Crawling From The Wreckage
Nearly 150 complaints have now been made against the Police in the wake of the death of Ian Tomlinson on the day of the G20 protests. What has shocked me about the turn of events over the past week or so has been the initial reluctance of the IPCC to want to get involved. The 'I' does after all stand for Independent and I would have thought that its first duty wasn't to the police but to the independence of its own authority and reputation.
There will of course be spurious complaints, much in the same way that rarely a month passes without some silly girl trying to make a name and some money by falsely accusing a Premiership footballer of some sexual misdemeanour or other, there will be people out there who want to make a claim for damages against the Met or just make sure some sort of personal revenge is taken. The Police aren't exactly angels in all of this, the removing of epulets by officers on the day is a grim reminder of past times, and fairly recent times at that as those tactics were seen at Heathrow and on the anti-hunt bill marches.
Policing in the U.K is unique in that it is policing under consent. As the Independent noted in May 1999 "Modern policing works on the basis of public consent. We are not governed by brute force or fear of repression. Anyone in any doubt about this should consider the figures: we have a population of 60 million but only 130,000 police officers. More than 80 per cent of all crimes that the police investigate are drawn to their attention by members of the public. Without public co-operation, the police could do very little - one piece of Home Office research demonstrated that a police officer on the beat in London could expect to pass within 100 yards of a burglary in progress roughly once every eight years, but not necessarily to catch the burglar, or even realise the crime was taking place.
Nearly 150 complaints have now been made against the Police in the wake of the death of Ian Tomlinson on the day of the G20 protests. What has shocked me about the turn of events over the past week or so has been the initial reluctance of the IPCC to want to get involved. The 'I' does after all stand for Independent and I would have thought that its first duty wasn't to the police but to the independence of its own authority and reputation.
There will of course be spurious complaints, much in the same way that rarely a month passes without some silly girl trying to make a name and some money by falsely accusing a Premiership footballer of some sexual misdemeanour or other, there will be people out there who want to make a claim for damages against the Met or just make sure some sort of personal revenge is taken. The Police aren't exactly angels in all of this, the removing of epulets by officers on the day is a grim reminder of past times, and fairly recent times at that as those tactics were seen at Heathrow and on the anti-hunt bill marches.
Policing in the U.K is unique in that it is policing under consent. As the Independent noted in May 1999 "Modern policing works on the basis of public consent. We are not governed by brute force or fear of repression. Anyone in any doubt about this should consider the figures: we have a population of 60 million but only 130,000 police officers. More than 80 per cent of all crimes that the police investigate are drawn to their attention by members of the public. Without public co-operation, the police could do very little - one piece of Home Office research demonstrated that a police officer on the beat in London could expect to pass within 100 yards of a burglary in progress roughly once every eight years, but not necessarily to catch the burglar, or even realise the crime was taking place.
Our Police are not armed, although they are supported by armed tactical response units, and should the day come when the British public welcomes the sight of armed Police officers on our streets then we shall have top confront the reality that trust and respect both earned and awarded has been lost.
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