Death in camera

Everybody who takes an interest in these things will have seen the video which shows of a police officer apparently attacking Ian Tomlinson. We know that Mr Tomlinson appeared to be walking away, hands in pockets in an entirely nonthreatening manner and we also know that he tragically died shortly after the events captured on video.

One thing bothered me about the news reports following the initial video. More video footage and photographs taken by people present subsequently came to light, but nobody mentioned CCTV footage of the incident. This seemed a bit odd - after all, this happened in the heart of the City of London - a prime terrorist target and an area which must have pretty comprehensive CCTV coverage (Metro reckoned that there were 3,000 CCTVs available to look for trouble at the G20 summit- not the most authoritative source, but I'm sure they were right to say that there are lots of them in and around the Square Mile).

A quick flick through the media seems to confirm this. No CCTV footage of what happened to Mr Tomlinson. Very strange. Either:

a) There really isn't any footage. If there is no footage of an incident which took place in broad daylight in one of the most heavily monitored locations in the UK, it does make you wonder how useful all these cameras are at protecting us.

b) There is footage around, but it's so badly organised, or there's such a huge amount of irrelevant stuff in there that nobody's yet waded through it to find the relevant sequence yet. If it takes this long to find something important happening, it's not going to be much good at stopping terrorists, is it?

c) The quality of the CCTV footage is too poor to help - maybe somebody has found a bit of blurry footage, but they don't want to release it and let any watching crims and terrorists know that if they actually did get caught on video, even their mums wouldn't recognise them.

d) A recording of the incident did exist, but it got accidentally wiped due to a clerical error.

e) A recording of the incident did exist, but it looked rather incriminating for the police - so it got "accidentally" wiped due to a clerical error.

These are just a few of the possibilities. I don't claim to know much about the capabilities and operating procedures of CCTV systems, but I do know that there are a lot of them and that they are supposed to be protecting the citizens of this country. Whatever the reason, they don't seem to have been much help in this case. To paraphrase Admiral Beatty, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody cameras.