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Police performance under the spotlight

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Friday, 28 Oct 2011

Communities can now compare their local police performance with that of forces across England and Wales at the click of a computer mouse.

From today, members of the public can look up performance categories including crime rates, quality of service and victim satisfaction and compare all 43 police forces in England and Wales via police.uk(Opens in a new window).

Communities are also able for the first time to access information on offences of public disorder and possession of weapons, shoplifting, criminal damage and arson, theft and drugs recorded on every street.

Greater transparency

This information on offence rates has been published as part of the government’s commitment to drive greater transparency across the criminal justice system.

Communities will be able to look up levels of crime and antisocial behaviour in their area which they can use to hold their local police, and in time their elected police and crime commissioner, to account in a meaningful way.

More than 430 million hits on police.uk website

Minister for policing and justice Nick Herbert said: 'Our crime mapping website, police.uk(Opens in a new window), has attracted phenomenal interest since its launch earlier this year with more than 430 million hits to date.  We want to build on this success and deliver a more transparent and accountable criminal justice system. The addition of further crime categories and easy access to police force performance data will give people the information and power they need to hold their local forces to account and ensure that crime in their area is driven down.'

Nick Herbert added: 'Ahead of the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners, crime mapping is just one way in which the government is empowering communities and strengthening the link between the police and the public.'

The government is also working on a number of further improvements to the site which will be brought forward by the end of the year. These include:

• the provision of more specific crime and antisocial behaviour location information. At present crimes are mapped to an anonymous point (called a ‘snap-point’) on a street with 12 or more postal addresses. We want to reduce this threshold and publish crime information for key locations such as football stadiums, parks and supermarkets so that the public has access to an even greater level of information about crime and antisocial behaviour which might impact on their day to day life
• the government will work with the British Transport Police to extend the range of information provided on police.uk so that the public can access information about crime rates at railway stations
• by May 2012, the public will be able to access police.uk to see what has happened after a crime has been reported to the police and track its progress through the criminal justice system

Mr Bruce - racial equality article

by Mike Smith, Lead Commissioner for the Inquiry, Equality and Human Rights Commission

Having grown up as a disabled person myself, I am used to my fair share of discriminatory behaviour: people treating you as though you are stupid; talking to the person with you instead of to you; overtly treating you less favourably. All of this can be unpleasant, but is it harassment? Probably not, but there have been other times in my life when I most definitely have been subject to harassment.

The most serious case was a period over about three months in the 1990s, when I lived alone in a block of flats on a smart, tree-lined avenue. I regularly had ‘NF’, ‘cripple’ and swastikas painted on my front door. I had wooden stakes pushed under my front door at night, and the ramp for my wheelchair moved. I had offensive graffiti painted on my bedroom window while I slept.

I called the police several times, and each time they just told me to ignore it and paint my front door again. It was only after about the fourth or fifth time that I was lucky enough to get someone who took the situation seriously. For the next two nights officers sat in my hallway, waiting to catch the perpetrator. They installed security TV and panic alarms. When he finally struck again, including torching the garages, half a dozen officers surrounded the place and caught him.

I didn't acknowledge that I had been targeted because of my disability until several years later. And despite the perpetrator being caught red-handed by police, the case never went to court.

Despite all of my personal and national experience of disability issues, nothing could have prepared me for the journey that we have travelled during the 18 months of this inquiry, and the horrendous things some disabled people have experienced. In the worst cases, people were tortured. And apparently just for fun. It's as though the perpetrators didn't think of their victims as human beings. It's hard to see the difference between what they did, and baiting dogs.

The really serious cases catch the headlines. But what about the constant drip, drip, nag, nag of the so-called ‘low-level’ harassment that many disabled people face on a daily basis. It ruins their lives. They don't have the confidence to go out. It undermines their ability to be part of society. It makes them behave differently.

For me, two things come out of this inquiry that are far more shocking than the 10 cases that we cover in more detail, awful as they are. The first is just how much harassment seems to be going on. It's not just some extreme things happening to a handful of people: it's an awful lot of unpleasant things happening to a great many people, almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands each year.

The second is that no one knows about it. Schools don’t know how many disabled pupils are bullied; local authorities and registered social landlords don’t know how many antisocial behaviour victims are disabled; health services don’t know how many assault victims are disabled; police don’t know how many victims of crime are disabled; the courts don’t know how many disabled victims have access to special measures, what proportion of offences against disabled victims result in conviction or how many of these offences result in a sentence uplift; and the prisons don’t know how many offenders are serving sentences for crimes motivated by hostility to disabled people.

