A Reflection: my personal views on media and crime-media

My consumption of media is likely very different to most people who are reading this blog right now; I follow very few television programs, use social media very minimally and predominantly out of ‘necessity’, and I have a general disdain for the consumption of media via mobile phones and the such when in public. Perhaps even more abhorrently, I do not even indulge in crime dramas or infotainment, as I find them to be excessively sensationalist and unrealistic. Where I indulge in media is primarily through the news; I watch news programs almost religiously, and have been known to, in the past, watch the exact same story being relayed on different channels. Thus despite the changing world outside, my own media consumption habits are exceptionally archaic.

A great peeve of mine is the changing processes through which ‘news worthiness’ is determined. My personal dislikes include celebrity breakdowns and their minor deviances (though Charlie Sheen was an interesting story that might fall into this category), ‘charismatic’ political leaders (notably the Obama’s are exceedingly annoying) and ‘news media campaigns’ that are often characterised by misinformation and ill logic.  As much as I acknowledge that ‘celebrity’ is a key factor in determining newsworthiness, surely any one of the many hundreds of murders that occur daily in both developed and third world societies is more interesting than Michelle Obama planting a vegetable garden at the white house. While watching the modern celebrity, so often void of actual talent and genuine character, fall from grace does bring a smirk to my face, surely the reporting of just about anything else is both more interesting and more ethical. The last problem area I have identified is perhaps the biggest peeve of mine because it has affected me directly; a largely misinformed media campaign by Channel 9’s ‘A Current Affair’, which I completely deny every watching, was linked to the increase in the number of hours required to obtain a drivers license; this has left me in a great hole. The premise behind the campaign and subsequent amendments was that more hours would make people better drivers; what they misconstrue, is that it is not bad drivers that cause serious car accidents but stupid ones who place themselves in dangerous situations to begin with.

Focusing back on the topic of my media consumption; whilst I do not follow television programs religiously or via a television, I have been known to view a decent array of media via the internet. An exceptionally tacky show to which I became quite devoted years ago, was ‘Gangs of Oz’, with episodes on ethnic youth gangs the most interesting to me. This pattern of a fascination with youth crime, and more generally youth deviance, is fairly evident in my choice of movies, music and reading. It could be because they are issues that are exceptionally relevant and real to me, but I’ll leave that question unanswered.

I would like to finish with some of my basic views regarding crime media. Firstly, the distinction between crime-media, and normal media, is becoming increasingly blurred with time; where scholarly input and well educated points of view once existed, celebrities now fill their place as both content and reporter. I think that the fascination that people have with crime is rooted very much in our psychologies. It is a well established notion in psychology is that when we are faced with any dangerous situation, we instinctively respond with fight or flight, and I feel that our consumption of crime in the media is a way for us to experience that carnal almost primitive rush that is just not available to us in our mundane daily lives. Lastly, I think that the average consumer of media really is as naïve as the advertisers and media outlets would like to believe. I don't feel that there is any reason for this belief, I just tend to believe it could be true. 

NSW State Election 2011: Bikie crime or fear of bikie crime?

The hammer of law and order was surprisingly quiet in this past election

For the first time in a long time, law and order issues were not a major turning point in the recent NSW State Elections. That is until, facing crushing defeat in the polls, the Labor Party brought up the issue of bikie violence in latent attempt to win votes  (McGovern 2011).  

Firstly I would like to point out that the very fact that a major political party invokeda law and order issue, without any logical pretense,  as a last grasp attempt at votes is clear acknowledgement that, atleast in NSW, law and order policies have been powerful weapons come election time. Further testimony about the importance of law and order issues in elections is provided by Cousins (2011) and McCullough (2004). As identified by McGovern (2011), the crux of Labor’s law and order attack during this campaign was toughness on bikie gang violence. Now everybody who hasn’t been living under a rock knows that in the recent past, bikie gang violence has been the ‘in’ issue of crime. From Underbelly, to their prominence in infotainment programs, bikie gangs have suddenly risen to the fore of Australia’s crime media. The problem with this is that while they have only just risen to the fore of media, the prominence and power of the bikie gangs has long been a fact of knowledge to both politicians and law enforcement alike. So why is it only now that it is becoming a prominent issue to them? This boils down to moral panics and fear of crime. 

