G20 death is a sign of systemic problems in the police

We still don't know what happened to Ian Tomlinson and we need to be careful not to jump to conclusions.

Last Wednesday, he died of a heart attack, and video released today shows he was struck by police minutes before that happened. Everyone has presumed the same thing - that those two events are connected, but that is not necessarily so. We now must wait for the IPCC-managed City of London police report, and then, in all likelihood, for the criminal investigation which follows it.

But at this early stage we can conclude one thing - the video released today speaks volumes about the systemic problems in the modern British policing of protests.

As I wrote in my eyewitness report on the day, most of the individual police officers that day behaved appropriately. They are, of course, as different as the general public - most of them charming and friendly, a few of them quite the opposite. But on an operational basis, the conduct of the police force made the events shown in the video horribly predictable.

Mr Tomlinson is shown walking away from police. His hands are in his pockets. He is no danger to anyone. As it happens, he is not attending the protest - he is trying to go home from his job as a newspaper seller. The group of policemen behind him have riot gear on and keep control of several mean-looking dogs.

One of them appears to strike Mr Tomlinson in the legs with his baton - although this section is unclear. The forceful push that follows is clear enough, however. Had Mr Tomlinson not managed to get his hands out of his pockets before he hit the floor he would have suffered severe damage to his face. There is no discernable reason for this to have been inflicted on him. He is then left, on the floor, unaided by police, and assisted only by a lone demonstrator.

Why would police behave this way? We can garner some explanation from the way the demonstration was handled, right from its planning stages. The warnings made by senior commanders saying they were "up for it" if there was any trouble clearly served to make individual officers as jittery and nervous as it did the protestors.

The consequent decision to kettle the protest, ensuring no one was let in or out, almost as soon as it began was also entirely unhelpful.

Picture the scene: it is around 14:00 BST. A group of peaceful protestors around the Bank of England are kept about 20 metres apart from another group of peaceful protestors on Mansion House Street. Much has been written about the effect this has on demonstrators - namely to make them more irritable and rowdy than they were previously. But it must surely have an effect on the police as well. At best, the people they are policing are treated as cattle. At worst, they are treated as a public disorder event which hasn't happened yet.

They are not, of course. They are British subjects exercising their democratic right to protest. But police behaviour is influenced by the words of their commanders, and the operational basis on which the policing is conducted.

The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this entire incident to be reduced to actions of the handful of police we can see in the video. The explanation of what we can see in this film must surely be systemic in nature.

If anything good can come from the death of Mr Tomlinson, it will be that we take a long, hard look at our attitudes to protest, and how the police have begun to approach it.

Ian Dunt