And why? How can we have created a society where no one appears to be seeing what's happening. As one of my colleagues on the inquiry said, when we were young we were told not to stare at the disabled person. So no one is.

OK, that's not strictly fair. Over the last couple of years the number of people being convicted of ‘disability hate crime’ offences has gone up. Some parts of the system are making a real effort. But last year the police only recorded 1,567 cases of disability hate crime. It's probably a drop in the ocean, compared with the high proportion of disabled people reporting experiencing disability-related harassment. We need a step change in reporting and recognition.

Over the last 30 years disability activists have developed the social model of disability. It says, put simply, the thing that's ‘wrong with you’ should be referred to as your impairment. This might be a physical condition, a sensory one, a mental health issue, etc. But it is not your impairment, in itself, that disables you. Instead it is society's response to you and your impairment: the way we build the environment; the way we construct our attitudes to what is ‘normal’; the way we think people should behave.

A wider understanding of this model will, I believe, help us understand why some of this harassment happens in the first place, and why we also don't deal with it well.

As human beings, we are not very good at dealing with difference. We’re also pretty concerned about good health. Most people, if they are honest with themselves, are pretty uncomfortable about disability. Every day, people say things like ‘I hear you are having a baby, do you want a boy or girl?’, the response being, ‘I don't mind, as long as it's healthy’. Or if some accident or health misfortune happens to someone, others indicate they would rather be dead than have that happen to them.

On top of that, there are societal attitudes and laws that tell people to treat disabled people differently: you can be excluded from being a company director, you can be prevented from doing jury service; you can be aborted much later – in 2010 the total number of abortions due to suspected disability was up 10 per cent on the previous year; you're not allowed to sit on certain seats in aeroplanes, or go to certain public places, because you will be a health and safety risk to others. People with mental health issues can be forced to take medication to keep everyone else ‘safe’, or if they refuse, be locked up. As disabled people, we even have different toilets. Something as fundamental as going to the loo, and we are separated rather than make regular toilets accessible.

Some people say they don't know how to act because they've never come across a disabled person. How can that be, when 21 per cent of the population are disabled in some way, according to government figures? Well, they probably will have done. But many of the people they know who are disabled will not choose to identify as such, or even if they do, keep it to themselves.

As a society we exclude disabled people from the mainstream – making them live in special homes, educating them in special schools, shut away from the rest of us. It's done under the pretext of ‘we think it's best for them’. But is it really? If you educate disabled children in separate settings, how are they to know how to integrate into society properly when they reach adulthood? And if non-disabled children grow up alongside disabled children, surely they're going to perceive them as different. If you have never come across someone with autism, how are you expected to know how they communicate or how you communicate with them? It seems to me that educating disabled children separately just stores up problems for the future for all of us.

So we don't really feel comfortable about disability, we are taught to think of disabled people as different, and are told to feel sorry for them. I personally think this is a significant part of the reason why, as a society, we have failed to recognise the nature and scale of the problem of disability-related harassment. Throughout the inquiry there seemed to be a collective denial that this sort of thing could be happening. It's as though people are thinking ‘we are supposed to feel sorry for these people, so why would anyone be deliberately horrible to them?’ Maybe it just makes us too uncomfortable, thinking that might be the society in which we live.

Despite the above, I did not think it is all doom and gloom. We came across some great examples of good practice. Throughout the report we highlight many of them. Appendix 17 includes many examples of areas where good practice has been developed where previously things have gone wrong. It is often said that disabled people know best what works for them. Good public authorities know this is true, and work effectively with disabled people and their organisations to achieve better outcomes.

This inquiry has already started the process of change. In many evidence sessions, I asked what we could say that would help drive the process of change. Many said they didn't need to wait for our recommendations, and just talking to us had already motivated them to take action. Others have promised new or revised guidance once this report is published.

The sheer depth and breadth of evidence that we've taken has given us a unique perspective. It was only by taking such a broad view that we were able to see the full extent of the issue and come to our conclusions.

It enabled us to see how the impact of decisions in one policy area affect another. Social services often award care and support based on quite limited criteria around an individual's ‘vulnerability’, and whether or not someone needs physical assistance to bathe or get dressed. Many local authorities allow support for ‘one significant social encounter a week’. They say they can't afford more, but think how socially isolated that will leave many people – a common thread of our inquiry was that people were socially excluded. The design of transport and housing often prevents some disabled people from getting out and about, including getting to a place of employment. So then the disabled person has no choice but to live on benefits, and is then labelled a scrounger and a burden on the rest of society. People think of choice of school as parental choice, but it is only when you step back that you can consider the wider impact on our society of segregated education. There are many, overlapping, vicious circles.

