The uses of Surveillance
Amazing, really, that they thought they would get away with this, or that anyone, after De Menezes, believed for a second in 'natural causes' and heroic police medics being 'pelted' with 'missiles'. It also suggests at least one consequence of our self-surveillance, with ubiquitous digital cameras and camera phones - that we can put surveillance to our own uses. Note also that the person who filmed this was, like the man killed, a bystander.
posted by owen hatherley at 11:21 am
21 Comments:
No Owen, because it should be self-evident by now that quite literally any death in the vicinity of a police operation is due to police brutality. And we all know that there isn't a single anti-capitalist protestor wrong-headed enough to have mistakenly pelted a police medic.
That policeman did not 'kill' Ian Tomlinson. He was a coward and a bully, but Tomlinson clearly had a chronically weak heart if being pushed to the ground could induce a fatal heart attack. I've seen worse shoulder barges on a football pitch, no-one stops the game crying murder.
It IS of course astonishing that the police tried to present such an incorrect version, when any bystander could be functioning as human CCTV.
'Kill' may be strong, but assault or manslaughter strikes me as straightforward enough. But it's nice to see some people's assumptions can't be shaken by any amount of evidence.
Incidentally, I immediately assumed the police version was broadly true, in that you could imagine one or two arseholes throwing stuff, and didn't think too deeply about someone in their 40s having a heart attack from natural causes. The ire here is partly directed at myself, as I, and everyone else, should have known better.
Your football analogy is preposterous. A footballer has trained to take falls like that, is likely to expect them, and is likely to be in peak physical fitness. And nobody, no matter how able-bodied, expects it to happen to them on their way home from work. Obviously this isn't a straightforward case of murder, but if you're going to cordon off a large area, regularly charge it with batons and dogs, randomly beat people up and block off all exit routes, you can reasonably expect things like this to happen. The man's weak heart is rather beside the point. The question is, was his death caused, or if we're going to play with semantics, triggered by the actions of the police? It seems pretty incontrovertible that it was.
Ugh. Anonymous above is a rather vile individual. (For my part - I have more often seen demonstrators in these situations helping the injured than I have seen the police, who, on the whole, tend to be the ones causing the injuries. The speed with which that oh-so-precise press release was delivered immediately made me suspicious. You simply cannot trust these fuckers an inch. They systematically lie about almost everything they do.)
10 years ago, the police would have issued a press release, the docile press would've believed them, and the truth would've taken a good five years to emerge. Dozy plod hasn't quite got to grips with the mass spread of digital technology. This is probably a good thing.
Ian Tomlinson died (i) because the Met at a very senior level authorised violence (all those press releases, including the one about the Met being 'up for violence'), and because (ii) 'kettling' is currently legal, which means the Met is free to punish anyone who turns up for a demo of which the Met disapproves by locking them up without food, drink or toilets for up to 7 hours. That includes anyone who happens to be in the vicinity at the time, such as Ian Tomlinson.
The officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson was just doing what lots of other cops were doing that day. Except that in this case the victim was not young and fit but physically vulnerable.
"I've seen worse shoulder barges on a football pitch"
Funny, some guy was getting beaten up outside work today, someone thought we should intervene - but I've seen harder punches in a boxing ring, screw that.
[Love the blog, Owen]
I'm not vile. I'm not even nasty, brutalist or short. I'm really quite charming.
And fair enough, the football analogy was poorly, hastily chosen.
My point is, shown that video on its own without knowing what followed, very, very few people would have tutted and said, wow, probably killed him there.
It's assault. It is a BAD THING which I am not defending. I am trying to suggest that, while Owen makes a rhetorical show of seeing the light and realizing that - of course! - the police killed Tomlinson all along, he is guilty of bad faith. A minor act of violence had a deeply sad and unexpected outcome. It is lazy propaganda to shout killer, not insight.
Re 'assumptions', I have no cosy assumptions about police conduct at all. The British police have a shameful history of violence. But without meaning to come across as the tough-guy capitalist realist, to your soggy bloggy milquetoasts, a policeman shoving someone to the ground is just that, not murder.
This is murder:
"It was at that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and kicked him in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of his rib cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh. The thought formed in Covell's mind: "I'm not going to make it."
The riot squad were still struggling with the gate, so a group of officers occupied the time by strolling over to use Covell as a football. This bout of kicking broke his left hand and damaged his spine. From somewhere behind him, Covell heard an officer shout that this was enough - "Basta! Basta!" - and he felt his body being dragged back on to the pavement.
Now, an armoured police van broke through the school gates and 150 police officers, most wearing crash helmets and carrying truncheons and shields, poured into the defenceless building. Two officers stopped to deal with Covell: one cracked him round the head with his baton; the other kicked him several times in the mouth, knocking out a dozen teeth. Covell passed out.
There are several good reasons why we should not forget what happened to Covell, then aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only the beginning. By midnight on July 21 2001, those police officers were swarming through all four floors of the Diaz Pertini building, dispensing their special kind of discipline to its occupants, reducing the makeshift dormitories to what one officer later described as "a Mexican butcher's shop". They and their colleagues then illegally incarcerated their victims in a detention centre, which became a place of dark terror."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8
Wow. I'm going to have to take, shall we say, strong exception (not sure what Owen's policies are regarding more explicit language) at the use of comrades being tortured and shot at in Genova as the means of exculpating another cop in London.
