The footage of a police officer shoving a man to the ground at a G20 protest minutes before he died has raised serious concerns about the incident and the subsequent process of inquiry into it.

The video was recorded by a New York fund manager in London on the 1st April during the G20 meeting. It shows Ian Tomlinson who was walking home from work at the time and not taking part in the G20 protest being pushed to the ground by a police officer, Tomlinson collapsed and died a short time later. The UK home office pathologist announced that the cause of death was a heart attack.

Initially the investigation into the incident was being undertaken by the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) as a ‘managed’ investigation, ie they oversee the City of London police enquiry. Opposition politicians and others in the UK questioned this and made calls for the investigation to be undertaken by the IPCC’s own staff and fully independent of the City of London police as their officers were involved in the policing of G20.

Today the IPCC released the following statement:
Yesterday evening, the IPCC was made aware of some footage of the incident running on a national newspaper’s website. This was the first time we were made aware of the footage. An IPCC investigator immediately contacted the newspaper and collected the footage from them last night.

This morning, IPCC investigators have been analysing that footage and, in light of this new evidence, a decision has been taken that this investigation will now be fully independent. This means that the IPCC will now use its own full team of investigators.  To ensure that there is no loss of effectiveness, some specialist resources from City of London police will continue to be used to carry out forensic and analytical research for our investigation.

Given this new evidence, the IPCC will request a second post-mortem.

IPCC Deputy Chair Deborah Glass said: “People are rightly concerned about this tragic death and this footage is clearly disturbing. People have been calling for a criminal investigation. I want to stress that, from the outset of all our investigations, we consider whether criminal offences have been committed. This is a criminal investigation and we will, of course, be discussing it with the Crown Prosecution Service.

At the moment the investigation is focused on identifying the officers in the footage. Several have already come forward and all efforts are being made to trace those who haven’t.

We continue to appeal for more information, including any other video footage. Clearly there were a lot of people in the area when this incident happened and we still need people to contact us with any information or images they have of Mr Tomlinson.”
Anybody who saw Mr Tomlinson in Royal Exchange Square is asked to contact the IPCC on 0800-096 9071 or email Tomlinson@ipcc.gov.uk.