3 Jul 2015

Azelle Rodney: PC Anthony Long cleared of murder

A jury finds PC Anthony Long not guilty of murdering Azelle Rodney in a police operation in 2005.

It would be easy to see the not guilty verdict as an absolute wrench for the mother of Azelle Rodney.

The public inquiry which gave rise to this trial declared the police shooting of her 25-year-old son as unreasonable, unjustified and so unlawful.

Susan Alexander had high hopes having spent the last 10 years patiently and determinedly fighting the system which continually wrestled with her efforts to seek justice by putting the Metropolitan Police and its officers on trial for what she has always considered “an execution”.

Her son Azelle was no angel, and on 30 April 2005 he was on his way to do harm to others – Colombian drug dealers with an enviable stash of cocaine.

Intelligence, which later was proved to be wrong, suggested he and two others were armed with sub-machine guns capable of firing 18 rounds a second. But as the crown put at the trial, that does not justify the state shooting someone dead.

The bare facts have haunted Mrs Alexander for a decade. Mr Long fired eight bullets in 2.2 seconds, six of them hitting her son as he sat in the back seat of a car boxed in by a police operation known as a “hard stop”.

Over the years the 13 seconds of real time film which recorded this manoeuvre has been played, examined, re-examined to the nth degree, dissecting every second, every angle, while every recorded word spoken or written has been analysed and confronted over and over again.

The animated graphic below was the final product of those efforts.

PC Long was in the car marked B and was the only one of 14 officers in those vehicles who opened fire on the suspects. The trained marksman has remained steadfast ever since that in those fractions of a second he did what he thought then, and still thinks now, was right.

It didn’t matter that as it turned out Mr Rodney had no weapon in his hand. What had fixed in Mr Long’s mind, as he had explained, was that the suspect’s body movements convinced him he was about to open fire.

He stuck to his original statement. If in hindsight he got facts wrong – facts which have emerged after years and years of forensic analysis – he apologised.

He wrote down he’d seen Mr Rodney move, but he said: “I didn’t choose to kill him. I chose to shoot him until he was no longer a threat. If I hadn’t genuinely believed my colleagues’ lives were in danger, I would not have fired a single shot.”

In trying to prove murder the crown had to show it was much more than a mistake, and had to prove that Mr Long did not genuinely believe that both he and his colleagues were in mortal danger.

That hurdle was too high and Mr Long joins a long list of police officers acquitted on the grounds they were just doing their duty.

Mrs Alexander said: “Azelle’s death was wholly unavoidable. This prosecution was entirely justified. Mr Long had a case to answer but now the jury has done its job my family and I have to draw a painful line under the last 10 years.

“I still seek an unreserved apology from the police and the Indpendent Police Complaints Commission for its wholly inadequate investigation in 2005 when it concluded the police had no case to answer.”