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Power revealed: masking police officers in the public sphere

Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’. Journalists who depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives have historically reproduced these distinctions and, as a result, images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize their claims. However a number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK mean that police officers are also being subjected to distinctions made by inquiry panels between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus a new trope is emerging in popular print and online news narratives in which the actions of the police rather than protesters are becoming the object of the public’s attention. These dynamics are explored with reference to the ways in which confrontations between protesters and police were pictured in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. The article focuses in particular on the way in which images highlighting acts of concealment became a significant strand in online and offline news narrative as they developed in the years between Tomlinson’s death in 2009 and the civil suit brought against PC Harwood in 2012. The author argues that images of police officers in militarized helmets and without identity tags become synonymous with the opacity that initially characterized the police force’s response to the death of Tomlinson. She concludes by suggesting that this lack of transparency contrasted with the extended visibility offered by mobile phone footage of the demonstration and contributed to the police’s inability to frame G20 protesters as violent agitators.