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.

===

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

They recently had Sir Tom Stoppard and the Belarus Free Theatre on at the Free Word Centre.

Nick Cohen wrote a smashing review in the Guardian about how to make a drama out of a crisis.

Belarus is possibly Europe’s last dictatorship where freedom of speech and expression are, to state the bleeding obvious, non-existent. We can whinge about media bias and BBC censorship or other indulgent bullshit that may or may not affect our mortgage prices. But if I make sweeping criticisms of government or take a detailed bash at our police, I do not have to wait for the knock on my door. Nor do I have to watch my mobile phone conversations, vary my journey to work or learn how to lose people who are tailing me. All because I want to tell a story that needs to be told.

There’s a lot UK activists can learn from people like BFT’s Natalia Koliada – the main one being to stop ratcheting up your suffering under the unjust hands of the state. When you don’t know where your friend’s body has been buried because he popped round yours for a chat about life, the universe and everything, then come back to me. The next time you feel compelled to whine about having your ‘cover blown’ as you were trying to D-lock yourself to a bank, have a little whine. Then shut up, stop focusing on your suffering and look at the wider picture. The states and systems that need addressing, the truth that needs to be spoken to power.

Right. End of self-righteous bitch. Here are the videos.

The interns filmed them. I corrected exposure, cut them down yadda yadda.

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.”

=====

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

Here are a couple questions I’ve had to answer recently…along with the answers.

Which TV programme has been the most innovative over the last year and why? * (Max 200 words)
Newswipe. Through the laconic sarcasm of Charlie Brooker, BBC4 have tapped into the sort of demographic that reads Private Eye, claims to have read Shakespeare and secretly dances to Baccara.
Brilliant in its use of news archive, it jump cuts its way through the haze. Most Britons have no clue that a good number of the reporters giving them their news gleaned their information from press releases, newswires, the BBC News website and Wikipedia. Ten minutes before broadcast. Fewer still know that some news presenters are little more than bedtime story readers who ply their trade with autocue – the clever questions they ask are bellowed down their ear by an anonymous gallery producer.
Newswipe unashamedly bares these truths. It’s Private Eye for telly.
Brooker’s editorial combs through the news and uses facts and deeds to trip The Man up. Televisual aikido.
Brooker takes us on a journey. On his sweaty sofa we see a man who is as baffled with how the world works as we are. The sort of chap you’d have on your pub quiz team.
It’s infuriatingly perceptive. Newswipe cuts through bullshit in a way that makes you think “I wish I said that.”

In your view, what should be the top priority in media policy for the new Culture Secretary? Why is it such a top priority? (Max 300 words)
Jeremy Hunt’s priority ought to be encouraging quality local content – not just formats that can be replicated and readily sold on to television markets around the world [talent show TV, I'm talking to you]. He’s stated in his keynote speech that he not only intends to push superfast broadband across the UK, but to accept Ofcom’s recommendation on reforming local media ownership rules. He will “significantly relax” rules to allow local newspapers to own local commercial radio stations and establish local TV stations.
A important idea that aims to strengthen “local communities”. He’s even hired an asset management firm to publish a report in the autumn. But Hunt forgets that the internet has remapped the idea of the local. It’s no longer a geographic measure, but an interest-based one.
“New York has six local TV stations, London has none,” Hunt says. But what can a local television station achieve that neighbourhood-centric blogs given more bandwidth or a newspaper tie-in can’t? The push to digital has already killed appointment to view television. Neighbourhood-centric and interest-based new media is where extra revenue should go because the content structure is already established. Blogs like Brockley Central already have a following. Trying to manufacture a local feel by allowing local newspapers to run mini media fiefdoms can only lead to the sort of contrived quality last seen on Ghanian talk shows shot on VHS.
The DCMS should press on with pushing for more local media, local TV stations, local radio, local everything. But if this government wants to “repair broken Britain” and encourage local communities to communicate, they should look beyond the box.

=====

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.

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

When we meet, he is ankle deep in cut-out letters, spraymount and a scattering of UK election campaign propaganda. He’s recently finished a two-storey high paste up outside Shoreditch’s Cordy House in support of the Robin Hood Tax – a simple suggestion whereby .05% of profits made by big business gets allocated to social services and charities. To erect the behemoth on brick, it took one scissor-lift, twelve hours and a sea of paper and paste.

“So this is where the magic happens?” I ask.

“Hardly. I don’t really work like that.”

