The BBC has put together a brilliant Flash piece around the timeline of British police shooting innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes after the London bombings in 2006.
It’s a fantastic use of Flash, incorporating maps, story-telling, photographs and CCTV footage of the incident, as reported in the trial of the police officers. It’s also hauntingly tragic and shows all the human and technical errors that contributed to Jean Charles de Menezes’ death. The surveillance team were taking a leak when Jean Charles left the building. He was incorrectly identified as a suspect. The radio transmitters between the shooting team and surveillance team didn’t work in the tube. The shooting team also nearly shot someone in the surveillance team after they killed Jean Charles.
It’s a pity the Flash piece stops at Jean Charles’ death and doesn’t then go into the timeline of the cover-up and media manipulation by the police force.
The use of Flash really brings that morning to life, more so than reading about it in the papers or hearing about it on the radio. It actually makes me want to cry thinking about the stupid waste of a life, and the unnecessary torture inflicted on Jean Charles’ family by the police trying to cover up shooting an innocent man.
This post is tagged under: Speaking engagements, innovation, politics
you are right - great use of flash, but also incredibly tragic. I saw some of the CCT footage on the news with the officers following him down the escalators and it’s haunting.