Dredd Policing and Vigilante Vice ā Sounding the Alarm on Dangerous Media Framing
Just over a week ago, on Saturday 28th December 2019, the Trinidad Express featured a photograph of the Commissioner of Police, Gary Griffith, standing triumphantly, brooding over the body of Marcus Thomas, a suspect in the murder of Police Constable Nicholas Victor ā a Traffic and Highway Patrol officer who was ambushed and killed by two gunmen on Christmas Eve. Thomas was shot dead by police in a reported shoot-out on December 27th. Following widespread criticism for featuring the graphic photo on its cover page, the Express doubled down on its decision to publish the photo in an editorial which broadly cited the āpublicās right to know,ā as the motivation to publish. Rather remarkably, the Expressā editors apologised for not attributing their cover pageās photograph to the Corporate Communications unit of the Police Service.
The Expressā explanation is, at best, disingenuous and at worst, a deliberate misrepresentation of the nature of the close working relationship between the Police Service and the media, in an attempt to relinquish some responsibility for the dissemination of the grotesque imagery they simultaneously claim to be unashamed of publishing.
Itās important to note that the pressā need to have constant coverage of crime-related events has led to a marriage of convenience between the Fourth Estate and the police. Police officers are customarily the first persons on the scene of a crime and, as the most visible law enforcement personnel representing the state, they are frequently sought after as sources of official information for crime reporting. As they have established themselves as the āauthorised knowersā, the trade-off for media organisationsā quick reception of privileged information from police sources is the positioning of the police as narrative shapers. This also lends to the police framing reported events to benefit their departments in a positive light. In Rob Mawbyās 2010, Crime Reporters, the Police and āLaw-and-Order Newsā study, he explains that āthe advent of corporate communications departments in police departments and the decline of specialist crime reporting has precipitated the entrenchment of the police media relationship in which ālaw-and-order newsā, though contested, has produced a relationship that is āincreasingly asymmetrical in favour of the police.ā
In T&Tās media landscape, most of the news on crime published by the media is received directly from press statements provided by the Corporate Communications department of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS). Despite the position espoused by the Expressā editorial, the non-attribution of the āthe photoā to the photographer of the TTPSā Communications Unit was not an aberration. It is standard practice for organisations of all different sizes, functions and mandates to conduct public relations by providing the media with information intended for the general public. The job of the media houses receiving these communiquĆ©s however, is to adjudicate on whether they are appropriate to publish. Appropriateness, of course is subjective. And in a country where, despite the existence of the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT), media practitioners do not follow one strict journalistic code of ethics, it is increasingly challenging to pinpoint direct infringements. On the other hand, the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPBA) Code of Practice provides some insights into the standards of journalistic practice that local practitioners should uphold.
According to TTPBA: Media practitioners should respect citizenās right to privacy and should refrain from intruding into an individualās life without his or her consent, inclusive of photography taken of people on private property without their consent. Notably, private property is defined as: ā1) any private residence; 2) hotel bedrooms and 3) those parts of a hospital or nursing home where patients are treated or accommodated.ā These are deemed ānot generally acceptable and publication can only be justified when in the public interest.ā While one would be forgiven for walking away from the Expressā editorial with the feeling that āthe public interestā is a nebulous concept, the TTPBA clearly outlines examples of cases in which the public interest would trump a duty to strictly adhere to the principles of its code. These exceptions are outlined in the following cases:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or a serious misdemeanour,
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by some statement or action of an individual or organisation.
So how exactly then, was the public interest served by the Expressā cover page? A code of ethics need not be examined to acknowledge that it is in poor taste to facilitate the indignity of publishing someoneās lifeless body on the operating table of a hospital bed sans family consent. The code does shed light on Expressā justification for publishing to āsatisfy the public interestā simply does not pass muster and rings extremely hollow.
