The police officer filmed pushing Ian Tomlinson to the ground will not face criminal charges, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.

The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, announced this morning that the officer — called PC ‘A’ — shown here pushing the 47-year-old former newspaper vendor to the ground at the 2009 G20 demonstrations in London, has no case to answer.

PC ‘A’ can be seen hitting Tomlinson with a baton and pushing him over at the South end of the Royal Exchange Buildings in the City of London. Demonstrators helped Tomlinson up and he is later seen staggering down the road. He later collapsed outside 77 Cornhill and died from internal bleeding. Evidence compiled using photographs and video readily available on the internet and via news organisations showed that not only were police not attacked by protestors as they sought to give Tomlinson first aid (as had been claimed), but that their phalanx-like lines of officers may have prevented an ambulance from reaching Tomlinson sooner.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission was late in launching an inquiry into the death, claiming there was nothing suspicious about it. Only the release of footage of the incident by the Guardian and Channel 4 News a week later changed their minds. The IPCC submitted its findings four months after Tomlinson’s death. Its initial post mortem stated that he died of a heart attack. A second investigation by the IPCC concluded that he died of internal bleeding.

It took 15 months for the CPS to come to a decision about whether to charge the officer, a member of the Territorial Support Group, with manslaughter. The deadline to charge him with common assault has long passed.

In a statement released this morning, the CPS says it will “not be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Tomlinson’s death was caused by PC ‘A’ pushing him to the ground. That being the case, there is no realistic prospect of a conviction for unlawful act manslaughter. It also follows that there is also no realistic prospect of a conviction for assault occasioning actual bodily harm or misconduct in public office.”

The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who won praise for his coverage of the incident, said: “Knowing the Ian Tomlinson case inside-out, I am shocked. Manslaughter was a tough call, but no charge at all? Not misconduct?”

The Tomlinson family who were in attendance at today’s decision along with PC ‘A’, claim the investigation was a cover-up. With Keir Starmer calling the events leading to Tomlinson’s death an “alleged assault” [despite clear evidence that Tomlinson was not only hit but pushed hard in the back], no one is surprised that PC ‘A’ was let off. But to not face any form of disciplinary action?

There’s a chant on the streets when demonstrators have a grudge against the police. It goes “no justice, no peace, fuck the police”. Today it is “no justice, no peace, we are the police.”

Download a timeline of the events on the day of Ian Tomlinson’s death.

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This article was first published on the Index on Censorship, 22 July 2010.

Home Secretary Theresa May is to halt searches of individuals without reasonable suspicion after the European Court of Human Rights rules the power unlawful.

In a speech to the House of Commons, May cited a European Court of Human Rights judgment that stop and search powers granted under Section 44 were illegal and equal a violation of the right to a private life. The court stated that powers were “drawn too broadly — at the time of their initial authorisation and when they are used. It also found that the powers contain insufficient safeguards to protect civil liberties.”

May went on to say that the government cannot appeal the ECHR’s judgment — nor would they have done had they been able to.

Shadow Home Secretary Alan Johnson criticised the government’s decision, stating that the decision in Strasbourg was based on how stop and search was used “some years ago” and that the use of Section 44 had “dropped considerably over the last two years”.

May says that after seeking urgent legal advice and consulted police forces she would be “introducing a new suspicion threshold”. Instead of “requiring a search to be ‘expedient’ for the prevention of terrorism” a search would have to be “necessary for that purpose”.

Officers will no longer be able to search individuals using Section 44 powers. Instead, they will have to rely on Section 43 powers – which require officers to reasonably suspect the person to be a terrorist.

Officers will only be able to use Section 44 in relation to the searches of vehicles and they will have to have “reasonable suspicion” to do so.

The case that brought Section 44 to this end was brought to the European court by journalist Pennie Quinton and student Kevin Gillan. They were stopped outside demonstrations at Defence Systems and Equipment International, the world’s largest arms fair held at the Excel Centre in East London.

The High Court and the Court of Appeal rejected Quinton and Gillan’s assertion that tactics under Section 44 were illegal, citing the threat of terrorism in London.

However, the ECHR declared it an unlawful violation of an individual’s right to privacy. Because the UK has signed up to the European court, decisions made by it are binding.

