People need to stop focussing on the events immediately PRIOR to Ian Tomlinson's death.

Everyone makes mistakes. I think that most people realise this, and are aware that it applies even when a mistake can lead to deaths. I’m pretty sure that we all realise that these things happen even when everyone does everything right and we shouldn’t be too alarmed about it. If it’s handled well, it needn’t be that big a deal to the general public. To illustrate this, I present two examples:

1. In June 2006, a man was accidentally shot by a police officer in an anti-terror raid on a house in Forest Gate. The police admitted the error and moved on. I bet you can't remember his name. (It was Mohammed Abdul Kahar.)
2. A year earlier, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot by the police in Stockwell tube station. The story given to the media and the public was that he was acting suspiciously, and the police shouted for everyone to stay still and get down, and one report claimed he then ran away and vaulted over a turnstile. This totally vindicated the police, until it turned out to be a lie. We heard about little else for weeks and the police suffered a massive loss of public trust. Four years on and I can still remember how to spell his surname.

Clearly nobody at the Met has ever watched Coupling. (Or the news.) When Ian Tomlinson died at the G20 protests on April 1st, the police claimed he collapsed and died of natural causes. A post-mortem said he’d had a heart attack. This turned out to be a lie: we now know he died of internal bleeding, such as might result from being hit with a stick and pushed over. I say “lie” rather than just “not true” because the pathologist who performed the erroneous post-mortem examination had previously been reprimanded for misconduct in a case involving a death in police custody, and had returned a ‘natural causes’ verdict on a suspected murder victim found in the flat of a man who went on to kill two people. He was perhaps a poor choice, unless the aim was to ensure a favourable verdict. The police said that “officers gave him an initial check and cleared his airway before moving him… as during this time a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them.” This also turned out to be a lie.

After a few days it emerged that shortly before Tomlinson died a policeman had hit him with a baton and shoved him over. We only know this because of eyewitnesses and video footage of the police officer attacking him, none of which came from the police. There’s lots of video of police misconduct at the protests, which is good, because it’s almost the only effective recourse we have against corrupt policing (since they’ve taken to disregarding the law requiring them to identify themselves). This may be why a law was introduced shortly before the protest making it illegal to video the police, which in turn might explain why people have been sending their videos to the Guardian rather than the IPCC, who today admitted they sought an injunction to stop Channel Four showing a new video of the incident. At one point the IPCC claimed there was no CCTV footage either. This also turned out to be a lie.

The government are granting increasingly absurd powers to the police, and when they’re abused nothing is done. The officer who killed Tomlinson hasn’t been arrested. His name hasn’t been released. The police and the IPCC lie about the circumstances and the evidence, and the government just carry on passing new laws to increase their ability to do so.

Watch your MP. They’re the only person in government directly answerable to you. Pester them relentlessly if they act up. They’re subject to great pressures from Westminster to vote the ‘right’ way, but if they don’t get elected they don’t have a job. It won’t help, probably. But it has to be worth trying, unless someone has a better idea.