Manchester police officer viral video doesn’t tell the whole story – Mark White analysis

The sight of a police officer kicking and stamping on someone’s head is understandably alarming, and that’s why the independent police watchdog is now conducting an urgent investigation.

But in these fast moving traumatic incidents, where short viral videos only ever give a partial account of those events, context is everything.

And the context here is that these video clips show only the very end stages of a very violent altercation in which police say three of their officers were injured and required hospital treatment.

One female officer was smashed in the face and suffered a broken nose.

But the social media posters who uploaded these images have been very selective in the clips they chose to upload.

Nothing of the violent assault on those police officers, but plenty video of the back-up officers arriving and robustly gaining control of the scene and making arrests.

You’ll have to ask those posters what their motivation is for giving only a snapshot of a much more complex incident.

But already, several have been suggesting the incident has racial overtones, as all the officers involved were white and the men they arrested were men of Pakistani heritage.

Yet, those same social media posters omit to mention anything about the violence those arrested are accused of inflicting on those same white officers.

The incident itself first began around 8:30pm on Tuesday in a multi-storey carpark attached to Terminal 2 at Manchester airport.

Police received a report that a person had been assaulted. They pinpointed a suspect on CCTV who was near a ticket machine in the carpark.

Officers were sent to that location and attempted to detain that suspect.

But during that attempted arrest, the suspect and several other men are reported to have struggled violently and knocked three officers to the ground.

Modern police radios allow officers to press a panic button to call for immediate assistance from other colleagues.

That distress button establishes an open communications link, where the control room and back-up officers can hear those officers in need of help.

It basically frees them up from having to keep pressing the communications button and allows them to shout other vital information to colleagues about where they are and what’s happening to them.

Those back-up officers rushing to the scene will have been listening to their colleagues screams as they struggled with their attackers.

The other important point here is that all the officers involved in this incident were firearms officers, as most police around airport terminals are, given the high threat environment.

Uppermost in the minds of those officers is the fear that someone prepared to violently resist arrest might also try to grab their firearms.

And that takes us to the point where those viral videos begin, after the officers have been assaulted and just as those back-up colleagues reach the multi-storey carpark.

Some of the injured officers can be seen pointing out the men they say attacked them.

Their colleagues waste little time trying to negotiate with individuals, who by this time, are protesting their innocence.

They are robustly dealt with, taken to the ground and handcuffed.

It will be for an independent investigation to determine whether the officer seen kicking one suspect in the head overstepped his authority.

In other words was his response proportionate given all of the factors at play and potential threat he perceived.

And in doing that, investigators will have access to all of those officers’ body worn video cameras. Including footage from the officers who were violently assaulted.

They’ll have CCTV from inside the car park and eyewitness testimony.. not just those short viral videos which rarely tell us the whole story.