough time to judge whether he was truly dangerous or simply despairing? It would seem not.
And so David Sycamore - the latest casualty of a country whose policemen increasingly know more about bullets than the Bible - died quickly and violently in the place where he had found so much peace.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1092383/Death-cathedral-Are-Britain-8217-s-trigger-happy-police-lethally-control.html
_________________
Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
|