A policeman shoving somebody to the ground, and that somebody suffering a heart attack as a result, can in no way be normalised or excused, much as the act of policemen shoving people to the ground is habitual in such situations. Habitual is not the same as acceptable, and there are laws that apply for people dying in violent circumstances that don't get suspended when the G20 rolls into town.
without meaning to come across as the tough-guy capitalist realist, to your soggy bloggy milquetoasts
Eww. Charming, you say?
On my 'rhetorical show of seeing the light', and attendant 'bad faith'. You may have noticed that in two long posts about the demonstrations outside the Bank of England I didn't mention Ian Tomlinson's death once. Given my already evident distrust of the police (see recent posts on Miners strike and dubious nostalgic police posters) I would, fairly obviously, have jumped on the issue if I had any major suspicions, would I not? Only when there was evidence that the man had died as a direct consequence of this jolly rough-housing did I mention it on the blog.
For what it's worth:
'murder' is innacurate, 'killed' is possibly too strong. They weren't using tear gas, water cannon, plastic bullets, or real bullets for that matter, which they have done in the recent past. What they were doing is a) hyping up the event for violent confrontation ('we're up for it, and up to it'), b) acting in a planned, belligerent and violent fashion, whilst armed, against unarmed civilians, and c) lying through their fucking teeth, after de Menezes and everything, and hoping that they could just make it go away. It's not murder, just outright thuggery and lies.
I mean, even the Evening Standard, until a few weeks ago owned by Nazi sympathisers, is on the Met's case. My own suggestion is that what they (the government and police) intended to be a 'nip in the bud' to a summer of protest has just backfired on them, to the extent that any further protests are likely to be further invigorated by the callous animal fuckwittery of this situation.
(ps- think about the man recently who was sent down for throwing a glass which shattered and spiked somebody's jugular, killing them. If the heart attack was induced (which is probably unprovable) then this incident is manslaughter at the very least).
Not to say I condone this behavior - but essentially the only thing clear in that clip is that the police are cunts; which is something we all are aware of. There is no point relying or even bringing to light this form of 'evidence' by way of the far leftist position toward the G20 when it does nothing other than to serve as an abstract, irreconcilable statement. This man was pushed admittedly, by the fash, onto the floor and died later. It is important to acknowledge this almost unfathomable (and somewhat inconclusive) scenario, but none the less still essentially meaningless when compared to the reality of the anti-capitalist position; i.e. there are no ideas present. I want to see less small gripes from far-leftists and more coherent theoretical positions from you intelligent chaps. Blogs are not about simply commenting anymore - you have the space to make plausible a re-generation of the left - so please, please try harder. The summer is coming, there will be plenty more protests too, why don't we lock ourselves up a while and try to put together a manifesto of sorts? Although politically flawed in a lot of respects, Badiou has a point: "We cannot rest content with the dialectical relationship between the state and the mass movement, the preparation for insurrection, and the construction of a powerful and disciplined organisation . We must actually re-establish the hypothesis in the field of ideology and action." For me the operative word here is ideology - or perhaps just simply - theory.
One last post from the Vile Anonymous. Seems I lost one just now, so this risks being a repost.
Owen, to clarify, I was trying to pre-empt exactly your 'eww' response, by making clear that I am NOT presenting myself as a capitalist-realist, nor am I trying to accuse you of being a milquetoast.
Giovanni, sorry to have offended. I am not normalizing or excusing the police behaviour in this instance. By referring to Genoa I am trying, not to reduce the Tomlinson incident to a comparative nothing, but to avoid a cheapening of the rhetoric of our critique, so that the full and real horror of atrocities like Genoa can be maintained, not least as evidence to be cited for those toiling under cosy assumptions about police conduct. If you read my comments, I insist throughout that the police behaved as cowardly lying thugs. The police are in the dock here. But I believe them to be in the dock for assault and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, not murder. Like it or not, there is a scale of violence, and we can say something is not murder without 'excusing' it. Thus shove < throwing a glass < mass-beating to a bloody pulp < etc.
Blogging is immediate, spontaneous etc, which is its strength and weakness. In complaining about Owen's hasty choice of word which wound me up, I made a very poor comparison myself (the football field analogy). Mea culpa. So enough nitpicking and back to the big picture as the previous Anon requests, and in an irenical spirit: fuck the police.
They weren't using tear gas, water cannon, plastic bullets, or real bullets for that matter, which they have done in the recent past.
I'm intrigued to know at which particular demonstrations "in the recent past" the British police have used "tear gas, water cannon, plastic bullets, or real bullets".
This puts the criminalisation of photographing the police into sharp perspective. It's clearly an essential democratic activity, yet we get the Home Office or Justice Squad or whatever it's calling itself now presenting it as the overture to terrorism. I was totally taken in by the early Menezes reports of barrier-jumping, heavy coats, suspicious activity etc (all false), and cannot really communicate my sense of betrayal when I learned that was all bollocks. Respect for the state apparatus would no doubt increase if they didn't respond to this kind of tragedy with a blizzard of disinfo.
Owen, call me a cynic but I'll only be amazed that the police thought that they could get away with it when we see people up on charges.
Juvenile Dwarf wrote:
I'm intrigued to know at which particular demonstrations "in the recent past" the British police have used "tear gas, water cannon, plastic bullets, or real bullets".
Their use was fairly common by the RUC not so long ago.
In the last instance, the policeman killed Ian Tomlinson. You can spent as many words you want to express it: the man is dead.
And if he was wearing a banker suit that day, he would probably be alive.
Sorry JD, I wasn't being specific about British police there, just 'Police' as a worldwide category.
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