We also found that some of the measures that are meant to help might inadvertently be making things worse. The ‘No Secrets’ guidance has resulted in criminal offences such as theft or fraud not being dealt with as crimes, and professionals focusing on vulnerability and protecting the disabled person (perhaps by moving them), rather than dealing with the perpetrators. It didn't occur to them that this would infringe the disabled person's human rights.

Equally the language of ‘hate crime’ has been useful up until now, to get the issues on the radar, but it probably now acts as a barrier to effective reporting and recognition. Many people think they have just been taken advantage of, rather than hated. Who wants to think of themselves as hated? This terminology also probably contributes to the culture of disbelief. Language may not be the most important thing in the world – action counts for more – but it's probably time to use a new terminology.

Dealing with disability-related harassment is not going to be solved just by better policing. It's going to take concerted, joined up effort by a significant number of public authorities, with proper leadership, and joint working at all levels.

It won't just be public authorities that have to act differently. It's all of us. In the way that we think of and treat disabled people. I want the person at the bus stop who sees something happening, or the plumber repairing a tap who comes across something untoward, to know that they too should take action. I don't want everyone to think that all disabled people are vulnerable and need protecting – far from it – but some people do need help and support.

Ultimately, it will only be when disabled people are supported to be and recognised as equal members of our society, and we accept disability as normal and part of the natural variation in the human condition, that we will feel comfortable in recognising and addressing the shame on our society that is disability-related harassment.

There are many people who I would like to thank for helping make this inquiry so successful. First of all, the brilliant staff within the Equality and Human Rights Commission for your many hours of hard work, dedication and commitment to this project. It's been a joy to work with you. Also, the members of our external reference group and the Disability Committee: collectively you have provided many excellent insights and guiding words along this journey and have helped us make sure that all critical stones have been upturned. I would like to thank the many people who gave us evidence in the call for evidence, in key-informant interviews, in focus groups, and in formal evidence sessions. Together you have given us tens of thousands of pages of evidence, which has significantly influenced the course of this inquiry and will give us a valuable information resource going forward.

But finally, I would like to thank all the disabled people who have told us their story: of the things that happened to you; of how you were supported, or not; of how you coped afterwards, or didn't. Without your voices, this report would not have the impact I believe it will. Please, continue using those voices, all across our nations, and make change. 

citizen journalism

Ian Tomlinson

Its citizen journalism as it was filmed by amatuer person who is not an actual journalist . The video is filmed by phone therefore the quality will be lower . The technology used is a phone .


Libya - Gaddafi being killed - again shot by an amateur . The technology used is is a better quality phone whihc clearly shows how Gaddafi was shot .Impact this had is that people had proof of the death of gaddafi .

hwk :) cover work

Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC

Sara Mills explores the rise of the citizen journalist and considers the impact of user-generated

content on news stories, the news agenda, and the role of the professionals.

Once, it was all quite simple…the big institutions created the news and broadcast it to a variously passive

and receptive audience. Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of

news. The audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers. Audiences now create

their own content. We are in the era of user generated content (UGC) where the old divide between

institution and audience is being eroded.

Key to this change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of

the internet and user-dominated sites. Both who makes the news and what makes the news have been

radically altered by this growth of media technologies and the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’. -This is when the audiences take an active role in shaping and creating news .

We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991. - This is when the first creation of news started with the rise of new technology . Video cameras had become more

common and more people could afford them…unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers! Having

caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered

him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The

home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for

complaints about police racism towards African-Americans. Four officers were charged with assault and use

of excessive force, but in 1992 they were acquitted of the charges. This acquittal, in the face of the video

footage which clearly showed the beatings, sparked huge civil unrest. There were six days of riots, 53

people died, and around 4000 people were injured. The costs of the damage, looting and clear-up came in at

up to a billion dollars. If George Holliday hadn’t been looking out of his apartment window and made a grab

for his video camera at the time Rodney King was apprehended, none of this would have happened. King’s

beating would be just another hidden incident with no consequences. The film footage can be still be viewed.

Try looking on YouTube under ‘What started the LA riots.’ But be warned – it makes for very uncomfortable

viewing, and even today, it is easy to see why this minute and half of blurry, poor-quality film had such a

huge impact.