Pennie Quilton told Index on Censorship: “It’s the least Theresa May can do. Section 44 is a law that has been challenged and has been ruled out of order. This government has to make amendments to the law to stay in line with the ruling in Strasbourg. Something had to be done because the police said they weren’t going to change the way they operated despite the judgment.”

The Metropolitan police said that despite a ruling in January by the European court that deemed Section 44 unlawful, they would continue using it as its decision was being appealed.

Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship commented: “Stop and search under section 44 was widely used against individuals exercising their legitimate right to protest. It has been one of the most notorious and frequent abuses of free speech over the past decade. The Strasbourg ruling is an important landmark and I’m delighted that the government is scrapping the use of these powers.”

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This article was originally published in the Index on Censorship, 08 July 2010.

One of the most flagrant of these illegal uses was in London in April 2004, involving 840 people.

Fourteen police forces in the UK including the Metropolitan Police, City Police and Thames Valley misused powers on 40 separate occasions between 2001 and 2008. The Home Office said a number of “administrative errors” led to police chiefs not getting the proper authorisation to carry out searches. The Act allows officers to stop and search people without having any “reasonable suspicion” they are about to or intend to commit an act of terrorism.

The errors involve paperwork. Someone didn’t sign something or fill in the right bit. The errors came to light after the Metropolitan Police had to dig around its archive thanks to a Freedom of Information request.

If you define terrorism as the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve a goal, then you can make that definition fit police actions whenever they invoke Section 44. The European Court of Human Rights ruled the blanket use of Section 44 across London was unlawful. The law is too loose and open to abuse.

Home Office admission to the illegality of stops and searches under Section 44 does not mean a government admission to the illegality and inhumanity of that very act. Messing up on an administrative level only means that police forces around the country will tighten up their bookkeeping. It does not mean they will cease stopping and searching members of the public they arbitrarily deem a threat to the status quo.

It doesn’t take guts to question what a police officer is doing to you once he invokes Section 44. It takes knowledge.

So what can you do?

• You do not have to give your name and address or explain why you are where you are. You can’t run off, but you can go limp and stay silent.

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This article was originally published on the Index on Censorship, 10 June 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

But there’s an elephant in the museum. As you move from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, look up into the corners. What do you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they’ve undermined what is otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate has accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and is wholly complicit in it.

No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. The best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. This exhibition showcases everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It shows the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy.

Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early albumen prints resembled deer in headlights, intrigued but unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoes its way to a snap of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bears an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.

Launching the show in London highlights and mocks our current indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasts of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrates and attacks our voyeuristic culture.

If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you feel the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You’re meant to be shocked, and you’re meant to think.

But where is Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who comes can think of other things that should also feature. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” is negligent. This show is the closest the BP-sponsored Tate will come to being overtly political. They usually wait until an issue has become vanilla until they wield a sword of topical criticism.

The show is not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It is politicisation by proxy. Then again, the Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.

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This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, 28 May 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

Sergeant Smellie, known to some activists at Tombstone Face for his uncanny resemblance to graveyard furniture, walked out of Westminster Magistrates Court with a smile last seen on OJ Simpson. Nicola Fisher, for reasons of her own, chose not to give evidence at the four-day trial.

“That’s him walking free then,” said an activist when Twitter announced that Ms Fisher was staying at her Brighton home instead of giving evidence at the trial. Having sold her story to a national newspaper for £26,000, she must’ve bought a fair dose of cowardice for that sum.

There’s no guarantee Smellie wouldn’t have walked free if the animal rights activist took the stand. But it might have helped. Instead, the trial was heavily laden with testimonies from Smellie’s police colleagues saying that Fisher was acting aggressively brandishing a juice box. The towering TSG officer was obviously defending himself against vegan rage.

Peter Smyth of the Metropolitan Police Federation said that “a ten second clip on You Tube doesn’t tell the whole story”. It tells enough. Delroy Smellie assaulted Nicola Fisher. And she had the bruises to prove it. The Met Police recruitment website says that the position of police officer is one of “responsibility and trust, given only to law-abiding people with proven character and integrity”.