Stated quite simply, moral panics are the products of extreme exaggerations of perceived problems within society leading to widespread and largely unjustified hysteria (Marsh & Melville 2009). Now far from implying that bikies are not a danger to society, as they are and do require some action to regulate, what I am trying to do is understand their sudden rise in media relevancy, which does not correlate with any change in either their tendencies or prominence as perpetrators of crimes. I believe the catalyst for the shift in policy regarding bikies was the brawl at Sydney Airport, documented in a news article by Bibby et al (2009). What was significant about the brawl was that it occurred in a public place; note that it occurring in a public place is distinctly separate from it involving members of the public, as no members of the public were harmed in any way. The major issue of law and order in politics is not crime itself but rather the fear of crime; thus the public visibility of the crime, despite the fact that it was functionally just another bikie on bikie incident, was enough to transform bikies into a public safety issue. 

The notion of fear of crime is quite self explanatory; it is the fear of being the victim of a crime. Whilst actual crime is obviously the proper subject of law enforcement, politically it is fear that is the more important issue. As Cleary (2004) says “It is very true to say that fear of crime robs a city of its vitality as the perception of crime is often as important or, as some argue, more important than the crime itself.” As odd as it may sound, it does make sense when we consider that they are driven almost entirely by the desire to get voters. Only a very small portion of people are actually victims of crime, and thus only a very small portion of voters would be affected by actual crime issues, and if we add to that the fact that the majority of people are misinformed regarding crime issues and hold questionable views, then the divide between the communities ‘fear of crime’ and actual crime within the community becomes clearer. Relating this back to the bikie issue; despite the fact that bikie crime has always occurred and has always been excessively violent in nature, it wasn’t until the airport brawl, and subsequently selective reporting of bikie violence to pander to the hysteria, that bikie criminal activity was bikie fear of crime inducing activity.  

In conclusion, the issues of fear of crime and moral panic are the usual weapons of choice for politicians during election periods, and whilst law and order as a whole was a lesser issue in these recent elections, the patterns and logic that have dictated law and order debates of the past remained, and will most likely feature more prominently in the future. 

As problematic and intimidating, but what's changed?

REFERENCE S:

Bibby, P., Clennell, A., Narushima,Y. . 2009. Sydney airport bikie gang murder. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/national/bikie-brawl-watched-by-security-men-20090323-97gf.html. [Accessed 02 June 11].

Cleary, S. 2004. Reducing the fear of crime in city centres. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.seanliamcleary.com/userimages/Fear_of_Crime.pdf. [Accessed 01 June 11].

Marsh, I & Melville, G. (2009). Crime, justice and the media, Routledge, USA

McGovern, A. 2011. State of nsw: setting the agenda on crime in nsw. [ONLINE] Available at: http://theconversation.edu.au/state-of-nsw-setting-the-agenda-on-crime-in-nsw-225. [Accessed 01 June 11].

'The Copy Cat Killer': A South Park portrayal of law enforcement

Recently I watched an episode of South Park, 'The Copy Cat Killer' from Season 8, that touched on the topic of crime; it was a parody of shows like CSI and Criminal Minds, but it did make a real point that the way in which crimes, criminals and crime fighters are portrayed in these types of shows is caricaturistic in nature. 

Now while these shows, if seen for what they are, as pure entertainment then this would not be any issue worth discussing. However, it is a well established fact that people rely almost entirely on media for their information about crime; they develop their attitudes, beliefs and fears purely from what they see in the media, and this includes fictional programming. Thus I thought it would be interesting to write about what I personally identify as the most significant, and most frequent misconceptions that people get about law enforcement and the nature of crime, as they appear in the South Park parody of crime media (while trying as hard as possible to not spoil it for people who might to want to watch it).

1)      That the lives of police, and the crimes they investigate, are all so dramatic:
There is a montage in the episode that begins with the stereotypical quip, “my police instincts are telling me the answer’s right in front of us”, then follows with dramatic music and scenes of intense investigation involving many intense faces and strange technologies. These sorts of are slowly replaced by scenes of the officers day to day life; him at the gym, at the beach playing beach volley ball, and forgetting what he was doing in the first place.

The point that this montage makes, is that while we’d like to think of police as ultra dramatic supermen, and of the process of investigation as a round the clock job in which the notion that “sleep is for the weak” is actually practiced is very far from the reality. The reality is that police are just normal people, with normal lives, who, while admittedly more dedicated and emotionally invested than some, are just employees working to run their own lives.

