Ian Tomlinson

At the big protests in London against the G20, a man named Ian Tomlinson died. The official story described the man as an innocent bystander dying from a heart attack unrelated to the protest; furthermore, police attempts to help him were hindered by violent protesters.
This sparked a post by lew at kiwipolitico, about anti-police bias in the media coverage of the protests; I commented to agree with him, which I thought was remarkable given my experience at the G8 protests and the way coverage there skewed heavily pro the official line. I had no doubt that many among the police were adding to the violence, but I also didn’t question the official version of Tomlinson’s death and its aftermath.
More fool me.
The Guardian has footage of Tomlinson moments before his death. It shows him walking away from the police with his hands in his pockets, not in the throng of protesters but by himself. A police officer approaches him from behind, batons his legs and then pushes him down. The police stand over him as he talks up at them from where he landed; a protester comes over and helps him up.
There is testimony that he was assaulted by the police a few minutes before this footage as well; I have no reason to doubt it, given the emergence of this confirmatory record.
Duncan Campbell writes well about the situation and how the police have not learned any lessons from the de Menezes shooting.
It makes me second-guess my response to this blog post by George Monbiot. I have huge respect for Monbiot, but this went too far for me: “…there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job.” Reading over it, it still strikes me as a rubbish argument that does not hold up at all. But the overall thrust of the piece, that the police are pushed into violent confrontation with protesters by structural necessities, isn’t something I can argue with.
Add into the picture the UK’s new laws against photographing police and you have a deeply unpleasant set-up that is outright dangerous for democracy. There is a real risk that this kind of footage – the only way to counteract the police’s self-serving official stories of this and many other events – will be itself be forbidden.
Here’s part of one of my comments to Lew’s post. This holds up still.

Ultimately though, I point at the the media and police and almost every pundit with a public voice who unerringly frame approaching protests as riots in the making; this framing always goes substantially beyond what is reasonable. Furthermore, it fosters the conditions needed for things to escalate quickly. I think it is incumbent on the media and law enforcement to adopt more responsible policies in their treatment of protest, as they have much more power than the protesters do. (Not that police/media using a fully responsible frame would result in a fully responsible protest; but it would be nice to see such an improvement.)

I have no neat summary of this event. The Met have always been thugs; at the Edinburgh G8 it was widely known that the policing done by Met officers shipped up for the occasion was provocative and dangerous while the local Scottish police were much more reasonable. Its just an unpleasant surprise to see it captured so starkly like this.
Something has got to give.