The police have been misbehaving. I'm angry about that, and would like to do something practical.
I'm pleased that people aren't sticking to the supposed ban on photographing the police. The videos of Ian Tomlinson being attacked from behind minutes before his death and the seemingly brutish attack on a woman at the memorial protest the following day show that we really do need some daylight here.
Whatever the outcome of the IPCC's inquiries, we should expect more of our public servants.
One disturbing aspect is that the officers involved tried to hide their identity. The chief of the Met has spoken about this:
"One matter that I also want to make clear is that uniformed police officers should be identifiable at all times by their shoulder identification numbers.
"The public has a right to be able to identify any uniformed officer whilst performing their duty. We must ensure this is always the case."
So, let's hold him to that. Let's find every public picture where an officer has hidden their shoulder numbers, and tag it with #policehide. If we act together, and put together a decent list of occurrences, we can then look at how best to submit a mass complaint about the officers involved. It doesn't matter where on the Web the pictures or video are, although I hope flickr proves a handy pool; that's what search engines are for.
I've no idea if this will work, but I want to channel some of this anger into something productive. Let's hold them to account.
Update at 10:31 BST, 21st April 2009.
A few people have asked me how to tag things with #policehide. In short:
- if you can, add a keyword or tag to the picture itself, e.g. like on this picture I took yesterday in South Kensington (apologies for the poor quality of my phone camera)
- make sure the text '#policehide' appears somewhere on the page the picture is on; on photo sites that don't let you tag others' pictures, a comment will work just fine. Add a real comment too, explaining the tag, but I'll be looking for the text '#policehide'.
- failing that, post publicly anywhere at all with a link to the picture (or a page with the picture prominently displayed) and include the text '#policehide'. It can be your own site or blog, somewhere like Twitter or wherever else you fancy.
(If you are using a British Mac, and can't figure out how to type a #, hold down alt and press the '3' on the main keyboard.)
Note that it needs to be publicly visible, so sites like Facebook aren't as useful when it comes to gathering all the links back in.
If others tag a few pictures, I'll put something together to pull them together into one list of pictures and videos.
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