05 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
If it’s true that Avon and Somerset police excluded ITV News from its Joanna Yeates inquiry briefing today in response to criticisms on last night’s News at Ten, then the Dumb Cop of the Year award is sorted with only days of 2011 gone.
It is so obviously unacceptable for a public service such as the police to exclude representatives of a public service broadcaster that a demeaning apology cannot be far behind.
It’s the sort of crass news management I associate with the Nixon presidency in the 1970s, and the sort of behaviour we might expect from a spoiled and sulking schoolgirl.
Not, it should be said, that the general business of access to briefings, press conferences and interviews is remotely transparent, or managed in the interests of news consumers. Heavy-hitting interviewers such as Lynn Barber and Simon Hattenstone are used to being blacklisted by movie stars and movie studios, and PR agencies always have journalists they deal with and journalists they don’t.
To take a really big example of selection and exclusion in news delivery, the BBC and Sky are probably still cross that Prince William and Kate Middleton gave their engagement interview to ITV’s Tom Bradby, a reporter they apparently find sympathetic. Ideally, picking which reporter does which job is the editor’s job.
The police, with their often generously staffed PR departments, are not immune to the selection impulse, but in my experience it is normally possible for a reputable reporter, or one working for a reputable organisation, to gain access to police press conferences. Deliberate filtering on the grounds that you have a record of criticising the police is, I think, as unusual as it is indefensible.
The rules are different, of course, for other useful forms of access such as one-to-one interviews, off-the-record briefings and tip-offs. These depend on trust between officers and reporters, the kind of relationship that journalists always need to be be wary of.
16 Dec 10 | News and features, United Kingdom
Journalist Shiv Malik was injured by a police baton strike during last week’s student protests. He asks who should be blamed for the violence: protesters, police officers or politicians?
It wasn’t true. At 15:30pm, two hours after it began, the front of Thursday’s anti-fees march had not been kettled. It was hemmed in on four sides of the square, but a main exit was still open — up Whitehall, the actual route of the march. The thing was, no one wanted to leave. “ We saw what happened after a million people marched during the Iraq war. We don’t want to just go home. And they haven’t even voted yet,” one red haired female college student told me.
Asserting their right to free movement, the crowd surged up Victoria which was blocked by a line of riot and mounted police. Within a few minutes, I found myself at the front line.
“Get back, get back,” shouted a six-foot copper, his truncheon raised. Now with the crowd pressing up behind me, attempting to break the line, there was nowhere to go. The officer’s baton then glanced the side of my face, knocking off my glasses and catching my left eye. I caught my glasses before they dropped to the floor and then prepared for a second strike. This time, I held the officer’s baton for a few seconds as it came down on me.
It was a natural response — I was defending myself against assault. However, an officer trying to keep order is a licensed professional in a unique position: they are permitted to strike out — within reason — to keep the peace and hold their line. For the officer, protecting myself by placing a hand around his baton, even for a moment, riled him up no end; I was stopping him from doing his job. The third strike caught the top of my head. The blood began to pour.
The narrative of who started what and when, and the blame game of who is responsible for violence — protesters or the police — is most always chewed over by people who don’t actually go to demonstrations where there is a threat of public disorder. As someone who has attended dozens of violent protests over the last ten years, including all four major student demos since 10 November, I can say that most trouble starts when protesters try to move in a direction — up a street or down an alley — which police commanders have decided they must be barred from.
Thursday’s events left hundreds of students and police injured. It was pure chance that no one died.
It’s worth asking a counter factual question. What would have happened if the police hadn’t been there, stacked line-by-line near Parliament? The answer, I believe, is that the students would have entered the House of Commons and occupied it. And it is entirely possible that it would have been 99 per cent peaceful, rather like the countrywide protests of 30 November or the dozens of other student occupations around the country. Ultimately, the police were there to protect the Palace of Westminster from a very unpopular decision being taken against people who couldn’t vote at the last election or felt rightly betrayed by the party they did vote for. And the easiest way you can stop thousands of people from occupying a building is to beat them back or charge at them with horses. Protesters will obviously fight back and use violence in turn.
One protester here sums this up: “A feeling of desperation always leads to severe consequences. The problem is the government are not supposed to allow it to go that far. They have, they’ve pushed their luck and now they are happy to hide behind the police, who aren’t our enemy, yet they’re the ones who get the stick for it. They brutalise us, we fight back, but it deters from the fact that the enemy is in there,” he says pointing towards the Palace of Westminster.
