ian tomlinson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/22/ian-tomlinson-police-not-charged
(notice I am now linking to the Guardian instead of the BBC due to their hideous website redesign, plus they deserve it for all the work they did on making this story come to light)
Absolutely disgraceful.
Raoul Moat shoots a policeman and overnight they have about 50% of the country’s police force relocated to several square miles in Northumbria to search for him.
Ian Tomlinson is attacked in an unprovoked incident by a policeman and dies shortly after as a result, and it takes a year to decide there won’t be any charges pressed because a dodgy-as-fuck pathologist who was known to have been writing bullshit reports for 11 years disagreed with two other pathologists thereby making a ‘conflict’.
what the fuck.
Yes there’s a conflict. That’s the way it works. There are two sides. One tries to convict someone and the other tries not to convict him. Then the jury weighs up the evidence and supposedly reaches the right decision. In this case, the Crown Prosecution Service presumably has taken on the role of jury themselves and completely subverted the legal process. In one single report they have destroyed their credibility, their respect, and they have done this to protect one thug who should never have been in the police in the first place.
In Canada (Toronto) recently they also had some G20 event, and, this seems to have escaped a lot of news (I heard about it on Dinosaur Comics), they tried to lock down the whole city as a police state to increase security. The result of which was the total opposite as citizens rightly objected to this and the police weren’t either capable of or interested in distinguishing between peaceful protesters and actual threats, so they basically incited violence and gave a lot of it out themselves. It was a total clusterfuck which came about only because the police did not seem to be aware that they were only going to incite opposition by using disproportionate force. The outcome to that is that the police have lost a lot of respect and will find their job in future a lot more difficult because the public will be unsympathetic to them.
This is similar to what UK policing has been like at protest events in recent years. It starts off peaceful then the police come in all fired up and looking for a fight, and do their outright best to escalate the whole thing into violence. There’s no shortage of footage on Youtube of the police going out of their way to cause trouble at climate protests. A lot of them remove their identification numbers (which is illegal) because the riot squads tend to be made up of ex military types and thugs, both of whom are just looking for a fight, and they know what they are likely to be doing is borderline illegal and they don’t want to be identified. They very promptly remove anyone filming them asking for their number.
This was really the ‘big’ event, there were a bunch of smaller ones showing unprovoked attacks which failed to get any real results against those responsible, and failure to bring charges against this one is utterly disgusting. If manslaughter is not sufficient, what exactly will riot police have to do before they have to take any kind of responsibility for their actions? And David Cameron wonders why Raoul Moat had 35,000 fans on facebook.
ramblings
I know I am out of date with this Roal Moat thing, I can’t spell Roul either.. is that it? RAOUL. What a strange word. Anyway… I couldn’t help but notice this during the proceedings: Originally the police said that Moat had made threats against the police and explictly said that he bore no grudge against the public. They had a hand-written letter with all this in which they happily gave over to the press.
After a few days of no progress they suddenly produced out of thin air that he had changed his mind and was now threatening the public. They never produced any evidence or explanation for this. Oh come on, what bollocks; the police were still in danger but the public were generally complacent. They introduced the ‘threat’ to make the public more likely to come forward with leads and to allow them to get away with more intrusive policing. And let’s be honest, their policing was rubbish, just like it was last time there was a gunman running around northern England. So were their press conferences. I understand that as you go north it gets harder and harder to find people whose parents aren’t related but I’m sure they could have found some better candidates to put on TV.
It is entirely unrelated and coincidental that I watched V for Vendetta on BBC3 this evening. It is a little far fetched though; you couldn’t run a police state with our police force.
In other news, BBC news changed its site layout. Never in the history of the internet has a site changed its layout and been greeted with any kind of praise whatsoever, which is because people then have to start reading all the text again to figure out where everything is and most likely you crammed far too much information onto the page and they find the process frustrating. Even ignoring that, this one is terrible. I used love the BBC news site, it was one of the champions of good user interface design in a world of web designers who have figured out they can charge more for every useless and annoying feature they add. It is like with academic papers. Anyone who’s ever read one knows that ground-breaking research is rare and the average academic paper explains a simple idea which is totally obvious after you give the reader a push in the right direction, but if you explain it simply you risk your reader grasping the idea as you’re explaining it and then thinking “well that wasn’t so clever” and then imagining that they thought of it too. In order to make it look like you’re doing some intellectual work, you have to make it so it’s totally incomprehensible to all but the most dedicated reader. Web designers have to make their site needlessly horrifically complex to make it look like it’s better than everyone else’s. Simple and easy to use interfaces just don’t impress the client like a sensory overload of uninteresting information. But now it’s going to be a pain to use.
Here is my reasoned criticism.
apologies to colour blind readers. And readers who when trying to read that probably feel colour blind. I should have drawn a green beard on Jonathan Ross.
