Photographers: time to keep your lens caps on
NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS do not need to improve their relations with the police (recent stories). They need the police to cease behaving towards them in an oppressive manner.
If journalists wish to end the police harassment and bullying they encounter too often they should not waste further time discussing instances of police behaviour that would be indefensible in any free country worth the name, they should do something.
And that something is this. The next time the Metropolitan Police commissioner calls a news conference on a matter that is important to him, the photographers should attend, with their cameras, but they should keep their lens caps on and decline to record even one image of the proceedings.
When it becomes clear to the commissioner that his handsome face will not be in the newspapers or on the television news — because TV camera crews are just as vulnerable to the habitual police displays of boorish unhelpfulness as are still photographers — he will want to know from his braided aides what is going on.
And when the word goes down the chain of command to the Scotland Yard Press Office and the reply comes back that the people who gather the news are no longer prepared to be treated worse than felons merely because they are out there doing a difficult job in a lawful manner, then he might just be prepared to do something about it.
When I was the BBC TV court correspondent for three years, I saw this tactic used. And it worked. Sometimes derided by the ignorant for the work they do, the photographers who customarily cover royal personages and related stories have on more than one occasion downed cameras when officious stupidity on the fringes of an event have made it impossible for them to work properly.
Following a silent and dignified protest, with cameras placed at the feet of their owners, it usually took no time at all for previously iron-clad restrictions and general nuisances that had been placed in the way of coverage to disappear, like snow in the spring.
The result: co-operation, better pictures, an outbreak of pleasantness, even the occasional forced smile.
Of course, it would require total solidarity in the Nikon choir for any defiance of the heavy hand of police authority to achieve its desired effect. But if done well, such a determined and dignified demonstration would not have to be repeated very often.
It would tell the police that the news media are not there for the convenience of the police, to be summoned from time to time in order to spread a little helpful information to the public, but to do a job that is vital to the proper functioning of a healthy democracy. And to be able to do it without let, hindrance, or the risk of injury from the police, the very people who should be protecting freedom of expression and the other liberties that they are sworn to uphold.
Michael Cole
Laxfield, Suffolk