If professionals consider one thing “unjust,” it is often this: split-second operational decisions that get evaluated, turned over, examined, picked apart, and analyzed for months—by people who were not there when the decision was taken, and whose daily work does not even involve such decisions.
British special operations officer Christopher Sherwood may just have felt that way in the aftermath of a drug raid that left one man dead.14 It was midnight, January 15, 1998, when Sherwood and 21 other officers were summoned to the briefing room of the Lewes police station in East Sussex. They had body armor, special helmets, and raid vests (sleeveless vests with two-way radios built in). They may need to immobilize somebody tonight, the briefing began. A raid was mounted, and Sussex was in need of officers who could shoot. Police intelligence had established that a suspected drug dealer from Liverpool and his associates were in a block of flats in St. Leonards, near Hastings. They were believed to be trying to work their way into the extensive drug trade on the British south coast, and to have a kilogram of cocaine with them.
One of the men was James Ashley, previously convicted of manslaughter. The other was Thomas McCrudden, thought to have stabbed a man before. In the briefing, both men were described as violent and dangerous. And most likely armed. The purpose of the raid was to capture the two men and to confiscate their contraband.
As usual with intelligence, however, it was incomplete. Where in the block of flats they were going to be was not known. There were no plans over the flats either—all would have to be searched, and as quickly as possible: with speed and surprise.
Equipped with rifles (fitted with flashlights on the barrel) and automatic pistols, and up to 60 rounds of ammunition each, the officers proceeded in convoy to the Hastings buildings. None of them were in any doubt about the threat awaiting them, nor about the uncertainty of the outcome. “You get out on the plot, and you never, never know how it’s going to end,” one veteran explained later. “Your heart is pounding….”
After quietly unloading, and making their way to the block in the dark, six officers took up positions outside the target building. The rest were divided up into pairs, accompanied by an officer with an “enforcer,” capable of busting front doors and other obstacles. Each group was assigned a specific flat to search, where one officer would cover the left side of whatever room they entered, and the other the right side.
“You know you are walking into danger,” commented another officer later. “You know you may be in a situation where you have to kill or be killed. It’s a hell of a responsibility.”
Christopher Sherwood was one of the officers who went to Flat 6. He was 30 years old, and for carrying that “hell of a responsibility,” he was getting paid £20,000 per year (about $35,000 dollars per year at that time).
The door went down under the impact of the enforcer and Sherwood veered into his half of the room. Peering through his gun sight into the dark, he could make out a man running toward him, one arm outstretched. The officer’s time was running out quickly. Less than a second to decide what to do—the figure in the dark did not respond, did not stop. Less than two feet to go. This had to be Ashley. Or McCrudden. And armed. Violent, dangerous. Capable of killing. And now probably desperate.
Sherwood fired. Even if there had been time for the thought (which there almost certainly was not), Sherwood would rather be alive and accountable than dead. Most, if not all, officers would. The bullet ripped into the gloaming assailant, knocking him backward off his feet. Sherwood immediately bent down, found the wound, tried to staunch it, searched for the weapon. Where was it?
Screaming started. The lights came on. A woman appeared out of the bedroom and found Sherwood bent over a man flat on the ground—Ashley. Ashley, splayed on his back and bleeding, was stark naked. He was unarmed. And soon dead, very soon. It was determined later that Sherwood’s bullet had entered Ashley’s body at the shoulder but deflected off the collarbone and gone straight into the heart, exiting through the ribcage. Ashley had died instantly.
Whenever a police officer fired a fatal shot, an investigation was started automatically. It did in this case. The Kent police force was appointed to investigate. They found systemic failure in the Sussex force, including concocted intelligence, bad planning, misapplication of raid techniques, and a wrong focus on small-time crooks. Kent accused Sussex of a “complete corporate failure” in researching, planning, and executing the raid.
Sherwood, devastated that he had killed an unarmed man, was interviewed for four days. He maintained that he, given the knowledge available to him at the time, had acted in self-defense. Not long thereafter, however, Sherwood read that the investigator had prepared reports for the Crown Prosecution Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions, though it was added that nobody knew at that point whether criminal charges were going to be brought.
They were. A year and a half after his shot in the dark, Sherwood was charged with murder.
“Why should anyone want to risk their career or their liberty,” an ex-firearms officer reflected, “if, when something goes wrong, they are treated like a criminal themselves?”
