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Open Justice and Court Reporting: Dull or Drama?

At its best the courtroom provides compelling drama of the kind rarely seen on TV. On any given day you can witness anger, grief, happiness, apathy, despair and disbelief, sometimes from the same person. There are performances of great skill alongside acts of sheer incompetence. Decisions are made which affect lives for many years, if not forever.

Courtrooms can also be boring. So soul-destroyingly, mindnumbingly tedious that you wonder why mankind even exists. Sometimes it seems like you’ve been waiting a whole day for one ten-second event that didn’t quite match up to your expectations anyway. Sometimes nothing happens at all, at a cost so extravagant that you might feel nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when criminals were caught, tried and executed before teatime.

We all intuitively know the system is dull, especially if we work 9 to 5 office jobs, but like most dull things we prefer not to think about them. We focus on the interesting things, just like journalists. We summarise an event when retelling it as an anecdote (or at least we should do). And so, when we do think about the system we are surprised all over again by how incredibly dull and time-consuming and wasteful it is.

This is what happened when West Midlands Police decided to send five press officers into Birmingham Magistrates Court to tweet the results of every case during a morning session on April 19.

Leaving aside the fact it took five press officers to do it (now you see why newspapers appear to neglect court reporting), the results were hailed as both ‘fascinating’ and ‘a waste of time and funding.’ And the Daily Mail wasn’t impressed either.

Some examples:

A 60 yr old female suspected shoplifter appeared in court for stealing flour and a cucumber. Adjourned until next week.
24 yr old Yardley man fined £200 fine £65 compensation for stealing electric fans and a mirror as the queue was too long!
22 yr old woman from northfield pleads not guilty to assaulting her daughter.adjourned until june for further evidence and trial
39 yr old man who stole £8.99 bottle of wine receives £15 fine to be deducted from his benefits
41 yr old erdington man given total of 20 weeks for 1 count assault on a police officer and 1 count common assault
30 yr old man accused of robbery of a mobile phone.remanded in custody for birmingham crown court
39 yr old bordesley green man fined £1,070 for no tv licence and failure to provide driving licence

A few of these might have warranted a paragraph or three in the local paper. Others are interesting purely because they shed light on something we tend not to think about. You can get fined £1,000 for having no TV licence? You can get taken to court for stealing a cucumber? We sort of knew this already, but still. We leave the bureaucracy to the bureaucrats so we can get on with more interesting things. Right?

What you read in the newspapers is what you see when you go to the cinema – the finished product. The dross, the repetition, the tedium has been weeded out and what is left is the highlights. It’s like watching the football without the delays, the half time intermission and the tedious passing around midfield that never goes anywhere. Like Hollywood films the result can be criticised for lacking in quality, but it’s been created for our entertainment.

Having said that, most local newspapers used to have a ‘Look Who’s In Court’ section. That stopped at one place I worked at because the court started charging money for the paper list, meaning a reporter would have to drop all the other exciting tasks like captioning school pageant photos to get down there. These days it doesn’t make financial sense to report the courts unless it’s a really big story.

Which is why the ‘tweetathon’ was a good idea – as a one-off. It did its job in opening up the Magistrates Courts for a morning. It educated, or at least readjusted, people to the reality of the justice system. But nobody wants a non-stop stream of court results fed directly to their brain, just like they don’t want to hear someone else’s thoughts all day and every day. There has to be a filter somewhere.

That doesn’t mean we should have to rely on a journalist or a posse of press officers. In this digital world, the Magistrates Courts should really publish the results themselves. They are already recorded on a computer system, it’s just we don’t have access to it. Once out there, the ‘internet’ would do the work. Significant results would be flagged up, passed on, commented upon and investigated. All without the cost that mitigates against a human being sitting in court all day waiting for a story that might never happen.

For an example of which, see here. Why Wigan should be the forerunner of this, I have no idea…

Teddy Highwood: Family of murder victim ‘failed by police and the IPCC’

Where do you go when you believe you have been failed by the police in their handling of a murder enquiry? This is the story of one family’s decision to complain to the Independent Complaints Commission.

Seventy-nine year-old Teddy Highwood was bludgeoned to death at his home on July 17, 2009. His killer, 20 year-old Marcin Orlowski, was a Polish man with previous convictions for mugging elderly victims.

Four days before the murder Orlowski had dialled 999 and told the operator through an interpreter: ‘I should be in prison in Poland, I think, and now I have decided I don’t want to run away anymore. I just want to be arrested and be extradited to Poland. I should be in prison for about three years.’

Orlowski was telling the truth – he had fled Poland as he was about to start a prison sentence – but UK police were unaware of this and there was no record on the national database.

After two further calls, the response of a police officer was to say: ‘It is a minor offence, when he goes back to Poland he should hand himself in. We cannot help him get back.’

Orlowski was given the number of the Polish Community Helpline and it was suggested he go to the Polish Embassy, but he ended up sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square with a bottle of cider.

