"It is time for the spinning to stop"
When Mr Tomlinson died during the police operation, the Met chose to delay announcing it for more than three hours. Its statement pointed a finger at protesters. "The officers gave him an initial check and cleared his airway before moving him back behind the cordon line to a clear area outside the Royal Exchange Building where they gave him CPR," it said. "The officers took the decision to move him as during this time a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them.The Independent Police Complaints Commission also comes out of the affair very badly:The force refused yesterday to reveal why it took so long to announce someone had died within the demonstration area, or to address the question of where the information about missiles being thrown at police officers had come from. Witnesses who aided Mr Tomlinson have always contested that police had been attacked by a hail of missiles.
"They have caught a real cold on this," said a senior source. "They were very slow, they clearly didn't think anything was wrong and they didn't look for it. Sometimes they just don't seem to be very independent."It's left to another Independent to put the boot in some more on the police, albeit a very balanced boot. "Unaccountable, secretive and out of control", the paper says. It too has sussed out the police spin:A former IPCC insider went further, blaming a "cosy" relationship with the police for the commission's failure to act quickly. "The problem with the IPCC is that it is too late to start inquiries and they go on for too long," said John Crawley, a commissioner for four years. "They should have picked this up as an independent investigation straight away. There was strong public interest given the concern about the 'kettling' tactics being used to police the protests and the need to gain the confidence of those demonstrators with information to come forward to someone who wasn't the police."
Almost as disturbing as the assault itself was the misleading response of the police when they were first probed on the incident. They made no mention of contact between Mr Tomlinson and their officers before he collapsed and briefed that other protesters had impeded police medics in their efforts to help him. It was only when this new footage emerged that the police admitted they might have a case to answer.
As for their attempts to present their involvement as merely shielding Mr Tomlinson from an angry mob, this was reminiscent of the false information circulated in the wake of the mistaken shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005. The public were told on that occasion that Mr Menezes' behaviour and clothing had given them cause for suspicion. These lies were exposed by CCTV footage from Stockwell Underground station, just as the police's account this week has crumbled in the light of these latest images.
Some of the miles and miles of footage that was shot has now been given to the Guardian and shared across the internet. It shows Tomlinson, who was not a demonstrator but one of the many people unable to leave the melee, being thrown to the ground a few moments before he died of a heart attack. Far from the police coming under attack, at this stage Tomlinson is only cared for by a demonstrator. Do the police have their own film of what happened?
What is also striking is that, so soon after the inquest into the death of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, assumptions about a suspicious death should be so swiftly made and the official version accepted so unquestioningly. One of the Met's major problems in the wake of de Menezes was the feeling that misinformation about the circumstances of his death was allowed to linger too long in the public domain.
Of course, the police are under pressure to come up with instant information for the ever-increasing media outlets. A man has died. How? Why? Who was he? It is hardly suprising that the police's best take on the incident – that they were the subject of attack by demonstrators as they tried to save a man's life – is the one that gets passed out and then gets prime position in the coverage. But when did it become clear to the police, from their own intelligence and video footage, what had actually happened to Tomlinson?
The men had been under surveillance for some time as part of what police described as “an ongoing intelligence-led operation”. Although details of the surveillance remain unclear, one source said the men were believed to be planning a terrorist operation abroad.For a start, how does a convoy provide "cover" to leave the country? You either have the right travel documents or you don't. And why to the police, who have had the men under surveillance, decide to reveal this to a national newspaper? Were the men arrested just in case they might be up to no good abroad? Has it stopped them going abroad in future?
Police were accused of using aggressive tactics, confiscating everything from toilet rolls and board games to generators and hammers. But ministers justified what they called the "proportionate" £5.9m cost of the operation, pointing out that 70 officers had been injured in the course of their duties.Presumably Coaker will be apologising.But data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act puts a rather different slant on the nature of those injuries, disclosing that not one was sustained in clashes with demonstrators.
The Home Office has now admitted that the protesters had not been responsible for any injuries. In a three-line written answer to a parliamentary question, the Home Office minister Vernon Coaker wrote to the Lib Dem justice spokesman, David Howarth, saying: "Kent police have informed the Home Office that there were no recorded injuries sustained as a result of direct contact with the protesters."
Relations between the police and the independent watchdog set up to investigate them are at breaking point, senior sources have told The Times.It's not entirely clear what the IPCC have done to deserve a backlash beyond publishing a report critical of Scotland Yard. But one Senior Office is allowed to allege, anonymously of course,
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) faced a backlash after publishing its critical report into Scotland Yard’s handling of information about the shooting of an innocent man the day after the July 21 attempted bombings in London.
"Private criticism" is a favourite tool of the Guardian's political reporters. It means that someone can have a free hit at their opponent without comeback.There has also been private criticism of the way the IPCC has conducted its first high-profile investigation since the watchdog body was reformed and made independent of the police.
"This was London in the grips of an attack, two weeks after another terrorist attack had killed 52 people," said one source. "Four men were on the run who could have attacked again, the events of the day were extremely fast moving. There is a sense that the IPCC, having failed to recommend any action against any of the officers involved in the shooting itself needed a scapegoat."
in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, sources say there were unconfirmed rumours that the man who had been killed may not have been one of the four suicide bombers being hunted. Mr Hayman is criticised by the IPCC for not passing this on to Mr Blair at a briefing he had with him at 6pm that night.We'll have to wait and see whether "unconfirmed rumours" and "unsubstantiated rumours" are valid descriptions of the information that the police had at that point. In the first place, there was never a positive identification of De Menezes as one of the suspects so the starting point was that he "may not have been one of the four suicide bombers being hunted". But surely the police had solid ID evidence almost immediately.However, senior sources question how he could have passed on the unsubstantiated rumours at that stage.