Nicola Fisher has said that she balked at giving evidence because she did not want to be subjected to a defence cross-examination. That she was suffering from depression and lacked confidence in the abilities of the prosecution. So a lawyer hired to defend an ultraviolent thug in uniform may have to ask some difficult questions of a woman who was exercising her democratic right to protest. Diddums. If you’re not ready to defend your actions in a court of law when you’ve obviously been assaulted and wronged, don’t run off to the newspapers and sell your story. Don’t bring it to court to allow the police to make a mockery of the justice system by showing that intimidation does work. Don’t insult everyone else who backed you when you were crying injustice.

Since my own arrest, my healthy mistrust of the police has been strengthened by the ridiculous farce played out in the courts involving ordinary citizens. One year on from the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson, we are still no closer to a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether they’ll prosecute anyone for that death. Over a year on from the demonstrations that saw thousands of young Muslims vent their anger at Israel’s wanton murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, we hear of police actions against teenagers that parallel military raids.

The anger over Sergeant Delroy Smellie’s acquittal is two-pronged. The first prong goes to Smellie, the police and the courts that are opening the door for future assaults. Smellie, after a suspension from service following his charge, is now on back the streets protecting the people of London. The second goes to Nicola Fisher who should have given evidence against the man who assaulted her. Her spinelessness makes her the Clare Short of activists.

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This article was originally published in the The Guardian, 01 April 2010.

Section 44 has long drawn criticism from protestors who argue the police have used the power to infringe their right to peaceful protest.

Policing and Security Minister David Hanson MP argued that the powers under Section 44 are “an important tool in a package of measures in the on-going fight against terrorism.” He said that he was “disappointed” with the ruling and “will seek to appeal”.

The case brought to the ECHR was that of Kevin Gillan and journalist Pennie Quinton who were stopped and searched en route to demonstrations against the world’s largest arms fair, Defense and Security Equipment International (DSEi), in 2003.

As she was stopped, Pennie volunteered her press cards with the hope of being waved on by the police. Instead Metropolitan Police searched her and Gillan under Section 44 and were ordered to stop filming.

Press freedom isn’t always a high priority for those policing protests. Press cards, as any journalist can tell you, are no guarantee of special treatment by the Metropolitan Police. Those that read “NUJ” are taken less seriously by our uniformed friends because “anyone can get those”. Despite carrying press cards emblazoned with the logo of a corporate television station I worked for, I’ve not only been stopped and searched under Section 44 but also arrested. And charged. And am now due to stand trial this February. For impersonating a police officer.

On other occasions, I’ve received hassle and faced physical injury at the hands of the Metropolitan Police. And that’s while I’ve been armed with that typical terrorist ruse of a television news crew consisting of me, a reporter, a cameraman and a rather conspicuous satellite truck.

Whilst manning newsdesks, an occasional complaint from journalists on the ground would involve members of the Metropolitan Police getting heavy-handed with cameramen and their kit. Nothing much comes from these incidents…phone calls from bosses to bosses ends up in apology and an unsaid agreement that they’d do the same dance when another such incident comes up in future. The link between newsrooms and the police is too great (one relies on the other for tip-offs on events, the other thinks they’re winning the PR war by doing so).

The Metropolitan Police are yet to issue any new instruction to their officers with respect to today’s ruling. I wonder how many stops and searches have happened since the Court’s decision. Because the Home Office have three months within which to appeal, I doubt the general public will see much change in how the police operate.

Section 44 allows senior officers to designate entire areas of their patch as stop and search zones based on their likelihood of being a terrorism target. Every train station in the UK is covered by a Section 44 order and there are over 100 stop and search zones in London. Because the Home Office is afraid such information might give terrorists ideas, most exact locations of stop and search zones are kept secret. So nobody really knows whether you are in an area covered by Section 44 and whether they are likely to be stopped and searched going about your daily business.

Even more invidious has been the way police forces across the UK have used Section 44 to target protestors.

What I want to ask is, by saying they will seek to appeal the ECHR’s decision, what do the Home Office think they know and who do they seek to control? And to what end? It’s as if, as people living in the UK, it’s assumed we are guilty and have to prove ourselves innocent.

