Citizens, journalists

A collaboration between a national paper staff reporter and one of the union’s most active street photographers has produced a string of groundbreaking stories on police interference with the right to protest

As public concern has mounted over increasing restrictions on of civil liberty, the Guardian’s Paul Lewis and freelance photographer Marc Vallee have revealed how police

  • amassed a database of information and images on protesters — and on journalists who cover political protests
  • tried to bribe protesters to turn into police informers
  • manhandled the passer-by killed at April’s G20 protests in London and lied to cover up the circumstances of his death
  • assaulted and detained for days two protesters who were trying to identify officers policing last summer’s climate camp in Kent.

As well as working together they have brought “citizen journalism” into the editorial process, making unprecedented use of information and images from activists and the public — expanding the reach of “mainstream” media in a way that many see as the future of newspaper websites in the digital age. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has set the paper on a course to become a worldwide online presence for liberal media.

The Guardian has lost several of its seasoned investigative reporters this year, amid suggestions that to achieve this worldwide presence the paper is prepared to blunt its political edge, but Paul Lewis, a young reporter taken on as a trainee, sees himself as picking up the tradition.

“A journalist can only have a small impact on the way the world is,” he says, “but we do seem to be having some. The Met are furious at the stories we’ve done.”

Marc Vallee is one of a group of freelance photographers who have started to react to police interference with their work on the streets in a new and assertive way. They have themselves held protest demonstrations, launched legal challenges, with NUJ support, and founded a group called “I’m a photographer, not a terrorist” to step up their high-profile campaign for photographers’ rights.

It was events around the G20 summit in London in April that propelled these stories into wider public attention. It was Paul Lewis who received, out of the blue, the sensational mobile phone video clip of paper seller Ian Tomlinson being pushed to the ground by an advancing police line just minutes before he collapsed and died — and its arrival was a tribute to the Guardian’s international approach.

The clip came from the USA, from a New York fund manager who had been visiting the City of London and chanced on the scene.

“That was a good moment,” Paul Lewis says. “He was on the Heathrow Express on his way to the airport when he checked his video and realised what it was. He was going to send it to an agency but then saw how we had been covering the story and sent it to me.”

The paper had already been front-paging the G20 events but after publication of the video there was “an avalanche of citizen journalist material,” he says. “We couldn’t cope with what we were getting — images from peoples’ mobiles, from students, filmmakers, from everyone. It was a treasure trove of information.” Marc Vallee came in as extra help on the picture desk to go through it.

Plugging into the Guardian’s new inclusive approach, Marc Vallee has become a regular contributor to its Comment is Free site, blogging on photographers’ rights. He and Paul Lewis had already revealed exclusively how police Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) had built up their “Big Brother” database of protesters and journalists — which the Metropolitan Police had persistently denied in the face of NUJ allegations in the past.

The team got confirmation through a Freedom of Information request, but they already had a good idea of the story. “If police are asking all these people at protest scenes all these questions,” says Marc Vallee, “well what are they doing with the data? They talk into a recording device while they question people. They must be doing something with it.

“I was hospitalised with a back injury after I was assaulted by police three years ago. A few months later when I covered the climate camp at Heathrow airport a FIT officer came up to me and said, ‘hello Marc, how’s the back?’.”

The database story “put us in a good position to do the G20,” Paul Lewis adds. “We had contacts with protest groups, but the way it turned out was a real irony. We had been doing stories on police surveillance, but it turned out that the story was the opposite — it was protesters’ surveillance of the police.”