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The police fiddle while children are killed
It is no exaggeration to say that today’s children have been betrayed by today’s adults. The killing of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool is a direct consequence of a mass abdication of responsibility by the generations that should have been protecting him – and his murderer, too
I am not talking about Rhys’s grieving mother and father, who are loving parents of the sort every child should have. I mean the agencies of state, from police officers and local authorities to those in Whitehall and Westminster who have turned their backs on adult obligations and discouraged the rest of us from taking them on.
Although we are the most spied-upon nation in Europe and although we have spent billions on social renewal schemes, we have reached a state in which children and teenagers in big cities live in terror of other children and teenagers and in despair of protection from adults. They carry knives because they are afraid.
They are afraid on their way to and from school and they learn almost nothing when they get there, partly because adults don’t protect them from bullying, thieving and disruption. Teachers have either lost or relinquished their authority and children can expect little or no guidance and protection from them, or from their parents, or from council care, or from the police.
Children know the police cannot protect them from gang leaders and that they would be daft to cooperate as witnesses. I know of two boys who were tortured by a young teenager to stop them giving evidence against him. For many young people in inner cities, there is no alternative to the comparative safety of gang life.
Since January eight young people have died in shootings – six in London, one in Manchester and now one in Liverpool. According to Home Office figures, the total number of young people aged between five and 16 who were murdered, one way or another, has gone down from 44 in 1995 to 20 in 2005-6 (and 40% of these were killed by a parent). However, overall gun killings went up from 49 in 2005-6 to 58 in 2006-7, which is a big leap.
Knife crime has gone up and knife owning is becoming common: 12 teenagers have been stabbed to death since the beginning of this year. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London found that between 22,000 and 57,000 young people could have been the victims of knife crime in 2004; without better official data it is impossible to know.
It is clear that violent crime among those under 18 has risen for four consecutive years. And it is increasingly clear that, like mass illiteracy and innumeracy, this is at root due to an adult flight from responsibility – a loss of a sense of proper authority, replaced by a misguided pursuit of improper authority.
Take policing, the first, thin line of protection. I find it incredible to learn that there are known gangs in Croxteth, where Rhys was shot (as in Peckham, where Damilola Taylor was stabbed). If the police know of these gangs, why don’t they control them with all possible severity? Why don’t they watch them ceaselessly and remove the ringleaders with Asbos? Why don’t they have police on the beat, as politicians keep promising?
Of course they know of these gangs. Recognising the gravity of gang gun crime, Merseyside police set up a special unit called Matrix two years ago with 200 officers. Why aren’t they patrolling the danger spots aggressively? If 200 officers are not enough, why aren’t there more?
According to locals, the car park where Rhys died had become a meeting place for gangs, yet plans to have police there between 8pm and midnight were withdrawn last May. A camera was proposed for this coming October. It is depressing by comparison that a camera was already in place on a beach in Sussex to catch two girls exposing their breasts, and police were available to arrest and charge them, and accompany them to court last week (though the case was later dropped), while nobody from our busybody state was watching the known troublespot where Rhys died.
There was also police time and presence enough in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, this month to arrest a boy who threw a sausage at a man in the street and to charge him with assault, for which he could stand trial at vast expense. A police culture that permits this is the culture of Nero – fiddling with cocktail sausages while the inner cities burn.
The police are not entirely to blame, however. It is not their fault that under politically correct micromanagement from Whitehall, policing has become pen pushing, forcing them off the beat. Alistair McWhirter, a former chief constable of Suffolk, recently made the well-known point that officers spend much of their time doing preposterous amounts of paperwork.
A file for a simple assault case contained 128 pieces of paper and had been handled by more than 50 people before it got to court. Recording an arrest will take up at least a morning of an officer’s time in paperwork. It was irresponsible enough to dream up such a time-wasting procedure; it has been almost criminally irresponsible, after several years of complaint, to continue with it. This is the betrayal of the Whitehall mandarins, who have insisted on this nonsense, in all public services, backed by government.
The failures of the police are only one part of a complex collection of social problems and if society is broken, the police can hardly be expected to fix it. What’s needed is a passionate backlash against irresponsibility and irresponsible, misguided waste and the terrible state sector mentality that promotes both.
It’s this mentality that has produced teachers who can’t or won’t teach, school leavers who are unemployable, students who can’t study, feckless parents, broken homes, police who are obsessed with things that don’t matter, neighbours who dare not stand up to other people’s children, jails overcrowded with the wrong people, idiotic state sector make-work, intrusive quangos imposing idiotic make-work and the divisive follies of multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration.
Until we begin to stand up against all these things, we can probably expect more senseless killings of children.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 26, 2007 | Comments (0)
Fatal mistake of a deluded film-maker
Film-maker Paul Watson's protestations of innocence are unconvincing - as is his relationship with reality
‘Am I a manipulative sod?” asked Paul Watson, the documentary maker, last Sunday. He was giving an interview to this paper at a time of uproar surrounding his ITV film, scheduled for this Wednesday, about the death of a man with Alzheimer’s. “Am I a manipulative sod? I am,” he answered, “because that’s what editing is about. That’s where you play God, and if you don’t play God truthfully, there’s no point.”
