MyPolice, (fair and) balanced journalism, and why, if it’s difficult, it’s probably worthwhile

MyPolice, the worthy winners of the 2009 Social Innovation Camp Scotland last week, received a write-up of sorts in the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times today.  I introduce the “of sorts” disclaimer because, as you can predict, any reading of the article is pretty heavily weighted by the title it has been given – “Warning over ’shop-a-cop’ website” – and the sub-heading, which intimates that “police leaders” say that the online forum may be hijacked by disgruntled members of the public.  It’s unfortunate that the first mainstream press mention of this initiative is so negative, but the team should take heart.

The article could be described as “breath-takingly” lazy if, as readers of the UK press, we hadn’t become so inured to such distortion.  So here’s the criticism:

1. “Police leaders” are intimated, yet only one (Calum Steele, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation) is directly quoted;
2. The MyPolice website doesn’t exist yet, so how can it be pre-judged?
3. They are firmly against the site becoming a place for vendettas against individual officers – i.e. the intentions are not “shop-a-cop”;
4. Calum Steele’s words, apparently a “warning”, are not in fact unreasonable.  One would expect that anyone in his position would be properly questioning about the efficacy of such an initiative, but so would the MyPolice team be themselves.  The project is difficult, but it can provide benefits to people, so that’s OK;
5. The only substantive assertion in the piece, being Mr Steele’s one that the police service already have (sufficient, one would infer) ways for the public to express dissatisfaction, is not challenged, or offered up for debate.

It could be futile to complain about the slant the titling of this piece gives to the rest of the content.  The attempt at ostensible balance in reporting, without the journalistic organ being honest about their own voice (do they support initiatives like MyPolice?  what part of their remit are they serving by giving it coverage?), is surely a refuge of the lazy.  Mr Steele was clearly called up for a quote about something he couldn’t possibly have been adequately briefed about.  Clearly journalists are under pressure to conjure up a sense of controversy in their pieces even if it does mean distortion.  We often complain that news organisations never report about good, positive things, and it’s unclear whether this happens because we have so little trust in public institutions that we can’t agree who represents that which is socially good and positive, or just because we love lazily allow our attention to meander to the aura of controversy.

I suppose established newspapers are having some difficulty justifying themselves to themselves and their customers, what with the onslaught of the new-form read/write Web.  It’s curious, however, how this can happen when the newspapers already have one up over the interhorde – they still have the ability to make people, lots of people, read about stuff they wouldn’t otherwise come across, in the public sphere.  Time was, I could write a letter to a newspaper, and one of my grandmas, even, would notice and give her opinion (an opinion that was contrary to mine, because I was writing to the Daily Mail just to rile ‘em).  Nowadays, rare is the medium where that might happen, and unfortunately I’m all out of grandmothers.

However, they squander this advantage with brainless one-dimensional have-your-say sections, and forget that the job of journalism is sometimes to be didactic, or to be icily objective, or to stay above the celebrity fray, or to root out new stories that will help me make sense of the world we live in, and won’t just divide us up and make us ignorant.  The UK is about to let into government a party that doesn’t have substantive policies, that is just as bad as the incumbents only more so.  Public life is sick if people aren’t seriously questioning how this can be.

So the MyPolice project has all these tensions it needs to work through and resolve.  There’s the issue of how, exactly, they do go about making sure that negative comments don’t become ex judice crusades against particular named officers.  They need to make sure that all participants are paid back in kind by their involvement – a complainant needs to know that they will be considered seriously, and the police need to know that any effort they expend in engaging with people through the site is worthwhile in terms of making themselves understood.  An interested visitor needs to be able find out something interesting about their area so that they can remember that the site can be of value to them should they ever need it.

MyPolice seem to be going about this the correct way – through interviews, finding out the situations in which such an online service may be useful to people, and working out what positive outcomes might come from involvement in this online forum.

I might have used such a service in the past.  In the summer of 2005, a few weeks after the G8 summit at Gleneagles (at which time, you may remember, a large number of people in Scotland were arrested and held arbitrarily under terrorism-related charges), a friend of mine was arrested in central Glasgow by a couple of officers on a power trip.  I witnessed the whole thing, and afterwards looked into complaining about the conduct of the officers in question as it had fallen far short of the kind of professional behaviour one would, with hope, expect from the police.  The procedure was, essentially, that you would write to the officers’ superior, and they would write you a letter providing an explanation of their behaviour.  If you weren’t satisfied with this response, you could take it even higher.  Never, though, was there recourse to any kind of independent body (Scotland doesn’t have a body like England’s IPCC) – the police would always have the opportunity to protect their own.  The procedure seemed to be written from a position, essentially, of arrogance: one was to infer that, for any given action by a set of police officers, there would be a reasonable explanation that could be presented, which you could either accept (in which case you went away quietly) or reject (in which case you have to go through the rigmarole of re-reporting the incident to a higher-up with no guarantee of a reasonable outcome that wasn’t a tokenistic fob-off).

I didn’t even start with it.  I would have engaged with MyPolice, had such a thing existed.

What’s less clear, though, is what I might have got from it.  The central thing it might have provided would be the site’s central service – to provide a place where a complaint can be made, in public, about particular incidents that the police can then respond to, again in public.  It may also have been the case that other people had had similar experiences with the police, and so I might have been given more information, through the prism of the experience of other people, about what kind of recourse I had available to me.

Here’s what I wanted, though: I wanted an outcome.  I wanted the officers in question to be punished for misconduct.  I didn’t want their names mentioned on a public forum, but I did want them, as individuals, to be reprimanded appropriately for their actions in arbitrarily arresting my friend.  If possible, I wanted the option of a suit for wrongful arrest.  I didn’t want the kind of camaraderie one might find on a consumer website, where one might find consolation that everyone else is just as screwed over by a particular private utility company as you are.  I believe in a good police service that doesn’t tolerate two officers arresting a young woman because they can, and that doesn’t tolerate their buddies down at the station lying to me (and her) about the whole thing.  I’d hope that a site like MyPolice could make some worthwhile progress in convincing me that if this were to happen again, I’d have access to a complaints mechanism that wasn’t in place just to fob me off and make me go away.  That’s fine (well… it’s not fine, but that’s a story for another day) for a gas company or a bank – I can just switch companies – but I have no appetite for condoning private vigilante armies!

The success of the MyPolice project will be in the details, and in the re-thinking of existing models for online participation to make something that really works for the finite set of use cases where the service could really make a difference to people’s lives.  I wish them luck.  The Sunday Times should, too!