Met Police Officer Who Shot Dead Chris Kaba Found Not Guilty of Murder. Why Was He Ever Charged?
A police officer who shot dead black man Chris Kaba in south London after he tried to ram his way out of a police roadblock has been cleared of his murder. The Telegraph has more.
Martyn Blake, a Scotland Yard armed officer, fired a single shot through the windscreen of Chris Kaba’s Audi Q8 killing him, when he tried to escape after being stopped by police in Streatham on the evening of September 5th 2022.
While Kaba’s identity was not known at the time, the vehicle had been linked to two previous firearms incidents including a shooting outside a primary school the night before.
Despite this Mr. Blake, 40, who had an unblemished record with the Metropolitan Police, was charged with murder with prosecutors claiming his actions had not been “reasonably justified”.
The decision to charge him followed a lengthy investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and consideration by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
However following a three week trial at the Old Bailey a jury took three hours to find him not guilty of murder.
The verdict was greeted with relief by Mr. Blake’s colleagues, friends and family, but will lead to inevitable questions about why he was ever charged in the first place.
Despite being cleared of the criminal charge, Mr. Blake could still have to face a gross misconduct hearing which could result in him being sacked.
Mr. Blake told jurors he genuinely feared for the lives of his colleagues, when Kaba attempted to ram his way through a roadblock in a residential street.
He also told jurors he had not intended to kill Kaba but had simply wanted to stop the car driving at his colleagues.
Worth reading in full. Watch the bodycam footage of the incident here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
why he was ever charged in the first place
The new racialism founded on anti-whitism?
100%
Not content with putting this guy through a murder trial he will now be put through the horrors of a gross misconduct hearing.
For crying out loud!
Why Was He Ever Charged?
Because the “victim” was black.
That’s it.
Shame shame.
Once any sort of robust response to potentially lethal law breaking episodes is effectively outlawed, the likely consequences are predictable and the British people especially in larger conurbations and especially the less privileged, are living with the consequences.
It is always the poorest in society who suffer most from the let’s criminally stupid policies.
Playing Devil’s Advocate here but, if you go by the video in the Telegraph, which is clearer then the Mirror link, the guy had already raised his hands when police told him to, so they could see he wasn’t carrying a weapon, then he accelerates forwards but is stopped by the police vehicles, then he’s shot and killed. Why didn’t the police give him a chance to exit the car or they could’ve gone up to the driver’s door and dragged him out, because his car was already stationary. He couldn’t go anywhere. So I’m not fully clear on how the shooting was justified and proportionate because it was established the guy was unarmed and was already stationary. No wonder the family has issues with his death watching this same footage. I don’t care if there’s now one less scumbag walking the earth but I honestly can’t see how this killing was justified. Was there a firearm found in his car? How could the policeman honestly say he feared for his colleagues’ lives when the perp’s car was stood still and he wasn’t carrying a weapon? This reminds me of the scenario in France, where the policeman killed a migrant… Read more »
You must be joking. He had his chance to exit the car. Perhaps the officer should only have shot him once he’d run over one of his colleagues. Maybe, only then, you’d agree he was justified in pulling the trigger. After all, plenty more coppers to replace one lying dead in the road.
I’ve watched the footage more than once. It’s unclear but I think the officer who asked to see his hands, then could see the perp wasn’t carrying a weapon before the car lurched forwards, is not the same officer who shot the perp, as that officer was already in position at the front. I think the officer who took the shot was trigger happy and reacted too quickly, but at that point he probably didn’t know the guy was unarmed as that info hadn’t been conveyed. How can a car ramming a police cordon so that it comes to a halt be deemed a threat to lives when the guy inside wasn’t wielding a weapon? He wasn’t going to run anyone over and he wasn’t going to shoot anybody! He got zero chance to exit the car.
Does him not having a gun in his hand mean there is no gun in the car? Think about it.