This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now commonly known

as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’. As technology improved over

the years, incidents of this kind have become more and more common. Millions of people have constant

access to filming capability through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on

the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions.

It is not only in providing footage for the news that citizen journalists have come to the forefront. UGC now

plays a huge role in many aspects of the media. Most news organisations include formats for participation:

message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled.These are some of teh examples that news has offered to its audiences in participation .  Social media

sites are also built around UGC as seen in the four biggest social networking sites: Bebo, MySpace,

YouTube and Facebook. People also turn to UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and

YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.

The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much

of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists, or ‘accidental journalists,’ providing

on-the-spot witness accounts of events as they unfolded. The main difference between professionally shot footage is that its edited out by its intitutions editors , whereas normal shot footage is on continous shot of an even that has happened , its not edited by the person who shot that particular event . Tourists who would otherwise have been happily

filming holiday moments were suddenly recording one of the worst natural disasters in recent times. In

addition, in the days after the disaster, social networking sites provided witness accounts for a world-wide

audience, helped survivors and family members get in touch and acted as a forum all those involved to share

their experiences.

A second terrible event, the London bombings on July 5th 2005, provided another opportunity for citizen

journalists to influence the mainstream news agenda. No one was closer to events than those caught up in

the bombings, and the footage they provided from their mobile phones was raw and uncompromising. This

first-hand view, rather than professionally shot footage from behind police lines, is often more hard-hitting

and emotive. An audience used to relatively unmediated reality through the prevalence of reality TV can now

see similarly unmediated footage on the news.

The desire for everyone to tell their own story and have their own moment of fame may explain the huge

popularity of Facebook, MySpace and other such sites. It also had a more negative outcome in the package

of writings, photos and video footage that 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate at Virginia Tech,

mailed into NBC News. Between his first attack, when he shot two people, he sent the package from a local

post office, before going on to kill a further 30 people. In his so-called ‘manifesto’ Cho showed his paranoia

and obsession, likening himself to Jesus Christ. The reporting of the terrible events at Virginia Tech that day

was also affected by citizen journalism, and the footage that student Jamal Albarghouti shot on his mobile

phone video camera. Rather than concentrate on saving his own life, he recorded events from his position

lying on the ground near the firing. The footage, available on YouTube and CNN brought events home to a

worldwide audience. We now expect passers by, witnesses, or even victims, to whip out their camera

phones and record events, an instinct almost as powerful as that to save their own or others’ lives. Perhaps

the news now seems old-fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage

provided by citizen journalists.

Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008. As

bombs exploded across the city, the world’s media got up-to date with events through reports on Twitter and

Flickr. There were questions raised, however, that by broadcasting their tweets, people may have been

putting their own and others’ lives at risk.

It was on Twitter again that the story of the Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to

the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing

awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted:

There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.

The picture is still available on Twitpic, under ‘Janis Krun’s tweet.’ While national news organisations quickly

swung into action, it was the citizen journalist, empowered by social networking sites, that first broke the

story.

So who’s keeping the gate?

Are the gatekeepers still fulfilling their old function of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and

won’t be broadcast?- a gatekeeper is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, be it publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some other type of communication. In some ways, yes. You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as

you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. In fact, last year a BBC spokesperson reported

that a large proportion of photos sent in to the news unit were of kittens. While this may represent the

interest of the audience, or users, it still doesn’t turn the fact that your kitten is really cute into ‘news.’

The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The blogosphere, for example,

provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience.

In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro-communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would

all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who

like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for

pictures of dogs in bee costumes.’

On a more serious note, the change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access

to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may,

through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice. - This is the main worry as people are bacoming more actively involved where do the professional come into play ? .The mass audience are no longer passively watching news but alos contributing to what is being published and stated on common news bulletins such as the london riots whereby BBC news , allowed users to post their views about it and this got mentioned on news bulletins By Sian Williams .

What about the professionals?

Do journalists fear for their jobs now everyone is producing content? It is likely that in future there will be

fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage

and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some believe that the

mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally,

unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or

fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts The risk of being

dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated

content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying!

If there will be fewer jobs for trained journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This

seems unlikely. Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the

host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites

for the last few years. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by

Murdoch, bought MySpace.- This is why the journalists are becoming increasingly worried about their jobs for the future , however the primary concern is that audiences will out compete each other to see who says the best crazy comment which will be noticed by any other consumer .

