04.08.09
death in the city
I love my city. The breadth and depth of my affection for London has only grown over the years that I have lived here, and friends are often amused by my enthusiastic outbursts about the city or its history. I often succumb to a strange urge to play tour guide, dragging anyone who’ll humour me around areas I find particularly interesting, scenic or historic.
London is my adopted home, the world city I love best and the cornerstone of my identity. I long ago passed, without even noticing, the milestone where I began introducing myself as “a Londoner, originally from Ireland”, as distinct from “an Irishman, living in London”.
Perhaps that’s why, when things go wrong with my city, I feel quite genuinely upset and hurt by them – an unusually emotional response, and one I have to work hard to rationalise. Our failure to tackle gang violence in parts of the city twists like a knife in my guts. I fume as I watch Boris Johnson fiddle while the Tory boroughs who dominate his Mayoralty disassemble the decision making apparatus and power of the Mayor’s office, and scheme to push our transport policy back towards private cars and away from public transport, walking and cycling.
My emotional response reached a peak when the Metropolitan Police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station in July 2005. The violence of it was even more shocking because it happened right in my neighbourhood. A resident of Vauxhall since I moved to the city, Stockwell is one of my local Northern Line stations. I use it several times a week. I’d probably stood in the very carriage where plain-clothes police, after failing to give a clear warning, fired seven bullets into the head of an uncomprehending, unthreatening civilian.
In the intervening years, the initial gut response has chilled into a more rational, cold anger at the events themselves, at the police culture they represent, and most of all, at the amateurish, blatant cover-up which ensued, and at the establishment which allows that flimsy cover-up to stand.
This week, we’re talking about another death in my city. Ian Tomlinson was a 47 year old man who worked as a newsagent in the City of London. On his way home on the day of the (almost entirely peaceful) G20 protests on April 1st, he died of a heart attack inside a police cordon.
Minutes before his death, Ian Tomlinson – walking home, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the police lines – was clubbed across the back of his knees by a police officer and then pushed to the ground in a completely unprovoked assault. As a friend commented after seeing the video which has been released today by the Guardian newspaper, Tomlinson was pushed so hard that he actually bounced off the ground. A few minutes later, he was dead.
So, what’s the standard procedure here? Well, as Unity points out over at Liberal Conspiracy, the police in Britain have taken to treating criminal assaults which result in death as murder cases – even, in one case, where the heart attack that killed the man happened over 24 hours later.
It will not surprise you, I suspect, to discover that matters are treated rather differently when the assailant is a police officer, as distinct from a member of the criminal peasant underclass that we’re told to live in constant fear of.
Within hours of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the police were denying that he’d had any contact with their officers. Instead, they gave the newspapers a rather different story – one where gallant police officers rushed in to help this man after he suffered a heart attack, but were tragically impeded in their work by vicious rioting crusties and anarchists who pelted them with bricks as they tried to rescue him. The newspapers, having long since discovered that reprinting official statements is much easier than actually doing journalism, and that a story about evil crusty anarchists delights a certain knuckle-dragging section of the audience, reprinted the police line unquestioningly and knocked off down to the pub.
Five years ago, that would have been that. A handful of eyewitnesses would have protested that this simply isn’t what happened, but their comments would have gone unheard outside of Indymedia and a handful of student newspapers. Middle England would have shaken its head at the antics of these terrible dreadlocked crusties, killing that poor man. End of story.
Today, however, we all carry video cameras, and the story is different. We have footage of a police officer viciously assaulting Ian Tomlinson. The police lied about this. We have eyewitness accounts of the “rioters” providing first aid to Tomlinson, and requesting help from the police, along with footage of the crowd standing back, making room and allowing police medics to work on the stricken man. The police lied about this. We have footage of police officers quite distinctly not being pelted with bricks. At one point, a solitary empty water bottle sails towards the officers and bounces harmlessly off body armour. I’ve been hit by more dangerous projectiles in business meetings. The police, once again, lied about this.
