It's official - police above the law

The death of Ian Tomlinson is back in the news after the decision by the CPS to drop all charges against officers involved. To recap the events here's what the police said at the time:

Ian Tomlinson had not been involved with the police prior to his collapse
His death may have been aggravated by the delay in medical staff reaching due to the protesters throwing bottles
He died from a heart attack

Now what actually happened:

Mr Tomlinson was bitten by a police dog, hit with a baton and roughly pushed to the floor prior to his collapse
Protesters reached him first and cleared room for the medics, some bottles were thrown initially but were quickly stopped.
He died from internal bleeding.

So we have potential charges of manslaughter, two types of assault, and misconduct in public office.

Due to the conflict in the medical verdicts and the delay between the police incident and the collapse the manslaughter charges were dropped as "there is no realistic prospect of a conviction for unlawful act manslaughter".

For the assaults, the prime one being actual bodily harm couldn't be proven due to the dropping of manslaughter charges, the lesser common assault might have been brought to charge, except there's a six-month time limit between event and charge and the investigation was still occurring after that point.

For misconduct, the fact that the manslaughter and two assault charges were dropped means it becomes difficult to demonstrate anything beyond the acceptable.

So essentially no charges were pressed because the medical opinions differed which in turn was exasperated by the Coroner's lack of information regarding the earlier incident, and because they ran out of time.

On its own not a good decision, but now tie it to the officer who was deemed to be acting lawfully when he back-handed a women half his size and then hit her around the legs twice with a metal baton.

If that's not even add in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and that no disciplinary charges have been made against any involved and it's hard not to suggest that if the police want to hit you, beat you up, or even shoot you they can and it's all perfectly acceptable provided they can think up a good enough excuse or employ delaying tactics to push time-limits.

Sigh okay there sometimes are convictions, but consider that this was someone who was in jail for misconduct and yet was still officially a police officer for at least the first month before he was dismissed.