Translating a tragedy
by Noel Rooney
[ opinion - november 05 ]
The shooting of two women police officers in Bradford, UK, yesterday, has unleashed an avalanche of sentimentalised moralising in the media. Similarly mawkish displays are common around fatal incidents, of course; but this case happened at an interesting time for policing in the UK, so the media have pulled all the stops out. Whose tune they are playing is another matter.
Let’s be clear that what happened was a tragedy and a crime. Two women went to help someone in danger, prepared to risk their own safety to do so, and one of them died trying; Sharon Beshenivsky was killed and Teresa Milburn seriously injured. These women should have our sympathy, respect and gratitude. We should also be keenly aware that they were the victims of an extremely unusual set of circumstances, from which it would be imprudent, even dangerous, to derive a paradigm.
The secret of good infotainment
The timing of the incident, coming so soon after the top police officer in the UK, Sir Ian Blair, called for a public debate on how we employ our police force, and when memories of the London bombings and its aftermath are still fresh, has galvanised our broadcast media into what, on the face of it, looks like a serious attempt to bring the issues to the public, using the circumstances of this tragedy as a focus.
In fact, it is anything but. The media have chosen instead to fly a cheap and superficial kite over the event. The two strings holding this kite up are the perennially vexed question of whether our police should be routinely armed, and the supposed ‘rookie’ status of the officers. Behind the live reporting and empanelled breastbeating lies little other than the routine fictional conventions of infotainment journalism; and their contrary glitter obscures objective or rational discussion.
Gun law?
The knee-jerk media question (which took minutes to surface) is: should the police, as a result of this incident, be armed on normal duty? The question is baseless on two grounds, both instructive. The first is historical, and the second reflects the specific circumstances of the shooting.
In the last 30 years, 89 police officers have died violently in the line of duty. That amounts to a cold average of three officers a year, and there is every indication that the rate has fallen significantly in recent years. While it is tragic and regrettable that any public servant should die just doing their job, we should be realistic. Given the size of our population, the number of crimes annually, and the number of police officers, this is a relatively low figure, which suggests a relatively tolerant environment for policing, at least in this narrow respect (bear in mind this narrow respect is the operative condition here).
Where, among these largely comforting statistics, is the case for more armed police officers? Frankly, nowhere. The real issue behind the question is best understood in the context of the war on terror. The security state (the ‘state of exception’) depends, in a plebiscite democracy, on the tolerance of its citizens. We are being inured to the idea of militarised policing through a combination of simple media exposure and plausibly fatuous discussion of it. The media, for reasons of addled self-interest, are assisting in this process in a variety of ways.
The casualty figures which should give us cause for alarm are those for people who die through ‘contact’ with the police. This figure is rising, year on year; but other than a few scattered homilies on road safety, provokes as good as no comment. Certainly we should not be expecting a call for a national debate on this theme any time soon.
The story as so far related makes it abundantly clear that it would have made no difference at all had the officers been armed. Unless, that is, we propose a state where police officers anticipate a gun battle whenever they venture onto the street. This is not a state many of us would like to inhabit.
A recent - and well-publicised - report suggested that our police force is under-resourced intellectually. Given this evidence, and the civilian casualties incurred under current conditions, the militaristic moral minority ought to have their work cut out making their case. Sadly, any factual disadvantage to the gun lobby is all too easily obscured.
Sending ‘girls’ to do a man’s job
It came to light early in news reports that the police officers were probationers, and eventually it transpired that Beshenivsky had less than one year’s service. Before this information was confirmed, and long before they knew how much experience the officer actually had, the media were making an issue of it. It was mentioned every time a police official was interviewed, usually off the cuff, but always there.
But what is the issue? A police officer is on probation for two years. An officer with 23 months’ service is a ‘rookie’; an officer with 25 is not. And the distinction is rendered irrelevant by the specific circumstances. These are straightforward. A member of the public sets off a personal attack alarm (the fact that s/he is working in a shop currently being robbed by armed men is not deducible from the alarm); central control reacts to the attack alarm and sends the nearest officers to investigate, presumably not alerting them via psychic means that they should expect an armed robbery; the officers arrive at the scene just as the armed gang emerge from the shop, shoot the officers and escape.
Substitute more experienced police officers here, and it makes no difference to the circumstances; they would be no more the wiser, and would probably have fared no better. So what is the ‘rookie’ detail for?
Whoever initially released the information was dealing in pathos, probably with relatively good intentions. Whoever picked it up and ran with it was heading in quite another direction, sensing a garnish of chimerical scandal to be had from the tragedy, an angle. Timing is critical here too. Coming so soon on the heels of 7/7, and Ian Blair’s comments, the incident seems to have allowed the media accidental licence to inflate a minor biographical detail into the appearance of a forensic journalism, digging up the real issues.
