The finding that Ian Tomlinson died during the G20 protests, not of a heart attack but of an abdominal haemorrhage, is truly devastating for several reasons -
1 Had the City employee not by chance captured the episode on video, the whole matter would have been swept under the carpet.
2 The police rushed to spin a story to the media which exculpated them any blame, and indeed present their involvement exclusively in a good light, before they had taken any witness statements or examined any CCTV evidence.
3 The Home Office pathologist brought in to do the first post mortem hastily produces a verdict which conveniently also excuses the police of any responsibility.
4 The IPCC (independent Police Complaints Commission) initially simply accepted the heart attack story and left it to the Met. to carry out any inquiry, claiming that no video evidence was available (though there were 4 CCTV cameras in the vicinity).
5 The media, with the exception of the Guardian, all tamely accepted the police version without any independent checking of the facts.
Quite apart from a possible manslaughter charge against the Territorial Support Group police officer who struck down Tomlinson, this catalogue of misdirections and deceptions calls for drastic rform.

There needs to be a full public inquiry into the policing of the G20 protests concentrating on the death of Tomlinson, but not exclusively – at least two other assaults by police on peaceful demonstrators are known to have occurred. It is clear that lessons that should have been drawn from the death of Kevin Gately in the demo against the National Front in 1974 and of Blair Peach in the anti-racist protest in Southall in 1979 have still not been learnt. There needs also to be serious scrutiny of the police tactics of kettling – confining demonstrators within a confined area, sometimes for hours at a time, before dispersing them if necessary by force. More generally, the wider question of proportionality and the degree of force deployed should be reviewed in regard to situations where there is no evidence of violence on the part of the demonstrators. This matters , if we are to avoid any repetition of Grosvenor Square, Grunwick or Orgreave, when 2009 may well see increasing unrest.
A full-scale inquiry is also needed to answer certain key questions which should lead to major changes of procedure. Who chose Dr. Freddy Patel, the Home Office pathologist, who has twice before been reprimanded for professional failure or misconduct, rather than, in such a sensitive case, an alternative pathologist with an unblemished record for professional competence and thoroughness, like Dr. Nathaniel Cary who carried out the second post mortem at the request of the family? Did the police have some inkling of what had really happened when they fed a false version of the events to a gullible media? Why did several newspapers swallow the police story whole without trying to obtain any supportive evidence? Can the IPCC really be trusted to act as a rigorous watchdog of police excesses when they simply accepted police assurances without further ado, even when a fatality was involved?
When these questions are answered in full, there needs to be a public debate, not only about police powers and the culture for handling peaceful protests, but also about the procedure for reporting on such events and the whole question of police accountability and the follow-through of complaints. Nor should there be any further fudging of the current unresolved, festering issue of who ultimately is responsible for policing in this country, in terms of the parameters of ‘operational independence’, the need to avoid (any further) politicisation of the police, and the tension between the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London over policing issues within the Metropolis.

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