The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the reaction to it — especially in his native Brazil — have been at the forefront of news for the past few days. I haven’t commented as I’ve been away. Normally I’d be the first to decry police brutality — and the fact that Menezes was shot 8 times, 7 of those in the head — needs to be explained. But I have a hard time blaming the police officers for making the decision to shoot. It was the day after the second coordinated bombing attacks in as many weeks. The man left a building that was being monitored for terrorist activity, entered a tube station carrying a bag, and ran when officers identified themselves and told him to stop.

At this point you have pretty decent cause to suspect that the man is dangerous, and prudence — given the previous day’s events — demands that you assume he has a bomb. The man is running toward a train, where to date 6 of the 8 bombs have gone off. To me, it’s clear: you have no choice but to incapacitate him. Now, in a perfect world, the police would have a weapon that could knock him down and pin his hands behind his back such that he couldn’t set off a bomb. But the situation was far from perfect, and so officers had to choose, and they choose to shoot. I honestly feel that they had no other choice.

As I said, someone has to explain why Menezes was shot several times at point blank range, and why he wasn’t contained on the bus rather than in a busy tube station, but in the end I believe the police had little choice.

Just one more horrible side effect of the bombings, I guess.