One was a 27-year-old plumber on his way to a job by Tube; the other, a 47-year-old newspaper vendor walking home from work. Two Londoners, both living peacefully within the law one moment; the next, after sudden encounters with the police, both dead.
On the face of it, the parallels between the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson are limited. The Brazilian – wrongly suspected of being a potential suicide bomber – was pursued into Stockwell Tube station and shot repeatedly in the head. Tomlinson, as the video footage showed, was ambling through the City when he was shoved to the ground by one of a cluster of baton-wielding officers on a day of wider protests in London.
But it isn’t only the innocence of the victims that links the incidents of 22 July 2005 and 1 April 2009: the more telling connection is in the all-too-familiar concealment. Twenty years on from the extensive police cover-up after the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans died, the force is still able to hide its actions.
On both occasions, the Metropolitan Police immediately put out a false version of events.
In the case of de Menezes, the police briefed for a full 24 hours that the victim was an Islamist terrorist – “Suicide bomber shot on Tube” was the Sky News strapline – and only eventually conceded that he was innocent. Andy Hayman, then the Met’s head of counterterrorism and intelligence, was later shown to have concealed his doubts about de Menezes’s guilt from the Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, during the hours and days after the shooting. Since then, details have emerged of how the police deleted and selectively presented CCTV footage and photographs of de Menezes. Furthermore, it was said that he had been running; that he had jumped the Tube barriers; that he had been wearing a bulky coat; and that he had been challenged verbally by police. In fact, CCTV footage finally released in July 2007 shows a lightly dressed de Menezes calmly picking up a morning newspaper and strolling through the station barriers on to the escalator.
Similarly, on the day that Tomlinson died of a heart attack the Met issued a wholly misleading statement. A member of the public, it said, told police that “there was a man who had collapsed round the corner”. Officers, it was claimed, had tried to help medics save his life as “missiles, believed to be bottles”, were hurled at them.
The reality, again revealed in video, shows Tomlinson walking with his hands in his pockets, offering neither resistance nor threat to the police line behind him. Next, he is struck around the legs by a baton-wielding Territorial Support Group officer who then shoves Tomlinson to the ground. After “bouncing” – a witness’s word – on the ground, a terrified Tomlinson can be seen looking up in disbelief at the officers, who stand back, leaving the public to tend to him.
http://www.newstatesman.com/law-and-reform/2009/04/police-tomlinson-menezes