The “complete corporate failure” that had sent Sherwood into the building, together with other officers loaded with 1200 rounds of ammunition, faced consequences too (such as admonition letters). Nothing as serious as murder charges.
A review of the armed raid by a superintendent from the National Firearms School had said that there had been no need for firearms to be used. Another superintendent, with responsibility for the guidelines for the use of firearms, said that this case had not met the requirements. The tactic for searching the flats, known as “Bermuda,” was also extremely risky. “Bermuda” was originally designed for rescuing hostages from imminent execution. Sussex Police claimed that their inspiration for using “Bermuda” for arresting suspects came from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in Northern Ireland. The RUC denied. Sussex Police’s own memos had warned as early as 1992 that “risk factors are high and, as such, it should only be considered as a last resort.” Their specialist tactical adviser had been warned by the head of the police’s National Firearms School that “Bermuda” was too dangerous for such circumstances.
Meanwhile, the inquiry discovered that there had been meetings that had been kept quiet between senior officers and some of those involved in the shooting. After those discoveries, the Kent inquiry stopped cooperation with the chief constable of Sussex, and informed the Police Complaints Authority that they suspected a cover-up. Sussex countered that Kent was bullying and incompetent. The Hampshire police force then took over the investigation instead. Yet in this defensive finger-pointing aftermath, nothing stood out as much as Sherwood’s murder charge.
The murder charge may not have been connected only to this case. The Police Complaints Authority was facing a national outcry about the apparent impunity with which officers could get away with shooting people. In the previous 10 years, police in England and Wales had shot 41 unarmed people, killing 15 of them. No police officer had ever been convicted of a criminal offense, and most involved were not even prosecuted. In this case, it seemed as if Sherwood was to be a sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat, so that it would be obvious that the police was finally doing something about the problem. After a year and a half of mulling over a split-second decision, people who had not been there to share the tense, menacing moments in the dangerous dark opined that Chris should have made a different decision. Not necessarily because of Sherwood, but because of all the other officers and previous incidents, the public image of the police service, and the pressure this put on its superiors.
It would not have been the first time that a single individual was made to carry the moral and explanatory load of a system failure. It would not have been the first time for charges against that individual to be about protecting much larger interests. Many cases in this book point in similar directions. What it raises may seem troubling. These sacrifices violate Aristotelian principles of justice that have underpinned Western society for millennia. Such justice particularly means refraining from pleonexia, that is, from gaining some advantage for oneself by blaming another, by denying another person what is due to her or him, by not fulfilling a duty or a promise, or not showing respect, or by destroying somebody else’s freedom or reputation. Holding back from pleonexia puts an enormous ethical responsibility on organizational leadership. Nothing can seem more compelling in the wake of a highly public incident or accident than to find a local explanation that can be blamed, suspended, charged, convicted. The problem and the pressure it generates are then simply packed off, loaded onto somebody who can leave, slide out of view, or get locked up—taking the problem along. But it is not ethical, and it is not likely to be productive for the organization and its future safety and justness.
THE INJUSTICE IN JUSTICE
Pursuing justice in court will always produce truths and lies, losers and winners (and more losers). Even if a scapegoat eventually gets exonerated, interests will have been lined up against each other in a way that makes any kind of reconciliation really difficult. By treating error as a crime, we ensure that there always will be losers, whatever the outcome of a trial. Because it divides people into groups of adversaries, we guarantee that there will always be injustice in justice, whether the practitioner gets off the hook or not. Common interests dissipate, trust is violated, shared values are trampled or ignored, relationships become or stay messed up.
On May 2, 2001, Chris Sherwood was cleared of any blame at the Old Bailey in London when the judge, Mrs. Justice Rafferty, instructed the jury to find him not guilty. There was no evidence of any intention to kill, she argued, other than that he had fired in self-defense. Justice prevailed, at the same time that injustice prevailed. What about the cover-up during the aftermath? And what about the victim’s family or his girlfriend, the woman who had stumbled upon Ashley’s still-warm corpse? No recourse for them, no justice, popular opinion found. Many commentators cried foul. The reaction meant that the pressure for the Police Complaints Authority to show its teeth, and for others to charge and convict, would probably remain.
No just culture—no peace for those who do the work every day.
* This case study is taken from Ref. 14.