Tell you what. I set.you a challenge. Let me get really pissed off about something whilst sat in my car, you stand in front of me between a couple of other cars, then let me ram those cars and see if you would be quite happy that I wasn’t risking your life.
Have you even looked at the footage? There was nobody stood in front of the car. He shouldn’t have but the perp then drives forwards into the police cordon, where he was at no risk of breaking through and running anyone over. Where was the imminent threat to life? There was none.
From the footage it seems the officer who fired the shot was stood at or near the front of the vehicle. There could have been others. It is easy to say there was no threat to life retrospectively. But can you honestly and genuinely say that placed in the same position where you need to make a split decision whether to shoot or not you wouldn’t have done the same?
Yes, based on that short bit of footage I can say that I wouldn’t have done the same. The guy was in no danger of breaking through that police cordon and the first officer saw he wasn’t holding a weapon. The shot came split seconds after the guy’s car came to a halt. There was no chance for him to co-operate further because no further instructions were given by the police, he was just shot dead. I’m afraid I’m not a believer in ”we’d best shoot him dead *just in case* he might have a weapon in there somewhere”.
And I’m not saying you are wrong. Just making the point that we expect police officers to make these types of decisions on a daily basis. Clearly not all as serious as this or with such an outcome but all are held accountable and asked to justify what they did sometimes just based on a ‘gut feeling’ that they had. It is obscene that on the the one hand we prosecute this officer for effectively doing his job in an extremely trying scenario and on the other politicians armed with a pen signed off on thousands of deaths and ruined the lives of millions with their npi’s from 2020 to 2022. Without justification and certainly no accountability- when will they face trial?
Yes I appreciate that but it’s the same scenario how we expect soldiers to shoot the terrorists dead and not the civilians. If that’s your role then you’d better be pretty flipping good at it. They are meant to be highly trained for such situations, after all. I know the guy’s car was linked to a shooting the previous evening but it seems ( see below link ) he didn’t have a weapon in the car, both hands were on the steering wheel and the car was stationary when he was shot and killed. Who’s to say that if the police had given him further opportunity to give himself up and get out the car at that point he wouldn’t have cooperated? But there was no instruction, nobody approached the vehicle to establish the guy was unarmed with hands on display, the officer just opened fire a nanosecond after his vehicle came to a halt. It could’ve been a very different outcome had the officer just taken a moment, as there was no imminent threat, but he just reacted instantly. As I say, if he was a scumbag then I’ll not be sorry that he’s dead but I’m not one… Read more »
Running into the side of another car with fairly low speed isn’t going to render the car inoperable and a car is a pretty lethal weapon. Further, the guy in the car had regained freedom of action for the moment because he moved past the officer with a weapon who had asked him to show him his hands. This was also a pretty reckless move¹ only someone who’s seriously desparate to get away from the police would have attempted.
¹ When nervous people with guns are coming after you, doing anything which might excite them further obviously carries a high risk of getting shot at.
I am utterly fed up with armchair bleeding hearts all too willing to criticise the split-second actions of officers.
Know what? F*** him. And f*** anyone else who gets killed by police whilst committing a crime which puts the lives and safety of others at risk.
There. I said it.
Yeah and people are allowed to have a different opinion to you and there’s more than one perspective to be had on any given situation so I suggest you lose the attitude and keep your fecking wig on! Not everybody’s scared of placing a toe outside the parameters of the DS echo chamber!
My ‘attitude’ has come after decades of seeing coppers hung out to dry for doing nothing wrong. Here we see it happening again by TPTB and by armchair critics. So, no, I won’t lose the attitude.
The public gets the police service it deserves. Frankly, it doesn’t deserve a police service with a backbone.
Well said— Totally agree with all of your comments on this!
