The Guardian are claiming an exclusive tonight with video of Ian Tomlinson, the man who died during the G20 protests being pushed to the ground by police. There’s no clear injury that looks to have killed him but he is known to have collapsed shortly afterwards.
The footage is sickening and reinforces all that is wrong about the notion that kettling and being strong against protests is just a necessary evil. It is never good to excuse violence by the government against it’s citizens. I accept that there may come a time when violence is necessary but nothing shown in the Guardian video seems appropriate.
What annoys me further is this quote from the IPCC in the same article:
“People are putting pictures on the internet, writing on blogs and talking to journalists. But we really need them to talk to the people who are investigating what happened.
massive edit
If you google the IPCC you get a rather annoying website. If I had a complaint I’d probably want to phone someone. There’s no central phone number and instead you have to pick a region first. If this was someone who’d just collapsed and died in the street and there was no police involvement we’d ring 999. We as citizens understand that. So why is the IPCC harder to get hold of? Surely it’s in their best interests to make it easy to take evidence?
We need a better way, firstly of policing demonstrations and secondly of investigating misconduct in the police. And looking at the goings on in Westminster of late a way of upholding standards there might be handy too. Bah, I hate everything tonight.
Were you to try and create a musician for me to admire, I’d think it hard for anyone to come up with anything more suitable than