In Britain, we are not short of stories of police incompetence, malfeasance or deception, but the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes stands out because the manner of his death is so shocking. De Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian working as an electrician in London, boarded the tube at Stockwell station on the morning of 22 July 2005. Moments later, before the carriage doors could close, armed police sprinted on to the train and shot him seven times, point blank, in the head. De Menezes had been mistaken for a suicide bomber; he was entirely innocent of any crime.
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a four-part drama by Jeff Pope, portrays the horror of that moment with breathtaking clarity. The sheer power and speed of the killing are viscerally startling: De Menezes (Edison Alcaide) is tackled, pinned and shot before he can utter a word in protest. Something has gone profoundly, unimaginably wrong, and Suspect is an enraging picture of what went wrong and how.
In his desire to explore every aspect of the case, Pope is as fair to the police as he reasonably can be. We will see an unbelievable catalogue of ineptitude and chicanery in time, but first the show acknowledges the circumstances that made the shooting explicable, if not forgivable. The event itself does not happen until the drama’s halfway point: episode one begins a fortnight earlier, with the 7 July 2005 explosions on London’s tube and bus network and the nationwide distress and alarm they caused, before following a second cell of radical Islamists who attempt to carry out a similar atrocity on 21 July. Those scenes are dreadfully suspenseful despite us knowing the outcome; we are submerged in a febrile, panicked atmosphere.
Episode two brings us to 22 July 2005, when a steady accretion of blunders by the ill-prepared police, some of them staggering, cause them to believe De Menezes is about to commit mass murder. The series is an examination of how dangerous misinformation can spread: that’s true within the police unit itself, as coursing adrenaline, the extreme pressure of anticipating another terror attack, and perhaps some unhelpful instincts lead armed officers towards disaster. Then it occurs via rolling news and the unreliability of bystander testimony, as the idea that De Menezes vaulted the concourse barriers while wearing suspiciously bulky clothing – eyewitnesses are confusing him with the police who were chasing him – goes public and becomes a fake truth that it is difficult to knock down.
But mainly, it happens here because once De Menezes is dead, the Metropolitan Police prioritise self-preservation over transparency. Misleading claims about De Menezes are repeated or originated by the police as their spin doctors go to work, again in scenes that cannily show how a certain mindset within an institution can lead to bad outcomes, without anyone needing to explicitly agitate for them.
Two senior figures are, however, portrayed in damaging ways. Conleth Hill plays Sir Ian Blair as a grandstanding liability, a deeply unserious man given a deadly serious task. In the drama, Blair makes a series of public statements that are just a little too flippant in tone – there is a hint of someone who is enjoying the drama. Emily Mortimer is just as good as Cressida Dick, who oversees the tracking of De Menezes on 22 July but is depicted here as never having control over it, and who then switches to implacable denial mode at the inquest, making the bewildering claim that nobody in the police made any mistakes. Hill is blithe and loose while Mortimer is brittle and tentative, but they both embody the same phenomenon: when people in positions of power are under threat, the shutters come down. (Blair and Dick are now, incidentally, Lord Blair and Dame Cressida.)
Suspect’s holistic approach to the story means its attention is elsewhere when we might like to maintain a barrister-like focus on the police. Having given us a detailed backstory for the 21 July bombers, it returns to them as they go on the run, after you might say they have served their dramatic purpose. But it also takes time to perform one task it can succeed at without frustration, which is to commemorate De Menezes himself. There is an unexpectedly devastating image of the tube carriage, deserted apart from Jean Charles face down on the floor, all alone; later we travel to Brazil for his funeral, a procession under beautiful bright sunshine followed by countless hands placed on top of his coffin. It is a reminder of how heavy the loss of one life is – the least Jean Charles de Menezes deserves is the whole truth.
• Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is on Disney+ now.