”The public gets the police service it deserves.” Yes, tell that to the peaceful protesters getting punched and decked then cuffed and marched away, or the ‘meme terrorists’ or people having the police coming round their house because they posted something ‘anti-establishment’, shouted at a dog or chucked some eggs. Or maybe the odd lone counter-protester who gets taken away while they protect all the hostile and hateful jihadis and terrorist-supporters? Or maybe you’ve got selective amnesia and don’t remember what the police did during the scamdemic? We are on the same planet, right? You have seen the many videos of just how appalling the police have treat non-violent members of the public? People walking in the countryside when they should be doing as they’re told and sitting at home, terrified of a flaming killer virus?! Nobody will ever accuse me of having double-standards and it’s plain to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes that the police are utterly shit, absolutely bloody appalling behaviour and no way are they on the side of the British public. Go knock yourself out on Twitter and Tik Tok with the infinite examples. And what ”backbone” are we referring to exactly? Arresting somebody… Read more »
I’d argue that armed response or any real police officers are not the same jobs worth, fat political hires of those mentioned…
Plodblob is a traitor, I agree.
I don’t blame you for thinking that way as a civilian, but there are thousands of bodycam shootings from across the world, but US especially, where “perps” have engaged peacefully one second then whipped out a gun the next. You can see for yourself how quickly it happens, and the amount of police officers killed because of it is astounding. It is also never noted how highly intense and charged these situations are.
That is why in America they “shoot first and ask questions later” (though that is rarely the case either…)
I’d encourage you to watch any number of raw body cam footage of what the police officers have to deal with, especially in armed response cases like this. You’d have a very hard time playing devil’s advocate after that… I’d hope anyway…
Excellent post!
I don’t understand all of the focus on whether he had a gun or not. We are regularly told that when we are driving, we are in control of a lethal weapon and that is how he was using the car to try and barge other cars out of the way to facilitate his escape. Yes hands in the air but he was still moving the car with the potential to crush people either with his car as they approached or by pushing others. He was driving a large Audi 4×4 with a lot of grunt to shift other vehicles.
Holding his hands up is no guarantee he did not have a weapon to hand – seat next to him, in the door pocket, for example. He was known to have a weapon which he used to shoot a rival previously. He then accelerated his car towards the police – clearly no intention to surrender.
The policeman fired one shot in an attempt to stop him using the car as a weapon against his colleagues possibly injuring or killing them.
I think the Devil needs a new advocate. .
I’ll tell you why he was charged, Will. Because the ‘System’ resents the police, on behalf of everyone who hates the police. They see it as their job to ‘get’ as many coppers as they can.
I worked in a complaints department in my last few years in the police, and I saw some outrageous decisions by the IPCC about how officers should have misconduct hearings. I myself had a complaint upheld against me by the IPCC because, and I paraphrase in my own words, ‘the complainant was such a shitbag that I must have abused him, him being such a shitbag’. That was the evidence against me.
Coppers are sacrificial lambs on the altar of political correctness and political appeasement, and, if you prefer, political cowardice.
Come to think of it, every non-Left member of society is also such a sacrificial lamb.
It is justified to stop someone driving over your colleagues and friends by shooting them dead. Who is to say that in the split second the car was stationary when he was shot he wasn’t manoeuvring to accelerate forwards. Even if he didn’t have a gun he was still in charge of a deadly weapon.
There are three simple questions to ask yourself here…
1) was the force used to achieve a legitimate aim?
2) was it the minimum force to achieve that legitimate aim?
3) were there any other options available considered, save for the use of force, which would have a achieved the same legitimate aim?
At last some good news!
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
It’s interesting but the BBC never mentioned that Mr Kaba had been in prison for violence suspected of attempted murder.
And now we know the truth, that all these tears about this gangster are for an unbelievably evil person. As for the scumbags at the CPS who revealed the poor police officer’s name, they should be sacked and charged with dereliction of duty in a public office. They knew the connections this criminal had and yet again this organisation has chosen to put the life of a decent policeman and his family at risk, with a £10,000 contract on his head, so that they could suck up to the BLM mob (and presumably their former boss).
“Why Was He Ever Charged?”
Because he shot a cultural enricher. If he’d shot a Far Right social media protestor there would have been a bonus and promotion for him.
Why do you ask?