Justice is impossible if we cannot trust police forces to tell the truth

From Blair Peach to Ian Tomlinson, there is only one remedy for police officers found to have made false statements: sack them.....

'From the information I had, that is what I believed happened to me." So Simon Harwood, the police officer who pushed Ian Tomlinson to the ground at the G20 protests two years ago, told the inquest into his death.

The information Harwood had led him to believe two weeks after the event that he fell to the floor, lost his baton, received a blow to the head and was involved in violent and dangerous confrontations.

 Last week he admitted that, though he had made these claims in a signed statement, none of it happened. So what was this information? Who gave it to him? Had he been brainwashed?

We have yet to hear John Yates's explanations for the ever-widening gulf between what he told parliament and what appears to have happened in the News of the World phone-hacking case, but they will doubtless be just as persuasive.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/police-truth-blair-peach-tomlinson