2)      That stereotypes are used by police as investigative tools:
In the South Park episode, there is a man at the scene of the crime who is dressed dirtily, talks in a deep and shaky voice, and who carries a blow up doll of a female who he talks to and refers to as ‘mother’. One of the children, observing, immediately calls over the officer to say they should investigate the man, while the officer contrasting says that it’s too obvious.

When we watch a show, we are very often left with the sense that whoever was the criminal was fairly obvious; this might be revisionist, but the fact is that normal people, with little experience of real crimes, do generally stereotype or judge people on the smallest of things. Note here, that the writers of crime shows are ordinary citizens.  However the fact that this type of thinking is attributed to law enforcement in shows, when the pretty girl is let off by the male officer or when a close family member is immediately assumed innocent (in ignorance of real world statistics), is in stark contrast to the painstaking and highly intelligent work done by police officers.

3)      That police are indiscretionary in their use of 'arrest' and 'charge' powers:
In the episode, officers begin to use the services of a clairvoyant who is actually just a child who has suffered from recent brain trauma and is thus having hallucinations. The police make arrest after arrest on the advice of the child, presuming that there are an endless number of copy cat killers before presuming that the child is simply wrong.

It is a common plotline in crime dramas for the police to be looking in the wrong direction and arresting and even brutalising the wrong person; who can’t recall the dramatic phone call and close up of the police officer as they hear of a particular crime being committed- a crime that they had thought would cease because they had ‘got their guy’. As I established earlier, real life police are just normal people who are as prone to error as the rest of us. However, a great deal of research, investigation and expertise goes into arrests and as such they are very, very rarely wrong. Whilst the principle that it is better to let 10 men go than to imprison 1 innocent is primarily a doctrine of the court, the logic behind it is equally applicable to police work.

We might assume he's a killer, but a policeman would require much more convncing.

The Problems of Mandatory Sentencing

In a recent article on the ABC News website Barry O’Farrell proposed the introduction of a mandatory life sentence for those found guilty of murdering a police officer.  This raises two important questions; what is the political motivation for doing this, and does it have any intelligent criminological grounding?

First we’ll address the political issues. It contrast to previous elections of the past two decades, in the recent NSW State Election law and order issues took a backseat. The only specific policies promised, beyond the very generic catch cry of more funding, more police, tougher police and the like, were anti-Bikie legislation and increased funding of police technologies.  However history will show that this is very likely a one off, and that the next election will likely strongly involve a battle of law and order policy. Thus, it seems logical that Barry O’Farrell would want to seem ‘tough on crime’. If this is all he was hoping to achieve from the issue, then he has done so very intelligently; this one action has at once painted him as a leader who is willing to act, who is tough on crime (due to the public perception that jail time is a direct correlate of toughness on crime), and has painted a picture of the police as some special force within the community. At this point, I thought that surely there was a more direct cause for this legislation than what has already been identified, but I was unable to locate any particularly high profile police as victims of murder cases; in fact, even within the ABC News article, the victim they discussed has been deceased for over 14 years. 

Now I will discuss the criminological perspective. Firstly, in the article they quote Former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery as saying, "The difficulty about mandatory sentences is that you remove the discretion of the courts to do justice in a particular case, cases are not black and white… It's for courts and judges once they hear all the evidence to make an appropriate determination, not for parliamentarians in a knee jerk law and order auction." Now whilst I do not necessarily agree with the notion of it being a knee jerk law and order auction (on the contrary, I feel it is highly planned, though purely political manoeuvre), I do agree, contrary to the common vernacular, that the move away from discretion is not a good thing. Why? Because it is a move backwards in terms of the way we view crime. A large body of research into the nature of punishment has shown that contrary to public perceptions that toughness, in both sentencing and punishment, reduces recidivism, it is the therapeutic restorative practices, that involve high levels of discretion and interaction, that are most successful in healing the wounds of victims and offenders alike. As posited by McCold and Wachtel (2003), a criminal justice system that merely doles out punishment to offenders and sidelines victims does not address the emotional or relational needs of those who have been affected by crime in a world where people are increasingly alienated. As Henry (1999) would say, the type of logic being used by Barry O’Farrell is an attempt to solve 21^st century problems with 19^th century logic.