There is a whole new world out there. With it comes new responsibility. There is enormous potential to

expand our view of the world and our understanding of what is happening. Our collective knowledge, and

wisdom, should grow. On the other hand, in twenty years time, the news could be overrun by pictures of

people’s kittens and a few bigots shouting across message boards at each other.

Sara Mills teaches Media Studies at Helston Community College, Cornwall, and is an AQA examiner.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 30, December 2009.

Institution hwk

Top providers of news in the UK :
News of the World
The Sun
News International ( Rupert Murdoch )
The Sunday Times
SKY
BSKYB
British satellite broadcasting .
BBC

BBC - own  two platforms debates , blogs,  comments ,Live RSS feeds , Facebook page , (Emedia and Broadcasting ) .
The sun - Newspaper , website
News of the world - News corp but have had a recent closure of their newspaper . Also own the Guardian - online and newspaper .
The Sunday times - own the Times and their own newspaper .
News international  : part of News Corp ( Rupert Murdoch ) . Plans to sue the company , own website . Apple fans que for iphone 4s .

NEWS hwk -mr bush

Radio 4 news : inflation rises in the economy , commodity prices are going to increase , Jo Yeats - her boyfriend pleaded in guilty to manslaughter . 7 people were arrested for using social networking site Facebook to post messages about the London riots. The patent for stem cell research has been declined , this is bad as we need stem cell research to treat a wide variety of illnesses . Man Booker Prize awarded to a male author whose book was only 150 pages long but was sad to be written as a piece of classic literature .
Guardian top stories : 1. Liam Fox resignation exposes Tory links to US radical rights , 2. Occupy protests against capitalism spread around the world , 3. Yemeni government loyalists kill 12 at protest rally in capital . 4. House swap plan to help the unemployed uproot in search of work . 5. Lynne Featherstone against ditching family friendly policies 6. Syria is heading for a full blown civil war ,top UN official warns . 7. Oliver Letwin sorry for throwing work documents in park bin . 8. The grim reality of life under Alabama's brutal immigration law . 9. In the chaos of Sirte anti -Gaddafi fighters are killing each other 10. Larry hangman diagnosed with cancer .
TV news : same as radio news ... BBC .
Local news : Greenford gazette  :

Red carpet film night at Greenford High School

Oct 17 2011 By Sophie Exton

SIXTH formers put on their best outfits and rolled down the red carpet for their very own film awards night.

But teachers and students at Greenford High School celebrated work not by Hollywood directors but the A Level media classes for a tenth annual ceremony.

The year 12 students, at the school in Lady Margaret Road, made brief film trailers, while year 13 had the freedom to pick their own topic.

Assistant head Adam Bush said: "This year's media awards had a higher standard of film than we have ever seen before. The evening was a fantastic success because of the hard work that all the students and head of media, Mr Bruce, put into organising the evening."

There was a red carpet in place as 250 sixth form media students dressed up to receive the awards on October 11. Prizes included best editing, best cinematography and best music video.

Some of the winners included Sita Chana who was awarded for leading the group of the best year 12 production. Asha Kabadeh won a special prize for her silent film, which was a moving piece about domestic violence and child abuse.

Codes and conventions : all the news areas that I looked at had a certain house style. For example the BBC news had presenters who looked very formal and spoke in a formal way . Even the type of news presented in the morning is more serious than that presented in the afternoon . The logo of the BBC with the world coming on screen represents that they report from across the globe not just UK . 

On the other hand more localized news papers only report on topics that concern that area . The news that is given there is much more relaxed and caters for the lower class backgrounds D-E . 

In all different news institutions try to cater for a certain demographic of audiences , therefore not all that is read or heard will be of interest to every person . 

Amazon info

·         Owner : Jeff Bezos . ( Billionaire and graduate of Princeton University – one of the top in the US ) .

·         The world's largest web retailer reported a 51 percent climb in revenue to $9.91 billion, surpassing Wall Street's expectations for $9.4 billion.

·         Operating margin fell to 2.0 percent from 4.1 percent a year earlier.

·         Operating income is expected to be between $20 million and $170 million in the period, the company also estimated. The guidance includes about $180 million of stock-based compensation expense and amortization of intangible assets. It also assumes no other acquisitions or investments close in the quarter.

·         Net worth : $78.09 billion (2011)

·         T he hardware business and the e-book store as separate. ( i.e the kindle and the kindle books are seperate company businesses .

·         Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys.

·         Other businesses associated with amazon are : AmazonEncore,^[75] AmazonCrossing,^[76] Montlake Romance,^[77] Thomas & Mercer.