Probably not, thinks septicisle:
As wearingly familiar as this sad tale of changing stories, incompetence and abuses of power is, the real outrage is that the overall cause remains the same. Just as the officers on the morning of the 22nd of July 2005 were briefed that those they were after were “up for it” and ready to commit acts of mass murder, giving the impression that lethal force was permissible even when it hadn’t been authorised, so the police prior to the G20 had made clear just how determined they were to crack down hard on those who were out to smash up the City. We duly saw police medics brandishing batons, those without the first idea how to “safely” use a truncheon flinging it around, and of course, the storming of the entirely peaceful Climate Camp, since found to have been illegal. Ian Tomlinson died both as he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because he was vulnerable to just such an injury as he received; dozens of others got cracked heads or worse just for daring to take part in a demonstration. It would be nice to think that following such regrettable incidents that future policing would have been rethought, but no, as the example of Alfie Meadows so pungently demonstrates.
I agree. The deaths of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes before him were the result of a deliberate policy to make the Metropolitian Police more ‘ard and confrontational. In de Menezes case it was the whole anti-terrorism mentality that was to blame, wherein any terrorism suspect is incredibly dangerous and needs to be “taken out” or London would disappear in a mushroom cloud; combine that with the fuckups that happened while de Menezes was under suspicion and you get why he was shot in the head in the metro. From that point of view the fact that he was innocent doesn’t matter; what does is that his exxecution send the message that the Met is serious about terrorism.
With Tomlinson’s death a similar sort of attitude is to blame, one that’s perhaps even more pernicious as this time it wasn’t about keeping London safe from terrorism, but about showing who’s boss in the city: the police or the demonstrators. The Met was and is incredibly aggressive in its policing of political demonstrations because it and its political masters want to discourage them; Tomlinson’s death is a side effect of this.
Without a change in attitude, de Menezes and Tomlinson won’t be the last victims of the Metropolitian Police, but the likelyhood of this change is small.