The last time a cop was killed during a demo in Britain was more than 100 years ago, and the person who did it was acquitted in court on grounds of self-defence! There has since been a cop killed during an urban uprising (Broadwater Farm) because of a previous murder by police. In the same period of 100 years, police have killed literally hundreds of people. There are currently around 600 deaths in custody per year, only about 100 of these are suicides. I can list a number of protesters and protest bystanders killed by police pre-Tomlinson - Jill Phipps, Blair Peach, someone run over at a military base, a man in a wheelchair run over by police during the Brixton uprising, two deaths from heart attacks when police attacked a courtroom protest during the Poll Tax, another anarchist who died at about 40 a few years after injuries sustained during a police assault... not including the various "shoot to kill" cases in Northern Ireland, or people who've died in hunger strike.

Police create an imaginary scenario of protesters causing death, when in fact this is almost unknown even GLOBALLY - protesters throwing rocks or even Molotov cocktails, or wielding sticks or whatever, does NOT kill police. The handful of cases where police have been killed, have been close-range lynchings, shootings or stabbings, and these are very very rare globally (and from the cases I know, always follow from police killings - the cases I know of are from Italy many decades back, the anti-Arroyo protest in the Philippines, the Gujjar unrest, Broadwater Farm and some cases from Nigeria). There were no police deaths in Genoa, no police deaths in the unrest in Greece last December. Look through a list of deaths linked to protests and NEARLY ALL are caused by police. Examples from this last year: the Gujjar protests in western India, 40+ dead in police shootings; Kashmir, 60+ dead in police shootings; Korea squat eviction, 5 protesters and 1 cop dead due to police use of dangerous chemicals. On rare exceptions where deaths are blamed on protesters using usual "violent" protest tactics, they are accidental, due to people setting fire to vehicles or buildings with people in them. (There's also the rather different phenomenon of ethnic pogroms, which really do cause deaths, usually from deliberately setting fire to houses with people inside or from beatings, stabbings or shootings - these are directed at civilians not police, and are usually easily distinguishable from protests).

Put simply, even if protesters are using the full range of the most "violent" protest tactics (which in Britain they generally aren't), these tactics are "non-lethal" or "less lethal" by police definition, i.e. they can't predictably be expected to kill anyone. If someone wants to kill police, they do it with lethal weapons against isolated individual police. So-called protest "violence" is about dispersing or pushing back police, enforcing the right to protest or sanctioning unwanted state actions by exercising proportionate force to control the streets of an area, create or defend an autonomous zone, reach a target or shut down state functioning.