The IPCC would ALWAYS have become involved. No matter what may occur whenever there is a death either in Custody or within 24 hours of being “invovled”/meeting with police there will ALWAYS be an IPCC investigation

You’re missing the point

To all intents & purposes there was no [admitted] contact until the guy with the camcorder put his hand up
The only thing that the police said was that he died & that they tried to help him & were coming under sustained attack whilst doing this [a lie]
They claimed that prior to him being hit there was no previous contact [another lie]
You could say they did all they could to keep the IPCC out of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I have great respect for what the police do & the way they usually go about it but when it looks like they have made an error you never get a volunteered full & frank explanation, you only get what they believe is already in the public domain & this is then updated as & when other info becomes common knowledge – they are always very economical with the truth.
If it takes people jumping to conclusions & refusing to accept explanations & statements that smell fishy in order to force the truth out – I’ll live with that.

Time for a friday beer

concerns me how everyone hears a story from one perspective and they are so anti-police.

Well that makes a change. Usually the media are very anti-protesters and very pro-police.

Something must have happened at the G20 protest 🙄

.

Oh yeah I know ……….. cameras and video recording equipment has suddenly become very available and very portable. Things will never be the same again …….

I doesn’t give me much hope for serving my force and trying to give the public the best service they desire and deserve when people are so anti.

In fairness, I think that is an issue for the police to address, not the public. People are reacting to some very disturbing images and I think the first step towards improving the police image would be to acknowledge the wrong doing, not try to justify it.

Well that makes a change. Usually the media are very anti-protesters and very pro-police.

Agree. Although, Charlie Brooker made an observation on Newswipe last night that, the cause for all the demonstrations and indeed the real news story, the G20 summit, has been lost amongst a flurry of violent images, with the finger pointed at all concerned. Very clever news manipulation that quite frankly, we’ve all suckered for.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/16/police-delete-tourist-photos

you gotta love the stazi-sorry Met

What, you expect ordinary coppers to publicly denounce statements issued by their senior officers.

No that’s what their Federation is for, unfortunately the Police Federation sides with management to protect their members which is very short sighted. A focused union would ensure their members interests came before those of the Police Service and would denounce those senior ranks that habitually lie or leak information to the press.

I couldn’t agree more Sandwich. However, the fact that coppers aren’t legally allowed to join a trade union is hardly their fault !

Again, direct your anger at the politicians NOT the police.

Blame the politicians or the police?
I am a 42 year old male. I am from the north (Sheffield) originally and went to college in Newcastle but now live and work in London. I am a skilled manual worker and dress accordingly. I have been stopped by the police three times in the twenty years I have lived here.
One of my closest friends is also a 42 year old male from the north (Manchester) who went to university in Newcastle. He now works in academia for museums and galleries and dresses much smarter than me at all times. In the twenty years he has lived and worked in London he gets stopped by the police about once every three maybe four weeks. I know because I live nearest to him so he always comes to see me after to just find rationality and peace of mind.
On Tuesday he was walked out of WH Smiths in Waterloo by a group of transport police in front of a rush hour crowd. His crime was to have gone in with an orange bag. I’m being serious, they told him 90% of crime in Waterloo was commited by people with orange bags.
He had just bought a yogurt drink in Sainsburys across the road. They accused him of stealing a bottle of water before they looked in his orange bag.
Are the politicians to blame for this incident that delayed him from getting to work by 40 minutes as well as embarassing him and seemingly showing the general public who can’t be trusted.
Yes, there is one major diference between my friend and I.
Otherwise he is from a better family and looks much more respectable than I do.
Every three weeks I have to help him return to normal.
I do not blame the politicians.
I do know that the police are giving certan sections of society an attitude of
‘give a dog a bad name and he’ll live up to it.’
I blame the police. All of them. Especially you Munqe-chick, unless you do something personally to stop this sort of action. The rate my friend is stopped hasn’t changed since the Stephen Lawrence incedence.

As for the G20, I have attended a few marches in London. On the one time I saw ‘incitement of the mob’, as it were, it was being done by someone who was obviously a plainclothes policeman.
The actions of the police at the G20 were premeditated.
I can’t find the pictures of the guy hacking at the building but I remember thinking it looked like he was wearing a police issue balaclava. Perhaps it was you Munqe-chick.

pullfaces I go to work everyday on a building site. My work might be to a good and acceptable standard. Or it might not. But if 6 months after the building is completed what I have constructed falls apart because of poor workmanship, then the client will hold the building contractors and it’s management responsible. He or she will not hold me responsible.

