Some shocking quotes have come out of the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest as police chiefs attempted to pass the blame for his shooting from themselves to the victim.

There were two particularly worrying comments mentioned in the BBC’s coverage. Firstly:

Last week Det Ch Supt Jon Boutcher told the inquest jury: “I cannot see anything we could have done that would have changed the course of the tragedy of Mr de Menezes.”

He also admitted he could not rule out someone being killed in a similar situation again.

If one of the web applications I support at work went wrong, I’d be expected to find the cause and make sure the same problem didn’t arise again. Apparently in matters of life and death, no such corrective action is considered necessary by the Metropolitan Police. It’s lazy, complacent and worrying.

Far more offensive, though, was the evidence from Deputy Assistant Comissioner Cressida Dick:

“He was extremely unfortunate to live in the same block as Hussain Osman, desperately unfortunate to look very like Hussain Osman, and the things he did in all innocence, the way he behaved getting on and off the bus, contributed to our assessment – my assessment – of him as a bomber.

“But if you are asking me did we do anything wrong or unreasonable, then I don’t think we did.”

To summarise her comments:

People who deserve no blame for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: The police

People who deserve some blame for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: Jean Charles de Menezes

So what can we extrapolate from these two testimonies? That the Metropolitan Police accept no culpability for the shooting and therefore see no need to take any action to stop a similar horrific cock-up from happening again, and that changing your travel plans on the London transport system is considered evidence of being a terrorist.

We should all be afraid.