Eight months on from the demo where I was struck and dragged from my wheelchair, the officers concerned remain at large
Young people riot in the streets of London; from Tottenham to Hackney, Brixton to Peckham. Those involved are denounced as "animals" and "mindless thugs", and calls are made for the army to be sent to deal with them. In the following days, the courts are kept open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and riot-related cases are fast-tracked.
On 9 December, at a student demonstration in central London; a police officer tips a disabled man out of his wheelchair, and drags him across the road. Video evidence of the incident is broadcast on YouTube, and viewed by more than half a million people. The police have a time limit of six months to refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, but they miss the deadline.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission's partial upholding of my appeal against the findings of the Met's own investigation, raises more questions than it answers. First, if the Metropolitan police are either too inept or too dishonest to meet the six-month deadline to refer one of its officers for criminal prosecution, as the IPCC suggested they should have, then why are they allowed to investigate themselves?
Then there is the case of the officer who struck me with a police baton. Although the IPCC have said that an apology, and one that I am still waiting for, would be appropriate, they have accepted the Metropolitan police's claim that they have been unable to identify the officer responsible. Yet, when it is rioters and looters, the ink hadn't dried on Murdoch's news presses before photographs of masked faces and appeals for information had been released.
This is the hypocrisy of the British judicial system. Hundreds of people have died in police custody in recent years, but no officers have been successfully prosecuted. The government has no moral authority to condemn human rights abuses in other countries, let alone send SAS forces and humanitarian bombs to "protect" those rights, when our own police force, or "forces loyal to Cameron" in BBC-speak, are committing crimes in our own country.
Not so long ago, the police were reeling from the death of Smiley Culture after a police raid on his home, and heavy implication in the phone-hacking scandal, which led to the resignation of its two most senior staff. As if that wasn't enough to inspire confidence in the Metropolitan police, former assistant commissioner John Yates was swiftly replaced by Cressida Dick, the officer responsible for leading the operation that led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. This half-hearted apology is an attempt to claw back legitimacy in the eyes of the public, much of which was won during post-riot hysteria. What my case, as well as many others, goes to show, is that it is reform and accountability, not further powers, that the police are in desperate need of.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/25/jody-mcintyre-police-reform
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