Known for altering a billboard of Amy Winehouse with the words “I hear Duffy’s selling coke” and likening Tony Blair to Darth Vader this most unlikely graffito is unconvinced of his status as a street artist.

“Artists lock themselves up in studios and create something from nothing. I drive past a billboard and think up gag lines. I have a quiet chuckle and I come here and knock something up”.

It doesn’t take long.

“I drove past a nice low billboard advertising the UK Independence Party on the M4. I got some paint and parked up a lay-by. Walked – in the rain – and painted ‘Kilroy Silk Woz Ere’ then fucked off.”

You can probably see it as you land at Heathrow.

“I work on my own. So I’m carting along ladders, buckets, paper, everything. And a camera. It’s not that I don’t have any friends – though that’s true too. Just that nobody I know fancies heading out at three in the morning in the London piss to put posters up.”

My first encounter with Dr D was thru an East End billboard reading “HMP London / Open Prison / I.D. must be carried at all times”. At the top right third was “dr.d”. Being an anorak of the vandal variety, seeing someone new sparks the curiosity. Seeing someone good sparks inspiration.

There were rumours. Questions over Dr.D’s identity, gender, even whether Dr.D was a group or an individual. The same sort of buzz that surrounds any really successful vandal who hides under a pseudonym. But Dr. D was no Banksy. There wasn’t a constructed mystery wrapped up in a commercial venture. You had billboards, and you had the occasional poster knocked up for sale for a tenner at a group show. Whoever Dr. D was, they or he weren’t in it for fame or money.

I found more and more billboards doctored with a laconic back-of-the-class-with-a-peashooter wit. Evening Standard street displays that weren’t all they seemed. The Olympic rings with blood spattered on them reading “Made in China”. Police adverts changed from “Make a Visible Difference” to “Make a Risible Difference”. Dr.D was tipping the axis of how I viewed the streets of London by a few degrees. His humour was no different to me scrawling on toilet doors but D was scrawling on the walls of a bigger bog.

This glue-stained scarlet pimpernel is, in my eyes, delivering overtly political messages with the aim of encouraging people who see his work to rethink their socio-political spaces. He’s less convinced.

“You say it’s political, but I’d rather let the paper do the talking. I’m more of a piss-taker and a chancer. Politics and politicians are asking for it. They spend thousands on campaign posters begging for votes to get a job in Parliament. But they way they put themselves forward is totally laughable.”

The last time he was caught by the long arm of the law, he was customising a then-new David Cameron “Year for Change” poster.

“Must’ve been a pretty sharp copper because I was there in full hi-vis, all the kit and all the gear to make it look as if I’d been working. But he obviously spotted something that wasn’t right – the fact that that poster had been up for a few days. He came over, had a word and well… most of what I was trying to put up is in that pile over there.” He indicates towards a smattering of letters on a counter.

When he’s not covered in paper and glue, slipping under police radar he’s “a rat catcher. And if you bought any burgers out of a burger van in the East End in the mid-90s, you probably bought them off me. Not that the rats or burgers are connected.”

I tell him that he doesn’t make life easy for himself. Is there a Mrs. D? “Who’s to say I’m not Mrs. D?” And where did the name come from? “It’s an old DJ name. Works nicely these days because Dr. D can also scan as ‘doctored’.”

I’m taken to an alleyway behind his surgery. Stencils litter the earth floor and he picks up one of a cut-out man like the ones you see indicating the men’s loos. Beneath are the letters WC.

“It’s World Corruption. I put a few of these up in the Foundry toilets in Old Street on copies of the Financial Times. I’m experimenting a bit more with stencil and lettering. My dad was a typesetter so I suppose that’s where my obsession with letters comes from. Oh…and an old art teacher knocked my grade down when I made a piece that spelled “magic” with a “k”. The national curriculum in this country seems to say that you can’t make good art unless it’s spelled right.”

He’s reluctant to push himself as ‘the next big thing’ but walks about his studio with a quiet confidence. He makes good work that makes people laugh…and then think. As unassumingly humble as he is, he says the best feeling is when artists say he’s done something that’s influenced them.

“I find it weird when I’m asked where I think my art will go because I don’t see myself as an artist. I wish I was. I wish I could paint and draw freehand but I can’t – the closest I’ve been to being an artist is living in a squat with artists.

I got into paste-ups after reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was shown the work that Ron English does with pop culture and billboards. Those two ideas came together and Dr. D was born – it’s a low skill way of expressing myself. Nobody else does it like me because it’s stupidly complicated, hugely inconvenient and a ball-ache. It’s a long way to go for a bit of a chuckle.