The family of Teddy Highwood say this wasn’t good enough. Not only that, they believe Teddy’s murder could have been prevented if the 999 calls had been taken seriously and Orlowski had been detained by police.

In August 2010 Mr Highwood’s great nephew John Morris took up the case with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), with the help of his local MP Jackie Doyle-Price.

The process – which ended in the complaint being dismissed earlier this month – has left him feeling let down and disillusioned.

When it was set up by the Home Office in 2004, the IPCC was meant to reassure the public that complaints against the police would be treated seriously.

Instead it has been dogged by allegations of favouritism, given that many of its investigators are former officers, and a catalogue of basic failures. Its current director of investigations, Moir Stewart, was himself criticised for failings in relation to the handling of the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes. And it has been accused of trying to obstruct journalists investigating the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.

As it happens, the IPCC decided not to investigate the Teddy Highwood complaint itself and passed it to the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) for a ‘Local Investigation.’ The DPS, which also investigates police corruption, is part of the Metropolitan Police.

“The people who investigated this were the police themselves,” says Mr Morris. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that they investigate their own incompetence.”

According to the DPS report, Orlowski ‘appeared incoherent and rambling’ when he dialled 999 on July 13, 2009, and a check by officers revealed no information about him on the Police National Computer.

It continues: ‘Having established that Mr Orlowski was not in danger or posed any risk, he was then advised not to use the emergency 999 system for this purpose again. It should be noted that Mr Orlowski made no reference to Mr Highwood and made no threats to police.’

As to why he was not detained by police, there was ‘insufficient capacity to despatch operation police units to this type of call’.

It also appears that UK police have no power to arrest suspects for offences committed abroad unless there is a European Arrest Warrant.

In conclusion: ‘It is unlikely that Mr Highwood’s death could have been prevented by alternative action being carried out… Mr Orlowski could not have been detained.’

John Morris is quite blunt about his disappointment. “They think it’s good enough – they didn’t take it seriously.

“He’s actually asked for help. They would have took this guy and held him, then rung the Polish authorities. If they had done that then Teddy wouldn’t have been murdered.”

In fairness to the police, they do set out a series of recommendatons (usually known as ‘lessons to be learned’) including risk assessment training for 999 operators and further improvement to the ‘European data system’.

But the public might be surprised that a man wanted in Poland could enter the UK so easily, just because no European Arrest Warrant had been issued by the Polish authorities.

Even the Met admits ‘it is of significant concern to this organisation that EU nationals may be unlawfully at large in the UK.’

John Morris now intends to campaign for tougher border controls, including criminal checks.

He said: “Someone could be a murderer and we know nothing about their background. Letting people in to a country without simple checks is wrong.”

Mr Morris added: “It’s not about money. Teddy was a pillar of the community and he did a lot of charity work. I told the police ‘We feel you made an error and we would like you do make a donation to the charities that Teddy worked for.’ They weren’t happy about that.”

Teen Murders 2007 to 2010

Last month four teenagers were murdered in London. The fact their deaths occurred in the space of ten days only highlighted the tragedy.

Three were stabbed to death (Wing Ho, Kasey Gordon, Daniel Graham) and one ran into the path of a bus after being confronted by a gang (Ezekiel Amosu).

In recent years teen murders have been seen as a barometer of ‘Broken Britain’. An increase indicates a breakdown in society and its values, a decrease… well, let’s gloss over the decrease.

The public and media uproar peaked in June 2008 with the murder of 16 year-old Ben Kinsella, the brother of Eastenders actress (and now anti-knife crime campaigner) Brooke Kinsella.

One of the measures introduced by the Labour Government was an increase in the minimum term for murders carried out using a knife brought to the scene, from 15 to 25 years.

But by the time this came into effect in March 2010 (following a review, then the official announcement in November 2009) the number of teen murders had decreased. In fact it more than halved, from 29 in 2008 to 13 in 2009.

In 2010 it rose to 19, although the total number of murders continued to fall.

The reality is that crime appears to come randomly in waves. Trends can only be seen over longer periods.

Four teen murders in a month is not that unusual – it last happened in April 2010 – and there were five in both June 2007 and May 2008.

But imagine that you only gathered statistics between October and December 2008, the peak year for teenage murders. There was only one.

At the risk of stating the obvious, one month does not make a trend.

A similar point was made following reports of four homicides in London in a single day, July 10, 2008. Statistical analysis revealed that this was actually a predictable event, rather than an alarming development.

According to a study by David Spiegelhalter

We can’t predict individual murders, but their pattern is highly predictable. This should mean we can be ready for events that appear to be good (a long gap between murders) or bad (3 or more murders on the same day) – both events are to be expected by chance alone. But by knowing what pattern to be expect, then we should also be able to spot when something really unusual is happening.

