G20 police officers may face multiple claims over brutality allegations

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

• IPCC says 120 complaints made against G20 officers
• Lawyers gather videos and photographs as evidence

Paul Lewis and Afua Hirsch

The Metropolitan police faces claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds if video and photographic evidence now under examination shows that officers launched unprovoked assaults on protesters during the G20 demonstrations. The Independent Police Complaints Commission said it had received 120 complaints relating to police actions at the demonstrations. Any civil action through the courts must be preceded by complaints lodged with the IPCC.

Leading human rights lawyers are collating videos and photographs of alleged attacks by police on demonstrators, as well as hospital records, witness statements and testimony from legal observers who attended the protests and noted the badge numbers of officers who they claim were acting inappropriately.

Lawyers said many people had come forward after seeing a video obtained by the Guardian which showed newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, 47, being knocked to the ground by a police officer moments before he died.

Stephen Cragg, a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, said yesterday: "If you come out of a protest with a serious injury then the police have to explain how that came about. Injured protesters might also be able to claim punitive damages, which will inflate the claims enormously if they can show there were serious levels of malpractice."

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/11/g20-ian-tomlinson-death

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The G20 protesters' stories: Allegations over police treatment on the frontline

The death of Ian Tomlinson has thrown the spotlight on police actions during the G20 demonstrations in the City of London on April 1. The Guardian has spoken to a number of people who allege they were mistreated by the police.

Here some tell their stories: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/11/g20-protest-witnesses-police-actions

Related story:

How G20 Ian Tomlinson footage spread shock around world

• Mix of old and new media attracted global audience
• Amateur film debated from Brazil to China

=snip=

The Guardian passed the film to the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4, who began broadcasting it. But many more people saw the footage via the internet, particularly after the video was added to YouTube, allowing other sites to embed it directly into their pages.

Last night, the top five most-read stories on guardian.co.uk were those connected to the video, with more than half a million views between them. The software that analyses online traffic figures gives an insight into this global spread by showing how viewers made their way to the relevant page.

Many came via search engines such as Google News, but thousands arrived from websites in countries including Italy, Spain and Germany, with significant numbers also arriving from the big US political blogs.

Everywhere the video was posted, readers shared their views on police tactics. On the Huffington Post site, a woman in her 50s recounted being badly intimidated by US riot officers after attending a Barack Obama election speech. "Those police weren't there to protect the next president as much as they were there to harass citizens. I felt like I was in a police state," she wrote.

=snip=

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/11/video-g20-ian-tomlinson

[rollingrock]

1. Their strategy is to kill at least one demonstrator at each protest

....in order to scare away the masses from joining future political demonstrations.

[Turborama]

3. Judging by the harrowing accounts from the 2nd link, that wouldn't surprise me at all

In fact, when reading what they went through, it's surprising there weren't more fatalities...

[rollingrock]

8. State-sanctioned murder/terror is a very effective weapon

...ever since the massacre at Kent State, Ohio, mass political protest has become an extremely rare event in this country.

[Iowa]

2. Cops... it's us against them.

I know a psychologist who used to screen cops. He says that, by and large, cops have the same psychological makeup as criminals and pose a significant risk to public safety. But don't look for reforms to come anytime soon... cops serve an important role in a totalitarian system. They are the blunt instrument of the wealthy and the enemy of liberty. Cut their funding to the bone. If they have the time to prey on decent citizens, we have far too many of them.

[acmavm]

4. When I was young I new a homicide detective (he was really a friend of

my Mom's and her boyfriend) and he said the very same thing. That half of the guys in uniform would be behind bars if they hadn't got on the police force.

He was a cop for decades! He was a good one. But he went back to patrol after finding two little missing boys in a car trunk. They had both been stabbed, one was dead, the other laid there alive with his dead brother for I think a couple days (so long ago). That did it for him. He couldn't take homicide anymore.

[vadawg]

5. us against them, WTF then you cant really complain when the cops think its them against you

if your gonna label every cop a fascist, then dont be surprised when every cop acts like a fascist when dealing with you. I have worked crowd control a few times and you know what, its the attitude of the crowd that governs how they are policed.

[Turborama]

6. "its the attitude of the crowd that governs how they are policed"

Clearly that's not the case in the UK.

Did you read the 1st hand accounts in the 2nd link I posted? Have you seen the video footage of what occurred at the Climate Camp PEACEFUL protest on that day? If not, a http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=climate+camp+g20&aq=f">quick search on YouTube will show how peaceful the protest was and how inappropriately violent the police's reaction to it was.


This is worth checking out too... http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson

[sendero]

7. Wow..

... thanks you dumbass fascist. Attitudes are not actions. police need to concern themselves with actions and leave their attitude judgments in their pea brains.