In the light of what has followed, this was an unfortunate confession. At that time almost everyone who took any interest in his film – Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell – believed that viewers would see Malcolm departing this life on screen. Many people disapproved. I wrote a column in the same edition arguing that there is something of the snuff movie about even the most delicately filmed death rattle; a man’s death should not be a television spectacle.
The public had every reason to believe Malcolm’s death was to be broadcast. Those who saw the film preview thought so, the ITV press release of July 20 said so clearly – Watson spoke in it of “filming to the bitter end” – and for days there had been a huge amount of publicity driven precisely by the rights or wrongs of filming real live death, as ITV no doubt expected. Neither the film-maker nor the widow said anything to disabuse us, and there was an odour of sanctimony about them; both he and she spoke heart-warmingly of the film helping people to overcome their fear of death.
So it came as a surprise when the dead man’s brother Graham wrote a blog on the Times Online website on Sunday evening (in response to my column) that Malcolm did not die on screen; he died several days later, after the end of filming and after Watson’s departure.
This put many people, starting with Watson, in an awkward position; if he hadn’t filmed Malcolm’s death, why had he let us think he had? Why had he not contradicted the impression that he had? Why does the film clearly suggest it? Watson’s response has been to take an adversarial stance of self-justification; on Wednesday he said on Radio 4 that his “crime” was that he hadn’t compiled the ITV press statement himself and hadn’t read it “sufficiently clearly”.
Now there’s a thing. He expects us to believe that an experienced media man like him, who has spent 11 years working with the Pointon family, at the end of all his impassioned creative input does not bother to read or try to influence the publicity introducing his own magnum opus. That isn’t easy to believe, to put it mildly.
Then there’s the matter of the alteration to the film that occurred to him so belatedly; he says he asked ITV last Monday to let him insert five words into the film “to explain that the picture you are looking at, at this moment, is not Malcolm’s death”, but that they initially refused. Why at that late date did this experienced director suddenly feel the need to insert “five words” to his long-considered, carefully completed and crafted film?
Are we to suppose that this hugely important moment, this “bitter end”, suddenly needed a bit of tidying up? Or should we, perhaps, make a different inference? We may never know, though ITV and a furious Michael Grade have started an independent inquiry. I have a curious piece of evidence of my own, which may interest readers who find this story as deliciously sanctimonious as I do.
Assuming the Times Online computer records are correct, Graham Pointon did not post his blog until 8.25pm last Sunday. At 7.24pm – before anyone could have seen Pointon’s damaging revelation – Watson sent an e-mail to me at my Sunday Times address. And in view of what he has said subsequently, it is rather astonishing.
It’s astonishing in what it leaves out. For nowhere in his strange, self-justificatory ramble does he say or hint that he did not film Malcolm’s death – he clearly suggests he did. Yet he had not, and this would have been the perfect knockdown defence against my column. He chose not to tell this truth. And nowhere does he complain to me of misleading publicity, or the need for clarification, which began to bear down upon him so forcefully a few hours later. I do not think he could have written to me as he did had he been aware of Pointon’s blog.
Nowhere does he suggest in his e-mail (as he has since) that the film “has been turned into something where it looks like I am trying to pass off a shot as a death scene . . . I was not there for the moment of death, quite deliberately”.
Last Tuesday he said in self-defence that “if anyone had bothered to call me I would have told them the situation”. But he didn’t tell me “the situation” in the e-mail he wrote to me, a journalist, two days previously. Indeed, almost the first thing he said to me was that he had filmed the moment of death before; last November he transmitted a film in which two alcoholics died in front of his camera, but nobody from “the usual suspects” or officialdom had complained.
“You must also know,” he went on, “that I lecture around the country against the insidious harm to ‘truth’ and the documentary form and indeed to ourselves by the ‘get rich quick’ formats of RDF, Endemol and others.” Words fail me. I cannot think of a character in fiction so preposterously self-contradictory.
I am not a lawyer but I do at the least think that Watson has been economical – or is it in this case generous? – with the actualité. I could go further and say Watson has an eccentric relationship with reality, and an arrogant one too. “You are right,” he wrote to me, “about the slight removal of reality (in a documentary) by my being present. But like grit in the oyster my presence can kill or produce a pearl.” This vaingloriousness prevents him from understanding that an audience doesn’t want the polished encrustation of the director’s embellishments; we simply want the real oyster.
The trouble with the enormous power of documentary television is that it tends to corrupt; it tends to produce manipulative sods playing God, quite often untruthfully. At the same time it tends to corrupt both truth and reality. I wonder whether Watson will continue giving lectures on the insidious harm to truth. God knows, I suppose.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 05, 2007 | Comments (0)