What I do is a problem-solving exercise that comes out of pragmatic laziness. How can I adapt a board to say something in the easiest possible way? The logistics is what influences how the final piece looks.

What makes me different is not just the scale of what I do but the fact that it’s not my job. We all know artists who are under personal pressure to create, to come up with something new. They spend hours crafting, devising et cetera. I don’t. I see a billboard and think of ways of making it funny. Or I pick up on funny things my friends say.”

Dr. D’s stock in the street art world seems to have risen. In reputation at least. One of the outfits he works with recently told me that D is their “golden boy…does the best stuff around.” Asked about this, the doctor hesitates.

“Sometimes I wish the guys who could paint, the ones I’m secretly jealous of, had more of a message that comes out in their work. Arty people are so…arty. I’ve hung shows where guys would turn up and not even have a screwdriver.

And a lot of street art people don’t really get what I do. I know I’ll never sell huge amounts and most of my work is off the streets within weeks. And it’s big so you can’t nick it. That makes me a non-commodity. I don’t push to sell limited edition canvases or prints because that’s not really what I’m about.

I think like an ad-man but I’m not promoting a product, I’m working for my own ends. And often times it’s just so I can drive past a board I’ve done and smile to myself.”

Most of what I have written is true. But I have changed some details to ensure the good doctor’s work can continue. The messages, the jokes, the subversion – all of that will stop if I let my lips loose. The need to keep D as anonymous as possible is greater than any truth I can offer you. As of now, the doctor is in.

===

This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, June 2010.

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.

===

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

Why? Libel. Apparently.

Instead of redrafting the Amnesty International press release and passing the words off as my own [really? that happens in the press?], here’s a link to the press release.

UPDATE: The ad is causing a bit of a stir in the FT newsroom. Emails are circulating amongst staffers, freelancers and management. In pre-Twitter days, if a newspaper decided to pull an ad, the public might’ve heard about it the following day. And only in hushed whispers. These days, its all over the Guardian and the Index on Censorship and the blogosphere like a rash. A pink one.

Could this be the rebirth of Amnesty – an emergence from the shadows of letter-writing and reactive press releases? Bear in mind that one of the blogs linked to above belongs to Naomi McAuliffe, Amnesty’s Digital Campaigns manager. It was her post on Twitter that told the world about Lionel Barber’s paper and its decision to snip the ad.

Sources at the FT say that one of their advertising department’s main concerns was whether Amnesty had the indemnity to deal with any potential comeback for the advert. The division between editorial and advertisement at the Financial Times is strict. What those on the outside looking in can fail to see is that editors at the FT are more than too aware of what the repercussions of pulling advertising are. Especially when it is put up by Amnesty International and targeted to run on a specific date. Like many newspapers, they’ve pulled ads at the last minute. But not many have been of a campaigning and activist nature.

“We know how this can look bad,” an FT editor tells me. “But as far as we were concerned, it wasn’t editorially deliberate. The guys in advertising have a tight code of practise. I think the main concern was whether or not Amnesty could provide indemnity should a complaint arise.”

Is this an editor passing the buck? No. Is this a department in a newspaper being a bit over-cautious about the political nature of the advertising? More likely. When you go out on a limb [albeit a rather sturdy, low-hanging one in Amnesty's case], you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. The free publicity generated and garnered by the buzz is invaluable. The important question is, after the smoke clears, will you have understood any more about Shell, the Niger Delta and the inhumanity its people are subjected to in the interests of bloody, black gold?

Gas flaring contributes to just over 1% of the world’s CO2. It’s where you set fire to the combustible vapours emitted by an oil well. An illegal practice in Nigeria since 1984, there’s overwhelming evidence of its continuing employ by oil companies like Shell. So much so that it can be seen from space.

The film officially launches at midnight tonight, but you can have a preview of it here.

A few years ago, a woman approached me with some evidence of nasty worker treatment by another oil company that drafts in foreign workers [Koreans mainly] to take care of jobs local Nigerians could handle. The locals were left to take care of work along the pipeline. Most of the locals employed were illiterate and couldn’t read the warning and hazard signs. As a result, a few of them died when the pipes occasionally went boom. If you want to know more, drop me a line.

For something a bit funnier, it seems Shell have halted Nigerian offshore drilling in a visionary new remediation plan.