Follow up on the posting regarding the Police

While I tried to keep my previous posting balanced and factual, as I always do. It seems that my posting has upset a few people. While I am sorry about this, all the facts are true.

As a law abiding citizen, I recognise that the police do have a difficult job to do and when it comes to demonstrations and protests, they unfortunately have to deal with a minority that are hell bent of causing trouble. However, with the G20 in particular, the police treated everyone attending as though they were trouble makers. In fact, as with Ian Tomlinson who an innocent bystander, just being in London that day appeared to make the public a target for the police.

Just hours after posting the web log, it was reported that following a second Post Mortem it appears that Ian Tomlinson died from Internal bleeding and not from a heart attack as first reported.

Part of the point for making the posting was simply to highlight that there are now three different examples, on you tube, where the police have been filmed assaulting members of the public. One was pushed to the ground, as shown in the film posted, via the Guardian Newspaper, one woman was slapped and punched another was hit in the face with a riot shield. These along with the other examples of the police “Behaving Badly” raises serious questions about the police and there attitude to the public.

Over the years I have personally witnessed incidence where the police have had a could not care less attitude to victims of crime, not always minor crime, just because of where someone lived or because they were not dressed as “White Middle Class”. Add to this the revelations by respected investigative journalists that have shown parts of the police to be racist, homophobic and sexist, and it looks as though there is a real gulf between police attitudes and the public face the police would like to project.

Even today on the News the police were trying to justify the violence they inflicted at the G20, by saying that they had intelligence that there were people at the demonstrations that were intent on killing a police officer. Now I don't know if this is true or not, but that is no justification for the violence the police inflected upon the public. Especially as that violence may have resulted in the death of an innocent man. Not for the first time either, I still remember Blair Peach who died at a demonstration in London thirty years ago.

The police said before the G20 demo's that they would use CCTV against anyone guilty of violence, yet when it appears to be one of their own who has committed the violence, they claim there is no footage. Now the police are crying foul of the film of them abusing the public.

The simple point is the police are not and can not be above the law. Further, in so many cases where the police have been discovered to have been in the wrong, the facts have demolished the PR stories the police are so ready to tell, making the police sound like heroes. I do not want to paint the police as villains either, but we the public need honesty and integrity from the police.

Therefore, I will critique the police when they need it, just as I will criticise our politicians, business or any other institution that needs to be brought to book. The difficulty often is that most law abiding people never really have any contact with the police, and often think that the criminals have it all their way. In the past there were miscarriages of justice and I am sure they will happen again, as often the police will put two and two together and make five and not from a poor maths education. Every miscarriage of justice means the real offenders get away with the crime. I don't want to see the police stopped from doing their job, but equally I don't want to see innocent people killed or brutalised by the police.