He also makes the point that “there is no evidence for homicide rates to depend on the month, but there is a significant ‘Saturday effect’ of around 60% increase in homicide rate compared to all other days of the week combined.”

UK Crime Map

The new police crime map (police.uk) is the third version to hit the internet since January 2009.

Earlier attempts didn’t particularly excite the interest of the public. This time the site buckled under the pressure of 18 million hits an hour.

So what’s different?

Unlike previous incarnations (see the Met’s borough and ward crime map for an example) it attempts to map crime on a street-by-street level.

You can now see exactly how many crimes have been recorded by the police on your doorstep, rather than a total for a much larger area.

But aside from the curiosity effect that many websites experience on launch, the reaction to the site itself has been mixed.

For every person who thinks it’s ‘too much information’ (the reaction of young mums in Windsor, apparently), others find it vague, flawed, useless and even misleading. It’s also been reported that the site cost £300,000 of public money to develop.

While the site has made its data freely available, the data itself has already been sorted and condensed into simple but vague categories.

Homicide is combined with GBH and assault to form ‘violence’, sexual assaults are placed with an unknown number of other offences under the tag ‘Other.’

Crimes are mapped by month rather than given a specific date and time, and all crimes for a street are placed in the middle of that street, concealing the differentiation between pubs, clubs, shops etc and residential buildings. It seems some residential streets in west London have been allotted crimes that took place at Heathrow Airport.

The argument is that crimes should be anonymised to protect the victims being identified – but the Americans have been mapping individual incidents for years (see below). These days they even show the exact addresses of sex offenders.

On the upside, there are developments on the way. Pilot schemes in different areas of the country are looking into daily updates, a case tracking system for victims, information about convicted offenders and mapping trends for offences.

One benefit of releasing full open data is that it can be used to create all kinds of different visualisations without any cost to the taxpayer. The newspapers naturally looked for the most crime-ridden streets of the country, but one of the best early examples was this ‘hotspot’ map of London.

Purely from murdermap’s point of view, the new data won’t help at all with the massive task of tracking down every murder and inputting it into the database. All the police provide are numbers, but numbers tell only half the story.

The London Map Craze

Londoners have always liked maps, perhaps because they use them every day to find their way around this massive city. The most famous map is also a work of art – Harry Beck’s 1931 design for the underground – and almost every household has a battered old A-Z somewhere.

But over the last year there has been an explosion in mapping over the internet and the craze shows no sign of abating. Maps have become entertainment as well as tour guides.

Whereas previously your friends may have used Facebook and Twitter to link to cat videos on Youtube or crazy pictures on Flickr, now they’re also linking to maps that help us to see London in a new light.

What does the BBC use to mark the death of musician Gerry Rafferty? Not just an obituary, but a map of hit songs about locations in London including Rafferty’s own ‘Baker Street’.

Maps have long been used to illustrate more than just geography – take a look at John Snow’s 1854 cholera map, the Temperance Society’s 1886 map of public houses, or even Wenceslaus Hollar’s map of the damage caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666.

But these days maps are easier to create than ever before, even for non-geeks. Want a map to help you avoid the police during the student protests? Or a map of ‘non-Boris‘ bike racks in central London? You got it.

New mapping sites are popping up nearly every day, some of them genuinely impressive even if their actual use is limited. As you’d expect, transport is a common subject. This real-time map of London tube trains was doing the rounds throughout December, as was the London ‘Boris’ bike share map and this neat map/display showing the travel time between every tube station. And if you prefer buses, there’s an animated ‘flowprint’ of London bus journeys.

What else can you map? Well, there’s communities like London’s football supporters, there are maps showing how badly London was hit by German bombs during WWII, but how about animating the first night of the Blitz?

Books and film? Find the local libraries threatened with closure, pore over an interactive map of more than 400 books set in different areas of London or 100 locations used in films.

Then art, and this staggeringly massive hand drawn map of Greater London and a map of Banksy graffiti locations. But there should also be a London version of these strange ‘graphical anagrams’. Naturally companies are jumping on the map craze to sell artworks – would you like a London typeface map? That’ll be £43. Or how about £99 for a canvas map to put on your wall?

People are also swapping digital copies of startling historical artifacts, such as these plans for railway stations in London 1864, an old tube map from 1908 or even a mystifying map of ‘social and functional analysis’.

And what about the future? A map works for that too – such as this vision of London-on-Sea in 2100.

Is this just a passing craze? Projects to keep an eye on include this one to add 3D models to London on Google Earth or the strangely relaxing London Sound Survey, which offers the chance to listen to recordings with titles like ‘Under Tower Bridge’ and inside ‘St Bartholomew the Great’ church (mostly quiet, with occasional bleeps from a tourist’s camera). Then there’s always the London 2012 Olympics.

And if you need a weekly fix of all things cartographical, then check out the blogs Google Maps Mania or Map of the Week for a regular fix.