So in conclusion, I guess it is best to say that Barry O’Farrell is a good politician (in the sense that he is good at his job as a politician), and that he is an inherently illogical policy maker.

Cop Killers: Is it just to sentence without knowing the detail?

References:

ABC News. 2011. NSW proposes mandatory life term for cop killers. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/22/3223632.htm. [Accessed 01 June 11].

McCold, P., & Wachtel, T. (2003). In Pursuit of Paradigm; A theory of Restorative Justice. World Congress of Criminology, N/A.

Henry, J.F. (1999). Lawyers as agents of change. Into the 21^st Century: Thought pieces on Lawyering, Problem Solving and ADR, Vol. 51.

A reply to "The Internet and Social networking sites-should we be worried?"

I think Mel in her blog post “The Internet and Social networking sites- should we be worried?” raised a lot of interesting issues about social media, but more generally on the impacts of technology on crime in general.

Is a second life just a second oppurtunity for bullies?

As Mel notes, the act of cyber bullying are well on the rise and while older generations might look back with nostalgia and claim that it is down to the natures of increasingly deviant youths, a more practical view is that it is the simple by-product of growing use of social media. Though there is very little academic literature on the phenomenon, an overview of the available non-academic literature is very revealing; major social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube feature in all lists of top 10 most popular websites with a variety of lesser known blogging platforms typically taking up another 1-2 spaces (My Top Ten  2011, Most Popular Websites 2011, Google 2011), while the Nielsen Company (2010), has determined that the average person in their sample (data is taken from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy) spent an average of five and a half hours on social media websites over a month, an 82% increase from the previous year. Australia weighed in at second for highest level of social network usage at over five and a half hours. Notably the Nielsen Company (2010) data excludes popular video sharing platforms such as YouTube and forums.

An important intermediary, before we link the growth of social media to the growth of cyber bullying, is the increasing significance of our online selves. It is both commonsense and legal principle that physical provocation is more serious than verbal, and using the same logic it should be seen that cyber provocation is even less serious. Yet the growth of the phenomenon of internet bullying, and indeed of internet usage in general, forces one to consider otherwise. People are increasingly emotionally, psychologically, and even financially vested in their internet lives; for proof we need look no further than the game ‘Second Life’(see video at end) in which users are known to spend hundreds of thousands of real world dollars on virtual entities, in which there are documented (and very serious, to the participants atleast) cyber-weddings and adulteries (Woods 2008), and in which there are documented cases of parents being so preoccupied with ‘Second Life’ offspring that they neglect their own (Torgovnick 2010). Without doubt it can be said that our identities and interactions are increasingly being subdivided into real life and digital life, our 'second life', with the latter growing in significance with time.  

If we make the reasonable assumption that bullies are as prone as the rest of the population to indulge in these sorts of websites, then it would appear that bullies are simply moving from the playgrounds to their keyboards; as identities and interpersonal relations have shifted from the real world to the digital, so too have the very real notions of hatred and degradation. So whilst the crime of cyber bullying is a new crime, I feel there is little that is new about it with the same principles simply being transferred to a new platform. The main problem, as Mel has identified, is how to catch the bullies out or to monitor victims in a platform that is inherently anonymous.

References:

Google. 2011. Top 1000 sites on the web. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/. [Accessed 07 May 11].

Most Popular Websites. 2011. Most popular websites on the internet 1-50. [ONLINE] Available at: http://mostpopularwebsites.net/1-50/. [Accessed 09 May 11].

My Top Ten . 2011. The ten most visited websites on the internet. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mytopten.com.au/top-10-most-visited-websites/tag/top-10-most-visited-websites-on-the-inte. [Accessed 09 May 11].

Neilsen Company. 2010. Social network monthly use: 5.5 hours. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3496/social-network-monthly-use-55-hours. [Accessed 05 May 11].

Torgovnick, K. 2010. Parents so obsessed with second life baby that they neglect real baby. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-parents-so-obsessed-with-second-life-baby-that-they-completely-neglect-/. [Accessed 01 June 11].

Woods, J. 2008. Avatars and second life adultery: a tale of online cheating and real-world heartbreak. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3457828/Avatars-and-Second-Life-adultery-A-tale-of-online-cheating-and-real-world-heartbreak.html. [Accessed 01 June 11].