G20 demonstrations: Police under scrutiny

Nearly 60 per cent of the British public are opposed to the police's behaviour at this month's G20 protests in London, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published last week. This concern is a welcome change to the silence and complacency of recent years. As more and more stories flood out, the reputation of the police has declined with every slow motion replay of the latest corroborating video footage. It would be easy to think that this misbehaviour is a sudden and worrying new development. Yet there is evidence that the G20 policing debacle is the result of repeated failures by police watchdogs, the media and politicians to deal with other incidents of violent and repressive behaviour from the police in recent years.

These cruel and overly aggressive tactics have been used before, and complained about many times, but nothing has ever come of it. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) promises to investigate the complaints – but there is never enough evidence, or people have to wait so long and jump through so many hoops that they give up and go away.

And it isn’t only the hippies who get bashed. At the Countryside Alliance demo, it was posh people who got the rough end of the police batons – yet somehow, amazingly, that didn’t count either.

But a death changes everything. Suddenly we have to take it all seriously, just as we did with the Stockwell shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. If Ian Tomlinson hadn’t died, then the complaints about the police would have fizzled away just as they have before. Most of the footage would not have been seen – left in cameras or only shown on obscure indie websites. And the police would not have examined their own film for violent police officers as well as violent protesters.

As a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority for the last nine years, I have been a critical friend of the police, defending them when I see the coverage is unfair, but making it clear when I think they have got it wrong.

On 1 April, they got it disastrously wrong. They took away the liberty, the civil liberties and the human rights of hundreds of people who were protesting peacefully. Who had every right to protest and who needed the police’s support. What the police did to the fluffy, happy, musical, picnicking Climate Camp part of the protest was violent and unprovoked. Who gave the order to go in and hit and kick and trample people who had their hands raised in the air? Who amongst those police thought it was the right thing to do? As more footage and more complaints come to light, I am starting to doubt that the police can clean up this mess inside themselves and make middle Britain believe in them again.

Of course I know that the majority of police officers behaved well, bravely, calmly, in the face of the violent minority who joined the demo of innocent, peace loving protesters. But they were let down by the officers who behaved badly. And the good officers who don’t want to sneak on their colleagues might protect the bad officers. In order to challenge a culture of policing which sees hiding your numbers as acceptable and hitting passive people with the edge of your shield, the police are, at the very least, going to have to overhaul their public order tactics and their training.

We could also ask if all the guardians of democracy—politicians, media, IPCC etc—also got it a little bit wrong. Was it right for Channel 4 to show Ian Tomlinson’s collapse and his head hitting the ground? I would argue, yes. The IPCC report will cover that and explain it – if that’s possible. And if it hadn’t been screened, along with all the other clips of police violence then the majority of people in Britain would not have understood fully the debate on whether or not we can now trust the police. We always see the minority of the demonstrators who are violent; it’s time we saw the violent officers too.

What about the IPCC, and Nick Hardwick in particular? Should the independent body and its chair stay quiet until their report is published? Yes, of course. It is mad for them to stir up any doubt about the validity of their report, which is now what has happened. It’s all developing into the most almighty mess for the Met police, and is likely to run and run.

There are also national ramifications to this debate. In recent years the Met has taken on a larger and larger national role, particularly in counter-terrorism, and any changes to Met procedures are therefore likely to be followed by other British forces.

It has been said that this is a pivotal point for the police, and that they probably won’t be able to marshal demonstrations in the same inappropriate way again. Let’s make that true, so that we get a police force that isn’t trying to repress free speech or take away tourists’ cameras and instead is actually upholding the law.