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This article was originally published in the Index on Censorship, 12 January 2010.

Despite the fact that photographs from the first day of the G20 protests in April 2009 show me astride an armoured personnel carrier in black bra and blue boiler suit with another woman straddling me in red stockings and lipstick heels, the Crown Prosecution Service has charged me and 10 others with impersonating police officers. We’ve been charged with two counts under Section 90 of the Police Act 1996 – the greater of which carries with it six months in prison.

Spot the Policeman

The vehicle, owned by anarchist pranksters the Space Hijackers, bore a number of fake CCTV cameras bolted onto its turret, a plastic pipe with holes in it for a gun and a bumper sticker that read “How Do You Like My Driving? 0800 F**K YOU”. It blared Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from a sound system. If you can show me a police force that does all that, I can show you a police force on acid.

“This is ridiculous, they’ll never press charges,” lawyers who attended to the arrested said on the day. Nearly six months and one court appearance later, the CPS is showing no signs of dropping what will be a four-day trial at the City of Westminster magistrates court in February. Eleven people, witnesses for the defence, witnesses for the prosecution, at least half a dozen legal representatives, the paperwork, the man hours, the expense – to what end? There were 27 prosecutions arising from the G20 protests. The rest include violent disorder, affray and setting fire to things at the Bank of England. The Space Hijackers and their tank sought to satirise the aggression stirred up by police ahead of the protests. Police said they expected violence and were “up for it”. It was April Fools’ day. And it was apparently the start of the “Summer of Rage“.

The case of the rather large Sergeant Delroy Smellie (quiet at the back please), charged with assaulting a rather small protester, Nicola Fisher, by smacking her across the face and whacking her with a baton, is representative of the 250 complaints received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over police violence at the G20. Sure she was short and shouty, but you swat flies. Not women.

Events surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson show police to be drunk with the illusion of their own powers. Even members of the Metropolitan Police Authority despair over how things are run. They have criticised police over not taking the issue of wearing ID numbers seriously enough. Apparently disciplining those caught without ID badges was unnecessary because they could fall off or officers could forget to put them on. Smellie was not wearing his numbers when he vented his rage at Fisher. That fuelled public anger over the overt disregard for the accountability that wearing ID badges would give. So since the G20, the Met has spent over £40,000 on force identification numbers for public order officers. A very expensive way of paying lipservice if police chiefs don’t consider wearing identification important.

There is a feeling that police chiefs and the CPS – run by director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer (formerly a defence lawyer with a long history of human rights cases) – have lost a sense of perspective. The Space Hijackers have a 10-year history of using comedy and theatre to highlight the hypocrisies and failing of the system. I was accepted as their embedded journalist to get a flavour of their version of protest.

Impersonating a police officer is a criminal offence. Murder is a criminal offence. Would you rather see your tax money go towards prosecuting 11 people up for poking fun at the police, or 11 murderers?

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This article originally appeared in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section, 01 October 2009.

A rough translation:

“it is plastic bullet…he has shot three air shots…they give him
info who to shoot…yes..like Palestine…he is shooting to air…oh
bastard, bastard….Mohammad get away (from the window) they are
shooting…(when the soldiers flee) good for you, good for
you…(woman’s voice) bastards, someone help him, bastard…
(people) ya hussein.
(woman) get away, get away (from the balcony)”

“Press!”

The line of fluorescent yellow police officers pushed. A sea of bodies wavered, toppled, then crashed on the Kensington street.

“Angela!!!” I was holding on to the tripod. The camera and cameraman had long since vanished to another part of the steadily advancing police line. I grabbed Angela’s red-coated arm…she was slipping away into the maw of the Metropolitan Police. The police kept pushing. The protesters behind me were standing firm. Resisting. Sky News reporter Angela Corpe was folding in half as the police line forced forward. She was being trampled. I was being crushed. Anchoring myself to the tripod, I lifted her up with the aid of a man sporting a keffiyeh. We became entangled in a microphone cable as the pushing resumed. Somehow I managed to grab her handbag and the kit bag in the melee. Dragged her, the tripod, and the bags. More pushing. More forcing. More resisting. The protesters were screaming “shame on you” at the police.

