Cleared by the CPS. Cleared by the jury. Now cleared by the watchdog too.

The story

Martyn Blake, the Metropolitan Police firearms officer who shot and killed Chris Kaba in 2022, will face no misconduct hearing, a police watchdog has confirmed. Blake was earlier cleared by the Crown Prosecution Service and, following a criminal trial, acquitted of murder. The decision means no disciplinary process of any kind will now examine the shooting.

The reframe

Each stage of this sequence is individually defensible. The CPS assessed the evidence and brought a charge. A jury heard the case and acquitted. A watchdog reviewed the same facts under a different, professional-standards test and found no case to answer there either. Nobody in that chain has obviously done anything wrong.

What the sequence also does, taken as a whole, is exactly what the manuscript describes as circular legitimacy: a structure where every institution involved can correctly say it did its job properly, and where the cumulative effect is that no institution ever has to be the one that says the outcome itself is now closed. Three separate, professionally sound processes concluded that this shooting will not be examined further. That may be the right outcome. What it is not, is a decision anyone actually had to own.

Within this loop, responsibility disperses. Each participant can point to necessity. The lawyer needed an opinion. The accountant followed standards. The consultant optimised within constraints. The regulator approved the framework. No individual is lying. No single decision is indefensible.The Performance of Obedience, Ch. 6