Police Power.....Mad!

Last week during the G20 protests a man was struck by a police officer and died.

Ian Tomlinson, 47, was trying to get home from his newspaper selling job, through the Royal Exchange Passage when he was struck in the leg with a baton by a metropolitan police officer and pushed to the ground. Bystanders are said to have helped Mr Tomlinson up, but he collapsed three minutes later of a heart attack and died.

Footage shows the newspaper vendor trying to get home to Smithfield past police cordons. He had his hands in his pockets, his back to the officers and it is alledged he was in no way part of the protest.

The independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the death.

I wonder, after looking at the pictures in the newspaper, why the officer chose to attack a man, not making any trouble and clearly just walking? I could understand a mistake perhaps if the scene was busy and there were lots of people creating havoc, but from the stills of the footage, it appears to be quite empty.

I was reading John Kingdom's Government and Politics in Britain, thinking about how much power the police on the streets should really have.

Kingdom writes that 'One of the defining characteristics of the state is the right to use violence' but that it needs to be used with caution or we run the risk of becoming a 'police state'. He also writes that 'Policing involves two broad functions 'fighting crime and maintaining public order'.
I think, that there is a very thin line between these two concepts. Yes, the police should fight crime in order to maintain public order, but there is a difference between keeping the peace and using violence in order to make a point.

In the case of the officer who hit Ian Tomlinson, no one knows exactly what was going through his mind at the time, in his eyes, he may have been trying to make a point that the police presence was there to stop anything kicking off, however he made the vital mistake in using a weapon. This raises the point of militarization. Using military style force to maintain order. 'Once officers are armed, mistakes can be fatal'. (Kingdom:670:ch21).

In 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public order Act was put in place giving the police the right to restrict protestors amongst other things. Of course this is a vital act given the amount of protests that have led to violence, but this should not protect the officer in question, and the footage will clearly show that he used force in completly the wrong circumstance. A similar case of police violence which led to the death of a person was Oliver Price in 1990, who died after being held in a head lock by a police officer.

Kingdom also writes that 'characteristically the police are associated with certain attitudes towards race, gender, class and ideology'. Looking at the stills, Mr Tomlinson does fit the lower class model, tracksuit bottoms, a shaved head and quite a big figure (I do not want to generalise here, I am just looking through the eyes of the officers) so this reiterates the police attitudes. It is however a very shocking incident, and it just shows that the police are giving too much freedom when it comes to policing the streets. Luckily there are witnesses in favour of Mr Tomlinson's family, and the footage, as it would not suprise me if the police got away with this by twisting the facts as has been done in the past, to protect the reputation of the Police Force in Britain. A quote from Kingdom 'There are grounds for believing that policing in the UK is a model for the world'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7992783.stm
John Kingdom: Government and Politics Chapter 21.