Blogger turns detective to solve G20 death riddle

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G20 - "This is not a riot"

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uploaded by Teacher Dude

When 47 year old Ian Tomlinson dropped dead during the G20 London summit protests on 1st April, the police announced that the unfortunate newspaper seller had died of a heart attack whilst making his way home from his job in a newsagent's in the centre of London.

The authorities and later much of the UK press made little of the story except to report that protesters had hurled bricks and bottle at those attempting to provide first aid at the scene.

However, video footage taken just before Tomlinson's death by a visiting American fund manager told a different story. The video taken by the witnesses mobile phone showed a masked member of  the London police officer striking Tomlinson from behind then pushing him to the floor. The Guardian newspaper which ran the story and posted the video on its web site sparked off a massive response by bloggers worldwide, prompting the police to re-assign the inquiry into the death to the Independent Police Complaints Commision and order a fresh autopsy.

However, bloggers, unhappy with the IPCC's sluggish response to the case have decided to take the investigation into their own hands. BristleKRS, based in the English city of Bristol has been collating the hundreds of pictures of the death of Ian Tomlinson that have been posted on Photo sharing sites such as Flickr in an attempt to identify officers present when Tomlinson died. So far only four out of the dozen or so present have come forward to be interviewed by the IPCC.

Much has been made of the fact that images of the death and eyewitness account made their way onto the internet almost immediately, directly contradicting the authorities version of the incident which, at first made no mention of any contact between Tomlinson and the police.

Unlike previous controversial UK police killings such as the that of Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot eight times at point blank range in the mistaken belief that he was an Islamic suicide bomber, the Tomlinson case has become very public with new photographs and video coming out daily which undermines the police account. The explosion in digital evidence underlines the fact that policing is now taking place in a very different media environment.

The fall in the cost of digital cameras and the rise of the internet means that visual record of police misconduct can now be spread worldwide in a matter of hours without recourse to the mainstream media.