“Move! Move!” screamed back the bellicose plods.
“I bloody well would if I had somewhere to move to,” was our response.

A pain to my head. Another to my leg. Coshed by our own tripod and kicked by who knows. Angela limps.
“You ok? Let’s get you out of here.”

We wind our way to the pavement near a hotel entrance. Gordon, our cameraman, finds us. He had his own story to tell. Squeezed between protesters and police. We start folding the tripod down. Tidying cables. Angela has lost her comms kit, the device that lets her communicate with the main control room in the newsroom for her live reports.
The phone rings. “Can we have you live at five minutes past five?” In twenty minutes.
“Er…yeah. It’s kicked off a bit here. Let us sort ourselves out ok?”
“Why don’t you fuck off and move?” yells a police officer. We make note of his ID number. He greets us with the politeness his colleagues gave us moments before.
***

Nearly 2,000 protesters calling for Israel to stop the aerial attacks on the Gaza Strip gathered at the gates of London’s Israeli Embassy on Kensington High Street. The day started off serenely, with around 150 people bearing banners, placards and a megaphone behind flimsy crash barriers. Sometime in the afternoon, the numbers swelled. The “big names” turned up…a Palestinian ambassador here, a fiery Member of Parliament there. The Neturei Karta, Orthodox Jews against Zionism, rocked up to show their support to a round of applause and the flash of cameras.

Then two men approached the gates of the road leading up to the Israeli Embassy and threw their shoes. A protest inspired, we think, by an Iraqi journalist and George W Bush. The first man was bundled off by the police. The second man made more a fuss and was floored by half a dozen officers. The swelling crowd over the road who were struggling to keep behind the barriers streamed forward…aghast…agape…angry. They quickly overwhelmed the meager police presence and occupied one of London’s busiest shopping roads on a weekend afternoon.

Muslims laid out prayer mats, families chanted slogans in English and Arabic. The demonstration, called a mere 24 hours before by groups from Stop the War to the Friends of Al Aqsa, was in full flow. Community leaders, MPs, former MPs, activists…all took turns on a megaphone stood atop street furniture near the embassy gates. Nobody could hear them but they served to keep the energy going.

They were calling for a cessation of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza – the ones that have killed nearly 300 people, injured more than double that. The ones that have sent Gaza’s hospitals into meltdown as they are running out of room to treat the hurt, store the dead. The ones that have sent a population where half rely on humanitarian aid to the unknown wastes of homelessness. They were joining voices from Iran to Lebanon to Turkey in proclaiming their anger at what’s often called “the situation”.

As I write, Hamas have just reported that Israeli aeroplanes have bombed the Islamic University in Gaza City. The airstrikes continue and through the miracle of modern technology, you can watch it live. I remember my one and only trip to the IUG. It was an oasis of a campus where you could amble along the promenade surrounded by students buzzing with the learning and the gossip of university life. The buildings were either whitewashed or a pinky stone that shone well in the Mediterranean sun. It was nice. And you could forget you were in the middle of Gaza City for a while.

“As long as Hamas controls Gaza, there is no hope for peace or the creation of a Palestinian state,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said. “We are determined, this is not a one day operation.” She agreed that the idea behind the initial attacks were a form of “shock and awe”. She maintains that they were pushed into these attacks due to the “constant bombardment” of Israeli targets by Gazan militants firing rockets into Israel’s heartland. And that they have allowed aid to enter…will allow aid to enter. Slowly. Hurt then heal. Bomb then balm.

Israel has called up some 6500 reservists. They are massing ground troops along the Gazan border. Its government says that they are not ruling out a ground incursion.

In an article by the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont he says that Israel has “supplied a rallying point”. That Gaza is something that can now be ranked with Deir Yassin. With Sabra and Shatila. A tangible massacre as opposed to the slow strangling of the world’s largest open air prison.

Angela Corpe’s comms kit, it transpires, is currently held at Kensington police station. At least ten people were arrested at the London demonstration. Countless others are massaging their injuries as the police camp out outside the Israeli Embassy for the night in readiness for another demonstration called for the next day. Israel holds all the cards. We are again watching which one they play.

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This article was first published on The Comment Factory on 29 December 2008. All rights reserved.