The police know this too. Asked if repeated clashes with students could damage the police’s reputation, Association of Chief Police Officer president Sir Hugh Orde said, “Yes, if it is allowed to be played as the cops acting as an arm of the state, delivering the elected government’s will, rather than protecting the rights of the citizen.”
He added “the predictable consequence” of the anti-cuts demos were that “the police become the focus of people’s anger. Any time citizens in uniform comes up against the citizen, relationships suffer.”
Orde is absolutely right, we are all citizens. So ultimately it is those politicians who cower behind the uniforms and resources of some of those citizens, who are responsible for the violence. And they should only carry on if they have the stomach for more blood.
Shiv Malik is a journalist and co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth
23 Nov 10 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
It started out as a routine night on the Egyptian parliamentary campaign trail, and ended as a clear lesson in the methods that a police state uses to control, intimidate and generally confuse journalists.
Along with several colleagues, I traveled to Shubra Al-Kheima — a grim industrial Cairo suburb — on Sunday night at the invitation of Dr Mohamed Beltagui, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated parliamentarian, seeking to defend his seat.
The Brotherhood is illegal in Egypt and officially banned from forming a political party. Nevertheless in 2005 parliamentary elections, Beltagui and 87 other Brotherhood members won seats running as nominal independents — instantly establishing the Brotherhood as the country largest opposition bloc.
This time around the government seems determined to cut the Islamist group down to size. Hundreds of Brotherhood supporters have been arrested in the past week, often after police moved in to break up Brotherhood rallies.
At first there was no sign of such a crackdown on Sunday night. My colleagues and I walked along with Beltagui’s sign-carrying supporters, recording their chants and watching the candidate give several brief campaign speeches over a portable loudspeaker.
After about two hours, I got into a taxi along with Ursula Lindsey, a correspondent for the BBC radio program The World, and prepared to head home. Suddenly the taxi was stopped by a crowd of plain-clothed men, obviously officers of Egypt’s ubiquitous State Security Investigations force.
They removed us from the taxi, and demanded our IDs and credentials. They aggressively asked us where was our tasreeh (permission) to work as journalists in this neighborhood. I explained several times that my press card issued by the Ministry of Information WAS my permission. It became very quickly apparent that our official state press cards were worth almost nothing.
What followed was a half-hour of surreal tedium — standing on a darkened street with 10 plain-clothed officers who apparently thought they were protecting the country from us. The officers kept explaining that they were “following orders” but refused to explain just what those orders were.
There were several comments implying that as foreign journalists, we were hopelessly biased against the Egyptian government and only gave attention to opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point, one of them laughed at said, “Welcome to Shubra al-Kheima. Now don’t ever come back. Shubra al-Kheima is hazardous to your health.”
Finally I was handed a mobile phone. One the other end was a man identifying himself only as “General Ahmed.” He came off as the nicest guy in the world, and told me I was welcome to return to this neighborhood any time I wanted. But there was a catch. “To prevent problems like this in the future,” he told me, it would be best if I first stopped by the local police station to inform them of my presence. That way, he said, they could arrange a police escort, “for your protection.”
Fortunately, I restrained the urge to point out that the only protection I needed was from his men.
Finally we were allowed to leave. In the end, it was more annoying than intimidating, more bureaucratic than bullying. But it was a clear window into the type of petty harassment the regime routinely employs in order to shrink the local political playing field and limit the activities of foreign journalists.
On Monday morning came a surreal post-script. The government held a press conference to discuss their electoral preparations. The head of the state-sponsored National Council for Human Rights issued several assurances that this electoral round would be clean, transparent and free of the violations that have marred previous votes.
I mentioned that several journalists, including myself, were detained the previous night simply for doing our jobs. The responses were genuinely shocking.
Several government officials told me that it was my fault for being there. If I want to interview a candidate, I was told, I should meet them in their office. To walk alongside a campaign rally constitutes “political activity,” they said — which apparently makes me and other journalists fair game in the eyes of the state.
23 Nov 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Three men were charged yesterday with the attempted murder of a journalist, news agency El Universal reported. Two of the men are reported to be policemen, while the third man has been recently convicted on charges of theft.
The three were arrested by the Federal Police in Ecatepec, Mexico state, as a result of an investigation previously initiated by the FEADLE (Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Freedom of Expression).
The two police officers were also charged with illegal possession of weapons. The name of the journalist remains undisclosed out of security reasons.
