Oh really? A survey has been carried out, it was announced today, that found that the majority of those arrested for the Summer disturbances claim to have been involved as part of a protest against police tactics and methods. This strikes me as being a little odd. There was some talk at the time that the trigger for the disturbances being the shooting of a London youth by armed police officers, no names, no pack drill, they are pretty much irrelevant. It is pretty much accepted that the reason we don’t have armed police officers as a matter of course is that it tends to lead to shooting incidents like this one. There is a lot of discussion around whether the youth was armed, and it seems unlikely, and whether he was part of a known local gang, and this again is up for debate. The details of the incident may never be fully established but this is largely irrelevant. We already know that our police service is not completely without blame at all times. We also know that mistakes are made, often on a daily basis. But we also know that there are procedures in place to deal with these mistakes and problems.
I can’t help but feel that using an incident like this as an excuse for the disturbances that followed is firstly to do a disservice to the family of the youth concerned and to his memory, particularly given that the family asked for calm and a reasoned response and secondly to cloud the investigation of the incident by creating mayhem around it and distracting the media spotlight, reducing the chance of finding out what really happened. It seems fairly clear to me that this is being used as an excuse. The police have, of late had a reasonable track record of being accountable for their actions. If we look at the Jean Charles Jimenez case we see the police being heavily chastised for their error. I am reasonably confident that justice would have been reached in the natural course of things but this is unlikely now given everything else that happened.
I make it clear that I am no apologist for the police or for government, but I feel that for the media to accept this report in the way that they have is to miss an opportunity to question the whole industry of surveys and opinion polls, which have for some considerable time been questioned as to their validity. Of course, the role of the media does not appear any longer to be to report the news, but to sell newspaper, magazines and television programmes and consequently sell advertising space. The higher the readership or viewership, the higher the advertising revenue. We saw this, to an extent in the phone hacking stories through the Summer whereby it appears that journalists were instructed to do whatever it took to get stories that would sell papers regardless of the ethics and scruples of the methodology used. I’m pretty certain that this is an area where the truth will never fully be revealed, but I also think that it is pretty clear that such practices were endemic within not just News International but other media groups.
I just wish we could find a way to get to a situation whereby news was reported for the sake of reporting rather than because it is sensational, and that we could get away from the reliance of spurious data from research groups with vested interests and the pointless vox pop culture that seems to assume that any opinion is valid…..
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