Today assistant commissioner Mark Rowley admitted to MPs that the Metropolitan Police force had made a “mess” in the aftermath of Mark Duggan’s death, whose fatal shooting by police lead to a series of riots across London in 2011.
“I think what you saw in 2011 was a hesitance,” he told the the committee, according to Politics.co.uk.
“What you would see today is regardless of the niceties the important thing is whoever it’s going to be, somebody needs to talk to the family as quickly as possible and we would certainly do that rather than stand on ceremony and make a mess of it.
He admitted officers had been “unnecessarily hesitant” in speaking to relatives but claimed that Duggan’s “complicated extended family” had made this difficult.
“It sounds like I’m offering excuses and I don’t mean to, ” he added. “We didn’t do it as well as we should do.”
Last week an inquest found that the 29-year-old was killed lawfully, by a majority of 8 to 2. The verdict has widely been regarded as an ‘unfair attempt to protect police’.