Ian Tomlinson’s death is not the issue

Firstly, this isn’t murder. Battery, yes; manslaughter, perhaps; conduct unbecoming, definitely. We do not have enough evidence yet to say that the actions of the police lead to Ian Tomlinson’s death. The fact that A happened after B does not imply that B caused A. It may be that Mr Tomlinson’s sand had run out, regardless of the intervention by the police officer. It also does not look like the police officer intended to kill Mr Tomlinson. Manslaughter may be a possibility, but the people saying ‘it was murder’ are just flat wrong.

At the same time as one side of the political debate has sought to say, straightaway, that this is murder, another side has tried to play the whole thing down. It doesn’t matter – from the point of view of the principle – whether Mr Tomlinson died or not. As Septicisle points out over at Liberal Conspiracy, the copper in question could not reasonably have expected pushing someone over to result in death.

There is a problem with CCTV and, indeed, all forms of photography, whether still or moving. We simultaneously want the right to take pictures wherever we want without interference by the state (I recommend looking at Matt Wardman’s list of incidents) and we want a right to privacy in the public space. I add a couple of riders to that – firstly, the public space bit means that Max Mosely’s sexual preferences should have remained private. Secondly, the problem of the gutter press publishing pictures of celebrities in unfortunate positions is a function of the lack of responsibility of said outlets and our own (media-driven) obsession with celebrity rather than photography.

Given that a private organisation, Google, now has the capacity not only to photograph us all from above but, street by street, from the road, the debate shifts as the power to accumulate a huge amount of photographic data on just about everyone is no longer solely in the hands of the state. I think this helps frame the debate in a more helpful light as the widening of the capacity removes some of the noxiousness that occurs whenever ‘the state’ comes into debate.

One of the distinctions that has been made for private and state cameras is that we have a choice about going into private shops and so on but do not have that choice for the public highway. That is a false choice, as nigh-on every convenience store, supermarket and pub in London and, I suspect, most built-up areas of the country have CCTV and it can be pointed from a private building into a public space. There are also private spaces that have a public function – for instance, a football match at any large stadium will be covered in cameras.

We need to decide how we resolve the tension between right to photograph and right to privacy in public before we address CCTV. I don’t want to go into it at length, but I favour the former as the restrictions on public space required by the latter I find unpalatable and unworkable.
Fundamentally, what is the difference between the images caught of a police officer attacking Mr Tomlinson and the (putative) images of a civilian attacking a police officer? Fundamentally, what is the difference between the government saying that it is wrong to photograph its agent (in the form of a police officer) in delicto flagrante and the assertion of a right to privacy by a celebrity?

There is no difference. In the latter case, there are issue of reasonableness but they have more to do with excess and aggressively shoving a camera in someone’s face than the principle itself. There are risks in having a large number of cameras around the country. These can be managed and reduced, but, in this instance, the state has been made a legal person like any other – or at least, like Google – by the march of technology. Particularly given the footage that has emerged of the police behaving in what is at best a stupid manner and may well be a criminal manner, the need to be able to show what the police are doing.

Newsflash to the right: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean that they’re Dixon of Dock Green.
Newsflash to the left: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean they’re a member of Birmingham CID.

The police are sometimes a bit naughty. Well, stop the presses. No, m’lud, he fell down the stairs before accidentally brutally stabbing himself to death while shaving.

Indeed, while it shouldn’t happen and other officers there should have stopped him, it’s no great surprise that when you put a load of people in uniform and then alternate them between sitting in vans for ages and dealing with the great unwashed, things go a little bit Zimbardo.

There has been an amount of soul-searching given that the right would not normally react in a positive way to something like this; I’m going to point you in the direction of our Hellenic chum, Mr Eugenides.

The police are, amazingly, humans. As I said earlier on, it should be no surprise that the police are subject to all the other features, good and bad, of the H. sapiens. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not in the habit of hitting someone with their truncheon for no good reason. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not racists.

