Robert Sharp

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Police, Camera, Action

22 April 2009 / / 7 Comments

David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:

Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like – you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.

Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed.  There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event.  The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end.  In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews).
Was it inevitable that the police would lose this PR war?  Or is that some kind of optical illusion brought about by 20:20 hindsight?  My feeling is that these stories, which trickle out over a few days, played to our preconceptions, feeding into an easily understood narrative.  Clearly, the public have lost trust in the police.
This is a desperately dangerous state of affairs, of course.  However, I think the vilification that the police now receive is a delayed punishment for earlier and more egregious clusterfucks.  Despite the fact that no-one in authority was punished for the Jean-Charles De Menezes killing, it is not unreasonable to draw a line between that incident, and the current debate.  Although neither Sir Ian Blair or Cressida Dick (or for that matter Tony Blair or his Home Secretary Charles Clarke) lost their jobs over the incident, the security services certainly lost credibility as a result.  They were ‘punished’ in the sense that they lost the public’s trust, a vital form of political capital.
There should be a bittersweet satisfaction to this: we’ve learnt that institutions simply cannot maladministrate, or violate our civil liberties, with total impunity.  We’ve learnt how to ‘police the police’, and some thuggish elements will be brought to prosecution through evidence collected by citizen photographer.  However, its also true that the men and women currently tasked with policing our capital city were not the ones who ordered a policy of violence upon us.  Those people who made such decisions still walk free, and unaccountable.  This latest success for citizen journalism is a Pyrrhic victory.
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Filming the Police, Filming Us

16 April 2009 / / 8 Comments

Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009

Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009. Photo by PublicCCTV.


At the CentreRight blog (via LibCon), Graeme Archer has posted some ideas for reform of the police in light of the appalling Ian Tomlinson incident.
He begins

The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state. Some reforms are therefore long overdue

Of the suggestions he lists, I have mixed feelings about this pair:

  • Just as the storage of DNA from wholly innocent citizens is an outrage, so is the routine video-ing of members of the public by police officers. This must stop.
  • In contrast, members of the public must never be prevented from recording the activities of police officers.

I recall a point made by the former pedant Cleanthes, commenting on my Notes for Michael, who cited Robert Peel’s principles for policing:

An agent of the state???? That, Robert, in one succint phrase is the most daming indictment of the damage that has been done to the ethos of the Police over the last few decades.
Read Peel’s Principles here. Especially no.7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Libertarian Ian Parker-Joseph made a similar point in the comments to the CentreRight post.
On the issue of filming, it seems to me we can’t have it both ways. If the police are indeed simply citizens in uniform, then they surely have the same rights to film people in public, as the rest of the citizenry? If we are allowed to film them, surely they should be allowed to film us, no? Placing a different set of restrictions on the police on this issue would violate Peel’s principle.
And before anyone brings up CCTV, Cleanthes and I have already discussed the difference between automated and eyeball policing at The Select Society.

Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre. CC Licence.

Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre.

Britain's Got Talent Potts-Boyler Narrative

14 April 2009 / / 2 Comments

If Susan Boyle doesn’t win Britain’s Got Talent 2009 I will eat my hat.  Click the pic for some unfettered joy:
susan
It will have escaped no-one’s notice that the narrative of Susan Boyle is very similar to that of Paul Potts: the undiscovered talent, sitting dormant until middle-age.  Both tell stories of a mundane life, and both defy the judges’ expectations in the most satisfying manner.  Simon Cowell is the wicked-witch and faery Godmother, rolled into one: he is the cynic to be flummoxed, and also the bestower of fame.
Its a double-delight to watch Susan and Paul ‘turn’ the crowd in the process.  Unlike the cool kidz and the prettyboys who expect the mobb’s support (until the proven otherwise), Boyle and Potts have to win over a crushing cynicism.  And it is that sweet, sweet triumph which makes these clips so throatblockingly beautiful.
A third delight is the fact that these performances emerge from a TV format that, elsewhere, depends on precisely the cynical, sing-by-the-numbers yawnery that usually serves to suppress people like Susan and Paul.  This is clearly a feature of the auditioning process, which takes place with a live audience in situ.  Contrast this with the X-Factor, which is auditioned in lonely, acoustic-poor conference rooms.  With just Simon, Louis, Sharon and Dannicherylpaula in attendance, there is little to rein in the instinct to follow the tested formula, and the whole ungodly affair is quickly homogenized.  While token fat and/or middle-agers do get through to the second round, its generally a highly conventional face-voice combination that will win X-Factor.  The opposite seems to be true with BGT, which strikes me as much more interesting and obviously better.
Also, expect to see a Paul Potts/Susan Boyle duet album and co-tour, sometime in 2009/10. They complement each other in appearance and demeanor, and as an added bonus, their surnames could not be better suited.  Their story could be a great little Potts Boyler.  If I was a more cynical I person I might even hint at a Chart Throb/Wag The Dog style conspiracy… but watching that clip of Susan, again, drains me of all such heresy.

Smashing

14 April 2009 / / 2 Comments

Having lost many an hour’s sleep playing Linerider, I can only imagine the hours that went into this delightful piece of Heath Robinson:

In the past, a person who created this in his flat would have been branded an obsessive nutter. In the Internet Age, however, he’s an entertainer. His dedication is only validated by his audience. Is that a good thing?

Gay Marriage in America

9 April 2009 / / 4 Comments

The state legislature of Vermont has just voted to extend the right to marry, to homosexual couples.  Meanwhile in Iowa, the state supreme Court has ruled that denying gays the right to marry is unconstitutional.   If you believe Andrew Sullivan, then the floodgates have opened in America and gays are finally nearing the promised land that is  full equality.  However, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight predicts that it will take a little longer for some of the deep south states to vote in favour.  His model says that Mississippi would not liberalise until 2024.
Predictably, there is a backlash from the socially conservative segment in American society.  The most intellectually inept I have seen comes from Michael Savage at WorldNet Daily:

There is a rising tide of pink fascism in this country, and it comes as a result of the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

The I think the ‘Hussain’ meme, which implies that the President is a secret Muslim, offers increasingly diminishing returns.  That some columnists in America are still earnestly deploying it is quite, quite sad.  However, to use it in the same sentence as the ‘pink fascism’ slur makes no sense whatsoever.

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