If a police officer behaves in an unacceptable manner, then certainly he or she should be held accountable/responsible for their actions. If this is however a problem which endemic throughout the force as some seem to be suggesting is the case, then senior officers also need to be held accountable. And of course ultimately the politicians also need to be held accountable, as this is where finally responsibility lies.

As the ‘client’ I feel that is the politicians which have a ‘contractual’ obligation to me to ensure that our society is properly policed.

If we have reached a stage where individual officers are a law unto themselves and operate quite freely from their superiors and democratic control (as expressed by the will of parliament) then it is the senior officers and the politicians who are responsible for this situation.

Sacking an incompetent workman might well be the correct course of action to take, but a client is hardly going to be very impressed if they are simply informed, “don’t worry it’s all sorted, we’ve sacked the guy responsible”, as that would clearly be of little concern to them.

What worries me about the Ian Tomlinson case is that whilst the thug who attacked him might well be sacked, those who created, and are responsible for the situation which allowed the thug to freely operate, will get away with it Scot free. I would like senior officers and politicians, including the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Home Secretary, to also be held accountable.

I’m also concerned that individual police officers might be used as scapegoats for the failures of senior officers and politicians, and that there is a general vilification of all coppers, as appears to be happening to some degree on here. Why the need to single out Munqe-chick ? As far as I know she’s a long way from the Met. Is it just because of straight forward prejudice ? Prejudice – what so many people accuse the police of being.

Grizzlygus, crikey with you both. Makes me angry people jump to conclusions from what the media portray which IS NOT the full facts. We as the public never know the full facts. Being a copper I can also see the difficulty for the police policing that protest, what a nightmare it must’ve been. I undergo the training to be able to police those demonstrations, get petrol bombed, fight with ridiculous amounts of kit on, run around with a shield .. would like to see some of you try it when you feel outnumbered and see what your reactions are anyway I’m not going to pass judgement or opinion on the G20 as I can see both sides and from my policing I certainly know the media are not potraying it in it’s full light. he police cannot comment on procedure/tactics to allay any fears.

Do not judge all police from one incident that has not even come to a full investigation/conclusion.

Except that it’s not just one incident. There is this case, the woman who was assaulted, and (which doesn’t seem to have been picked up by mainstream media that I’ve seen) this video – plus numerous witness statements. I’m not suggesting that ‘all police are thugs’ – but I am suggesting that significant numbers of police almost certainly acted in an overly aggressive, unacceptable manner. It also seems fairly clear that the Met has repeatedly lied about what happened.

Closing ranks and ‘sticking up for your own’ no matter what they’ve done still seems to be a pretty prevalent attitude in the police force, judging by the response of serving officers on here.

I am not blaming the media at all, what I’m saying is everyone is making their opinions and decisions based on the media, which as everyone know is never the FULL picture.

The IPCC would ALWAYS have become involved. No matter what may occur whenever there is a death either in Custody or within 24 hours of being “invovled”/meeting with police there will ALWAYS be an IPCC investigation. If I spoke to Joe Bloggs in the street and conducted a drugs search then 8 hours later he died of a heart attack, the IPCC would conduct an investigation due to police involvement, so IPCC involvement has nothing to do with media furore over his death.

Except that the initial IPCC response was ‘nothing to see here’ – until the video came out.

it just concerns me how everyone hears a story from one perspective and they are so anti-police.

Maybe part of the reason some people are ‘anti-police’ is the way you seem to try and justify unacceptable behaviour and automatically side with your colleagues no matter what.

http://twitpic.com/3idaq

As seen on my walk to the office this morning

All I’m now saying is I don’ work in the Met. I’m not going to make any more comment on his thread as it may lose me my job. I’m off not to return here.

PS: Oh and Grumm I have made no comments on here about my views of what happened at G20 so you cannot suggest I have “sided with my colleagues”.

Not exactly, although you did say, in response to this post in the thread about Ian Tomlinson’s death:

Say what you will, I don’t like the G20 protests or the protesters for that matter. Police get too much crap for what is a VERY tough job

They will be easily identifiable by their shoulder numbers.
2 hottie … agree, good on you.

So do police get too much crap for beating people and lying about it? It’s a tough job and we wouldn’t understand so they should just be allowed to get on with it eh?

Or maybe you were agreeing that you don’t like the G20 protests or protestors? I wonder if any other police feel the same and whether this might have clouded their judgement?

I agreed with what 2hottie said but I have never given my own opinion on any of the matters discussed here and I would not like to either as I wasn’t there.

Having just re-read the other post I didn’t make myself clear. I didn’t agree with everything 2 hottie said but it’s too late now it has come across as wrong and written in a hurry! oh well never mind mistake made.