![]() Now, in search of Tosh, on the morning of Thursday, January 8, Hastings police reopened the OP. The observation point had recorded suspicious comings and goings, but it had been closed down without result. In October, Hastings police had set up a covert observation point on a house in Western Road where Ashley and two others had moved into three flats. There were rumours but no hard evidence that they had a gun. Over the previous 12 months, an informant had told them he and a few mates from Liverpool were taking over the supply of heroin in the town and using violence to muscle in on other dealers. The Hastings police knew quite a bit about Ashley, then 39. The friend was a Scouser called Jimmy Ashley. When the police came, they were given two leads: the Scotsman was known as 'Tosh' and he had been pulled off his victim by a friend who had then walked away with him. The Scotsman followed him, pulled a knife and stabbed him three or four times in the groin. A Scotsman accused him (wrongly) of being a grass. It all began on the evening of Wednesday, January 7 1998, when a man called Paul Smith was drinking in Cherries bar on the Hastings seafront. Together, the two inquiries painted a picture of casual disregard for the rules which ring-fence the police use of firearms, a picture in which complacency and confusion conspired to jeopardise the lives of members of the public and of junior police officers alike. The evidence was considered strong enough to prosecute only in the case of four of the junior officers. They found evidence that in the planning or later handling of the incident, crime was committed by the chief constable, his deputy, one of the assistant chief constables, a superintendent, a chief inspector, an inspector and three constables. The shooting was investigated by two outside forces - Kent and Hampshire - and the Guardian has seen secret reports from both inquiries. The bullet with which he killed Jimmy Ashley in the bedroom of his flat in Hastings, East Sussex, in January 1998 turns out to be merely the final shot in a volley of error unleashed by just about every rank in Sussex police. And the law which surrounds this is inadequate and incapable of fixing the blame when things go wrong. ![]() The more police are armed, the more they will shoot the wrong people. In reality, it indicates something very different but equally disturbing, not just for potential victims but also for the police officers who may fire at them: police use of firearms is inherently dangerous. This might look like a disturbing sequence of corrupt decisions, effectively a licence for police officers to kill. Police officers in England and Wales now shoot people once every seven or eight weeks. The victims include Harry Stanley, 46, shot dead on his way home from the pub after police mistook the table leg he was carrying for a gun Diarmuid O'Neill, 27, the IRA man shot dead in Hammersmith in 1996, unarmed and naked apart from his underpants and David Ewin, 38, shot dead while trying to batter his way out of a parking place in a stolen car.
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