They did more than lie, however. They also concealed. The City of London is one of the places with the most surveillance on the face of the planet. In a nation filled with CCTV, the City stands out like a hotspot – there are cameras on every wall and every corner. Footage from those cameras, which would have revealed the lies of the police, was not released. As an interesting parallel, I invite you to consider the fact that on the day when Jean Charles de Menezes died, the CCTV cameras in Stockwell station and on the tube train where he was shot were, apparently, malfunctioning. What unhappy coincidence!
Moreover, they smeared. Remember when the press breathlessly reported that Jean Charles de Menezes was an illegal immigrant? (He wasn’t.) How about the reports that he may have been a drug addict, possibly even involved in the trade? (He wasn’t, on either count.) Both lies have entered the popular perception of de Menezes, muddying the water around the Met’s behaviour and giving knuckle-draggers the opportunity to mutter “bloody got what he had coming to him” around their mouthfuls of cheap lager.
It’s little surprise, then, that in the day following Ian Tomlinson’s death we saw the beginning of allegations that he had attacked the police (he hadn’t), had verbally assaulted them (he hadn’t – not until they smashed him into the pavement, anyway) and even more unpleasant insinuations about his alcohol use (utterly unproven and entirely irrelevant – attacking a completely harmless man with his hands in his pockets who’s had a few beers is no better than attacking the same man when he’s sober).
One wonders what would have happened if the people who filmed the footage hadn’t sent it to a newspaper. What if they had sent it directly to the police, for instance? Would it have been released? Or would the “managed enquiry” presently underway by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an enquiry whereby police officers themselves investigate their own colleagues (the word “Independent” here is, presumably, intended to be ironic) have reached the most convenient conclusions, sat on the evidence and hoped it would all go away?
There is other footage, too, which is worth looking at from the G20 protests. There is footage (and eyewitness accounts) of a baton charge on protestors who are sitting down on a road, harming no-one. There is footage of a violent police assault on a crowd of protesters, all of whom are holding both hands in the air and chanting “not a riot, not a riot”.
And then there is the iconic footage of the windows of RBS being smashed, a few minutes of footage which is being wheeled out by every right-winger or authoritarian to justify the actions of the police on the day. Yet… Look closer. In this footage, there are no more than half a dozen actual “rioters” – and at least three dozen photographers and cameramen from the press.
Is it entering the realms of conspiracy theory to wonder who told those cameramen to gather at that exact spot? To ponder whose decision it was that RBS, alone out of all of the businesses in that part of the City, should leave its windows unboarded on April 1st? To question why those five or six window-breakers could not be isolated (they’re a long way away from the rest of the crowd already) and rounded up? Instead, the entire crowd was penned in with them, in a process known as “kettling”, and deprived food, water and toilet facilities for several long hours, as well as being assaulted by police if they attempted to leave the cordon.
I have no illusions about the composition of these demonstrations. The only time I have attended them was at some of the early Stop the War demos, and I quickly became disillusioned due to the heavy presence of loudmouthed groups like the various Socialist factions, who seemed determined to dominate proceedings. On the day of the April 1st protests, I showed my support for the demonstrators by, er, going to the giant Westfield shopping centre on the other side of the city with a friend and buying stuff I didn’t need.
But even if I don’t agree with all of the sentiments of those protestors, I believe that they have a fundamental right to be heard. The nation is angry, and rightfully so, and we have a right to take to our streets – OUR streets, note, built and maintained with OUR money, for OUR benefit – and express that anger peacefully. The police, however, have chosen to try to clamp down on and discourage protest – keeping reasonable moderate people away by portraying peaceful protests as “riots”, and when the protesters don’t cooperate and riot as they’re meant to, the police create violent situations for the media to film and broadcast.
More than our right to protest, however, there is another right to consider. We have the right to walk through our streets without being assaulted and killed by the police force that we pay to protect us. We have the right, when a police officer commits a criminal act in broad daylight (or any other kind of light), for that act to be treated with seriousness, not covered up as our supposed protectors close ranks around the culprit. Innocent people should never have to be afraid of the police, and I fear that today, in my city, that assertion is crumbling.
The Metropolitan Police is a part of my city, an intrinsic, vital part of the functioning of this great urban landscape – but as each of these stories emerges, I find myself less and less sure who these people are actually serving. Where does “keeping us safe” end, and “keeping us in line” begin – and when did we cross that line?