We therefore need to ask, whose interests are being served by publishing such a grotesquely garish photo of the nationās Commissioner of Police posing over a dead body in a curated photo that has the distinctive eerie feel of a hunter looking over his prized slaughtered prey like a trophy? Despite its attempt to do so in its editorial, the Express cannot present itself as an unbiased observer.
Media researchers have over the years established that media framing of events can have a significant impact on an audienceās perception. The press can effectively construct particular meanings in the minds of their readers through the use of language, and the selection or omission of details. Framing is essentially about selection and salience. While the term media framing has a commonly used meaning in the English language, in communication theory, media framing has an even more specific meaning which is useful when considering the way that fatal police shootings are covered in Trinidad and Tobago. Communications theorist, Robert Entman states that āto frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.ā The Express not only dropped the ball on upholding decent standards of journalistic ethics with their front cover page and cover story, but this depiction symbolises the type of vigilante justice framing of police killings recently championed by the top brass of the police service. Vigilante justice frame narratives are further compounded by the way the media chooses to describe fatal police shootings. By labelling Marcus Thomas as a āCOP KILLERā in their lead headline, āCOPS KILL COP KILLERā, the Express criminalised the deceased with an emphatic pronouncement of his guilt ā this is the equivalent of rubber-stamping the front page with the policeās given narrative. The police appear confident that Thomas was PC Victorās killer, stating that they retrieved Victorās firearm in the police operation in which Thomas was killed. There may indeed be veracity to their suspicions, but it is wholly irresponsible for media outlets to present the policeās version of events as the de facto truth and to facilitate the normalisation of officers of the law operating like the protagonist in the dystopian comic Judge Dredd ā as judges, jury and executioners.
From very early in his tenure, Commissioner Griffith made his thoughts on the relationship between due process and the deadly use of force by police officers clear. When asked to clarify his adoption of the now infamous āone shot, one killā military policy in a December 2018 interview with LOOP TT, Griffith stated that ādue process is (about) the lives of my officers (and it) has precedence over any other matter.ā
One year later the Commissionerās rhetoric remains consistent. In confirming the shooting death of Thomas to reporters, Griffith resurrected his gun talk with the gusto of a Midnight Robber; āYou touch one, you touch all!ā He reiterated that his intention was to lead operations āgoing after every shooter.ā
A perusal of the comment sections on online forums and media outletsā social media pages illustrates how many Trinidadians seemed to have accessed and utilised a vigilante frame to describe their view of most fatal police shooting in Trinidad and Tobago. This frame, like all good media frames ā defines a problem (citizens living in fear and insecurity); diagnoses a cause (pervasive crime with lawless criminals wreaking havoc on innocent citizens); makes a moral judgement (criminals deserve to die for their crimes) and suggests a remedy (police officers should fatally shoot suspected criminals when engaging with them).
The Express claims that it is not āunaware of the growing demand for exterminating suspects by any means necessary regardless of the collateral cost to innocent persons and the Constitution.ā It says āthe photoā simply captured the tensions between that perspective and the ācriminal siege on our nation and its people.ā However, the press is a conduit through which news media organisations set the agenda for the discussions of the day and select the topics deemed worthy of national and international importance. The discourse on crime is no different, and as researchers have noted, the media fraternity has guided audiencesā understanding of crime. The media frequently dramatises crime stories, centering the villain in their crafting of crime reports, and in so doing, create a predictable narrative that their readers can come to expect before theyāre even apprised of the details of a specific case when reading crime reports. The creation of digestible predetermined narratives was noted by filmmaker and scholar Rachel Lyon in 2009 and sadly, it continues today, in 2020. Failure of the media community to thoroughly and critically engage with the facts and circumstances surrounding police shootings has the potential to encourage indiscriminate use of deadly force amongst the ranks of the police service. Potentially, this could lead to the police group innocent victims and dangerous criminals alike, made worse by a media environment that allows the Police Service to essentially eulogise victims of fatal police shootingsā, writing their final stories in the media.