It only takes a few people to give a larger group a bad name, whether their name is Constable Savage or their penchant is for throwing bricks through windows. As ‘Various People Against Nasty Things (Hijacked by Nutty Lefties)’ does not, as yet, have a standing army, I’m going to focus on the police as they are present everywhere and are rather more important to the cohesiveness of society.

Fortunately, the police are a lot better than they used to be but incidents like the death of Ian Tomlinson (or, rather, his being hit with a truncheon) don’t only happen when there’s a camera watching.

Opposition to paperwork in all its forms has become something of a leitmotif for many parts of the political spectrum, as is opposition to ‘heavy-handed Whitehall diktat’ or words to that effect. Certainly, there is a balance to be struck, but I hope that this incident shows that we do need to find a more satisfactory answer to quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – who watches the watchers? – than the Guardian and Indymedia. That means paperwork and that means procedure and that means form-filling and that means having a watching brief to make sure that it’s not going to far in either direction. That equally applies to social services, teaching, medical care and so on.

I have been on protests for all sorts of things and I rather suspect I will continue to protest for all sorts of things. For the record, I’m a fairly law-abiding sort of fellow. I have been known to attend protests without, I might add, the slightest intention of throwing anything at anyone. I only mention this because I recall being shoved by a police officer on one occasion; I was walking, with a friend, right at the back of a block of demonstrators. The police wanted us to go a bit more quickly – a few of us at the back were dawdling – but instead of asking us to stay with the rest of the group, they pushed us. Not violently, not with any force of any substance, but enough to get the message across.

This raises a couple of issues.

Firstly, the rationale for protesting. For a lot of people – think of the huge protest against the war – it is a bourgeois, middle-class activity on a par with writing a letter to your MP. It’s not something you do very often, it’s not something you really expect to achieve anything but at least you’ve had your say and you feel like you’ve had something to do with democracy, or something similarly nebulous, registered your protest and hopefully brought some publicity to your cause. There is a section that does want to throw bricks around and/or start the revolution, but it is relatively small. What the police don’t seem to have realised is that they push the former group into the latter group before they even arrive at a protest if they’ve seen pictures of the last protest and are expecting trouble.

Partially, there is a disconnect between those who wish to protest peacefully and those who are going to cause trouble. That isn’t going to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, the police are going to need to rethink their tactics – yes, kettling – but also the attitudes of individual officers, on the ground, towards protesters. For a start, they have to explain this photo. Not the fact that the officer in question is a medic, but that the officer in question has baton raised and that this is not an isolated incident.

The justification of protecting public order seems to be pretty weak, given that SOCPA has been kicked in the teeth by the displaying the flag of the LTTE – a proscribed, terrorist group within the EU, USA and other countries – on Parliament Square without the necessary permissions to be even protesting under the Act.

Secondly, failure. One of the most scandalous parts of this whole, sorry tale was that the police made up a story and then passed it onto the papers, who dutifully reported it without checking the facts, with no amendment made until the infamous film footage came to light. Not only that, but the IPCC seemed to think that the CCTV cameras in the City of London – an area liberally coated in them and other security apparatus – were all broken that day. It needs to be possible for organisation to say ‘we screwed up’ or ‘we don’t know’ without howls of derision from the media and, indeed, the blogosphere.

This the operative White House position. All other statements are inoperative.

– Ronald L. Ziegler, after Watergate was uncovered.

Similarly, you could look at the Menezes case, or the Lawrence case, or Blair Peach, and so on. I don’t know what the answer here is. Some of the questions and some of the answers might be above, but ultimately the police need to try to change the attitude whereby rule-breaking by officers is not reported. That has been going on for some time, but pressure must be maintained for it to continue and the change must respond to the current situation.

Our sympathies must and do go to the family and friends of Mr Tomlinson. However, the last few minutes of his life are, I’m afraid, unremarkable except for the issues that they raise. To lose sight of those issues and focus on the personal tragedy for Mr Tomlinson’s kith and kin would be to miss the opportunity that events have forced upon us.

xD.

Update: Bloggerheads – I’m not standing for this. Why were police officers going around with their numbers covered? Why were they allowed to? Why were they attacking people who weren’t doing anything?