Feathers, loads of feathers suddenly, on the ground, in the air, everywhere. An outdoor pillow fight? No, this looked more serious, and there had just been the sound of gunfire, two shots. A duck shoot then, maybe? Wrong again, not toffs with double-barrelled shotguns shooting fowl from a rural sky; but urban armed police with some serious weaponry, Operation Trident, in Tottenham, north London.
Maybe there are similarities, though. “To me, it looked like these people had come out to hunt someone,” remembered the minicab driver, when giving evidence at the inquest, about the police. He said they threatened to shoot him too if he looked over at the man they had just gunned down, his passenger, Mark Duggan. And the feathers? Duggan was wearing a down jacket when he was shot.
The lethal shooting of Duggan in August 2011, you’ll remember, triggered the worst riots in modern British history. Yet still there is no agreement about what happened when he was stopped that day. An inquest jury decided Duggan hadn’t been holding a gun, but that the killing had been “lawful” because the officer who shot him honestly believed he did have one and was a danger, to him, to his colleagues, to the public. The IPCC found he had been holding a gun but that he’d been throwing it as he was shot. Was the gun thrown or moved later by the police? Who was Mark Duggan? Dangerous criminal or family man? Why did he acquire a gun? Was he even the man the police should have been going after, or should they have been concentrating on the man who supplied him the weapon? It’s all tied up in so much secret intelligence that it’s impossible – especially for his family – not to suspect the truth is being hidden.
Lawful Killing: Mark Duggan (BBC1) attempts to answer some of those questions and get closer to that truth, using personal testimony and official records. And by dramatising scenes in the lead-up to the shooting, based on what is known about the movements of Duggan and the police. We also get to hear the words of police and other witnesses in dramatised transcripts from the inquests.
Yes, at times it’s a bit confusing. So this is the real Semone, Mark’s former partner, being interviewed. Plus his real sister, brother, mum, friends from the community. But now this is an actor playing Semone in a dramatised section. All the police officers we see are actors because the real ones declined to take part.
The cab driver is an actor, but speaking words the real man spoke at the inquest … so why does he not look as if he’s at an inquest, but is sitting in front of a plain white screen as if in a studio, testifying to a photographer instead of a jury? Maybe it doesn’t matter. A bit of confusion is actually quite fitting, given how muddled the story already is, with so many versions it’s impossible to know what really happened.
I’m not generally a massive fan of dramatic reconstruction; it’s usually hammier than ham and adds little to understanding. Here it’s better than normal quality, drama-wise, and though it doesn’t add much to understanding what Mark Duggan was actually like as a person, it does clarify, in terms of the sequence of events, what happened when and where, and who was there. Well, as clear as it’s possible to be, when there are so many contractions.
In the end, the film doesn’t really get much closer to the truth, which will probably never be known. It does do some other things, though. It raises some serious questions about the gathering of intelligence. It demonstrates why Duggan’s family and friends are not satisfied that justice has been done, and are still suspicious. And – most of all – it paints a very bleak picture of a community and a police force that have neither trusted nor respected each other since the Broadwater Farm riots a quarter of a century earlier.
What’s needed after all that urban tension? Puppies! The Secret Life of Puppies (Channel 5), with a soppy voiceover from Ashley Jensen. Actually, this lot are between about five and 12 months old, which in dog years makes them teenagers. So they can be a bit awkward and stroppy – some of them are showing an interest in sex, eurrrgh.
Yeah, but they’re still cute, aren’t they? There has been some worrying talk in my house of getting a cat (boo), so I’ll be showing this to my boys, confident it will cure them of that.