But the real issue emerged from robbing a travel agency (hardly a high-value target) brandishing guns (the risk was no higher than the value), saw uniforms and ended up shooting two women. A forensic investigation of those details might be of some societal benefit. Instead the perpetrators will be described in terms befitting a prosecution barrister’s opening remarks; and any enquiry into their backgrounds will be selective, working only to cement their demonisation.
It is hard to see how public interest can be served by this kind of journalism. Running away with irrelevant details, or plausible but otherwise groundless conceptualising, is patently unhelpful to a serious debate about the role and responsibility of the police force. It can only provoke a phoney debate, the usual ranters brought out to represent positions rife with convictions but oblique to the facts. Sadly, this seems to suit the mainstream media just fine; and it is soberingly interesting that the government is in no hurry to correct the miasma of superfluous misimpressions trotted out by the media.
News, ‘news’ and no news
The shooting and its immediate aftermath exemplify the infotainment approach to the real world in a number of other ways. Soundbite symbiosis, and the casualty update farce, are direct press contributions; razor wire round the stable door, and revenge PR, are provided by the police.
Soon after the shooting, the 24-hour news channels brought us breaking news; the prime minister had said it was terrible, and so had the home secretary. It is difficult to find the information, the news content, in this convention; it would be breaking news if the celebrity deemed appropriate for comment had offered something other than a mawkish snack for apparently desperate dictophages.
Although done more respectfully in this case, the casualty update is unavoidable in any incident considered major by the news media. The phenomenon is best seen after a catastrophe, when multiple casualties are likely. While the people who are actually there to help are careful to count casualties patiently and accurately, and avoid misleading speculation, the media do just the opposite.
Every chance remark from an exhausted victim, worker or official is added up and interpolated. A running total is constantly updated by this means; the speculative sum is amended, usually upwards, and regularly beyond the eventual figure. Then the first estimate arrives from someone who has a realistic handle on the situation. With the advent of the real information, the updates melt into air. Oddly, continual deflation in precisely this fashion makes the fictional farrago no less appealing to the news gatherers.
Policing the aftermath
One of the perennial puzzles of modern policing is why, after a major incident, the crime scene is flooded with armed officers. There is little or nothing for them to do, and if there were anything to do, their weapons and armour would make them cumbersome candidates for the task; in fact they largely look like the surplus they plainly are. Perhaps, in a far corner of la-la land, some planner imagines it is reassuring for the public to see legions of underemployed, over-armed people hanging about after an incident - onlookers with attitude, perhaps.
Reassurance is the last product of this addled tactic. For the incident’s neighbours, the most obvious effect of such belated heavy-handedness is fear. They will naturally assume they are still in some sort of danger; otherwise, why all the armed police? And since the police are less than brilliant about sharing information with the public at times of tension, there is little to assuage the feeling, delusory or otherwise.
With the advent of 24/7 media, addicted to live action tragedy, the fear generated by the tactic is broadcast generally. This can only compound the climate of paranoia we insist on living under in the name of security. It also has an invidious effect on the broader terms of the debate about police and guns; many viewers may get the impression from such blanket coverage that most police officers are already armed. This is likely to skew the debate on policing still further.
At best this form of post-incident policing is an expensive, menacing irrelevance, which leaves the distinct impressions firstly that we are paying for spurious policing, and secondly that a panicked machismo, over-reacting to an urban myth, is passing for police policy. The gunmen are unlikely to return to this scene, unless they are prone to the same specious psychologising which generated the myth in the first place.
Superfluously militarised policing is now a commonplace of public order, especially where major crime scenes or public figures are involved. There is no valid security reason for it. If we are facing limitations in police funding, this would be an excellent candidate for rationalising, in all senses of the word. That is, if our political masters do not find it comforting for their own reasons.
The most unedifying aspect of the whole affair, however, came in the police press conference after the incident. We were assured that, since one of their own had been slain, the police would spare absolutely no effort to get the bad guys. This is revenge posing as public relations.
A professional body concerned with public safety would surely want to assure us first and foremost that, had the police arrived 90 seconds later, and the gunmen absconded, the police would put the same effort into finding and stopping the people who had terrified, assaulted and robbed innocent civilians. Then they might make us feel confident that they are busy protecting us from the escaped gunmen.
Instead we were treated to a display of playground tribalism, and the invidious comparison between deaths which always surfaces in such situations; it was a special case because a police officer died. Surely this is only true is you are a police officer? So surely the public should be hearing something different here?
All the news that’s fit to plant
Ultimately, one can hardly avoid the suspicion that someone in government spotted an opportunity to seed the forthcoming debate with ingredients palatable to a security-minded state apparatus. An emotive, high-profile death used as a slippery hors d’oeuvre to a feast of fudge? Surely not.
But then, if the media have not been nobbled into this ineptitude, we are left with the assumption (not altogether unwarranted historically, it has to be admitted) that the mainstream media are incapable of understanding the story in front of them in anything but the most degradedly simplistic terms. And that the vapid conventions of 24/7 news (they solidified pretty quickly, didn’t they?) both infect the rest of the mainstream, and obscure the issues from anything resembling an objective view.
