March 11, 2010
Police 1-0 Accountability and the MSM
Originally posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Re-posted here with an extension. This case makes me livid.
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When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.
Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.
When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.
It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.
So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not.
Take the tragic case of Ashleigh Hall, who was groomed by a convicted double-rapist via Facebook. The facts as we understand them are that Peter Chapman posed as a 19 year old, using fake photos, and over a period of months lulled Hall into trusting him, before convincing her to meet him. When she did, he raped and murdered her.
This story is a tragedy – but it’s also a scandal. It’s a scandal because Chapman was on the sex offenders register, a known dangerous criminal – but Merseyside Police lost track of him from January 2009, 9 months before he killed Hall, and only putting out a nation-wide alert for his person a month before he struck. After Chapman was sentenced to 35 years, Merseyside Police decided to refer itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC said they were “disappointed” the referral hadn’t come earlier.
And that’s when the police spin doctors came out to play. Anybody who’s been following this case will know that suddenly it’s the security of Facebook – not the failures of Merseyside Police – that have grabbed the headlines. This follows criticisms by the police that Facebook does not carry a Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) button – a link children can hit if they fear they are being groomed by a paedophile or otherwise threatened.
Yet it seems overwhelmingly obvious that in this case, a CEOP button would have made zero difference. If Hall had thought that she was in danger she wouldn’t have gone to meet Chapman. She’d never have hit a CEOP button, because she didn’t think she was in danger.
But if you look at the main news reporting on the issue, the row over whether Facebook is not taking the safety of its users seriously dominates. No surprises that the gutter press is running with the scare-story about Facebook (Fbookphobia is a favourite of the Mail, because it gives you cancer after all).
Yet the so-called “quality” press in most cases is no better. Here’s the BBC, The Guardian (twice), The Independent and The Telegraph (briefly) all reporting the story of the police criticising Facebook for the lack of a CEOP button. None of these stories bothers to point out the elementary point that a CEOP button would not have saved Hall.
Yet now a silly debate has sprung up about whether Facebook is protecting its users. Lib Dem Chris Huhne and Home Secretary Alan Johnson are trying to out-platitude each other by demanding that Facebook install a CEOP button. In turn the media are reporting on that. All the while, the big question – how did Merseyside Police fuck up so badly that a child ended up being raped and murdered by a man they should have had tabs on, and why have they only just referred themselves to the (admittedly useless) IPCC – is moving further from the spotlight.
1-0 to Merseyside Police. Another indictment of the pathetic state of our mainstream media.
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I did find one article making the sensible point that a CEOP button wouldn’t have helped, tucked away in The Times’ online crime section, in an Op Ed by Murad Ahmed:
“But the main problem is that it would seem as though no button could have prevented what happen to Ashleigh Hall. Both the police and Facebook stress that people should be wary of talking to strangers on these sites, and particularly of meeting them. Ashleigh did not know that she was walking into a dangerous trap – and there will always be those trying to set them.”
But that this is only in a comment piece is precisely the problem. The MSM’s pusillanimous, slavish desperation to offer “balance” in all cases – even when one side is talking evident crap – has allowed the police to shunt the uncomfortable question about their incompetence off the main report pages. But that’s exactly where the question needs to be. In the news sections, where everyone can see it.
Peter said,
March 11, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Yeah it’s ridiculous. And the failure to bring charges in the Thomlinson case, when if I went on the street now and did the same thing to an old lady I’d be charged like that, is bloody disgusting. One rule for them, another for us. Fucking shameful.
Paul Sagar said,
March 11, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Peter,
Whilst I completely agree, you do rather sound like you’re on BBC Have Your Say.
lol.
Alex said,
March 11, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Also, can you think of a worse idea than a button on a high-traffic social network site that lets you denounce someone on impulse? There’s no requirement for enough moral commitment to talk to somebody on the phone/walk into a police station/even just go to the police force Web site, and worse, the reports are going to be used for some nebulous “intelligence” purpose. That is to say, rather than being scrutinised as possible evidence of a crime, they’ll be uncritically scarfed up into a huge database.
Further, the huge DB is managed by ACPO, a private sector entity that escapes entirely from supervision by an elected police authority, by Parliament, or even just by Home Office ministerial line management.
And Facebook lets you develop arbitrary code to be executed as Fbook Apps on its systems. The potential for XSS and XSRF attacks doesn’t bear thinking about.
Paul Sagar said,
March 11, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Alex,
Those are excellent points, and I heartily concur.
Quinn said,
March 13, 2010 at 5:30 pm
I guess the point about the CEOP button is not that it can directly do anything to help someone who doesn’t know they are being groomed, but that it can be used by others to raise the alarm about suspicious behaviour before a paedophile gets the chance to speak to a more gullible soul.
That notwithstanding, Alex raises some very good concerns about CEOP in particular, and in this case it has been used as a massive smokescreen by the police to mask their own culpability.