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Power Revealed: Masked Police Officers in the Public Sphere

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Power Revealed: Masked Police Officers in the Public Sphere Power revealed: masked police officers in the public sphere Article (Accepted Version) Ruiz, Pollyanna (2017) Power revealed: masked police officers in the public sphere. Visual Communication, 16 (3). pp. 299-314. ISSN 1470-3572 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/66654/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Power Revealed: Masking police officers in the public sphere ‘I can see how it would be nice for the police if the officer turned up to the inquest in his civilian clothes’ (Paul King cited in the Guardian 2010). Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest, and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’ (Della Porta et al, 2006). Journalists, who have traditionally depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives, have historically reproduced these distinctions (Hall et al, 1978) and, as a result, images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize protester’s claims (Juris, 2005). These processes of legitimation lie at the heart of public order policing (Waddington, 1999) as they take place on our streets, and are covered in our newspapers. In this article I will explore the way in which police, rather than protesters or victims of police brutality, have been pictured in the coverage of protest. I will illustrate these augments by focusing on the news coverage of the trial and eventual acquittal of Simon Harwood, the police officer who was pictured pushing Ian Tomlinson to the ground during the G20 demonstrations which took place in London in the spring of 20091. Photography, specifically analogue photography, has traditionally made a claim to standing as quasi-scientific ‘evidence of the external world’ (Winston, 1998, p.53). While the advent of digital photography has in many ways sundered the physical connection between the image and the world, the image remains a peculiarly persuasive form of communication. The coverage under consideration in this article was underpinned by a drama of concealment and disclosure which focused on three interrelated images; Harwood’s uniform, his masked face and his lack of identity tags. The importance of the visual in this incidence is indicated by the lack of traction generated by the solely textual accounts which circulated in the immediate aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. Consequently I will argue that arriving at a ‘common understanding’ (Taylor, 2003, p.23) of social unrest requires us to examine the way in which the police, as well as protesters are made visible in the public sphere. 1 The Guardian’s video of this assault can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ&feature=channel_page? 1 Thompson’s seminal article on the food riots of eighteenth century Europe rejected the notion of social unrest as mere ‘rebellions of the belly’ (Ashton and Sykes, 1929, p.131) and questioned the prevailing understating of social disturbances as being ‘compulsive, rather than self-conscious’ (1971, p.77). He argues that ‘The men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community’ (1971 p. 78) Thompson calls ‘the wider consensus of the community’ a ‘legitimising notion’ (1971 p. 78) and draws upon a wide range of eighteenth century stories and songs to illustrate the way in which this wider consensus was made manifest. The stories and songs which rang out through eighteenth century popular culture have been replaced in the twenty first century by an intricate network of words and images. Stafford points out that there is a long and sophisticated line of thought which differentiates between ‘imagery used as equivalents to discourse (or as illustration)’ and imagery used as ‘an untranslatable constructive form of cognition (as an expression)’ (1996, p. 27). According to this second definition, images should be understood not as empty displays of visual rhetoric but as acts of meaning making in themselves. Consequently, the images that accompany the articles we read in our papers and on our screens should not be understood as transparent windows on the world but as ‘the site for the construction and depiction of social difference’ (Fyfe and Law 1988, p.1). As such images play a central role in the formation of consensus within the wider political community. In recent years, the relationship between images of protest action and public legitimation has been transformed by the advent of mobile technologies. The police once enjoyed sole access to a complex network of aerial surveillance units and closed-circuit television cameras, which they used to monitor the movements of protesters. However, protesters now carry the means to capture and distribute images of the police in their pockets, in the form of a mobile phone. This has enabled protesters to turn the lens upon the police during public demonstrations and, in doing so, has democratised the ability to surveil (Mann et al, 2003). As such, the mobile phone could be read a part of an empowering ground swell of technologies that have transformed the organisation, manifestation and representation of protest in the public sphere (Castells, 1996 Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). This transformation goes beyond the technological affordances offered by mobile technologies. Pictures taken by 2 protesters require professional journalists to extend their investigations beyond the usual sources identified by authors such as Halloran et al (1970) and Gitlin (1980). In this way ‘the increased gaze of the media’ has forced police, protesters and, indeed, journalists to ‘be more accountable for their actions in the eyes of the public’ (Zajko and Belan, 2008 p.722). The increasing number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK and beyond, mean that police officers are now being subjected to distinctions, in both courts of law and in the court of public opinion, between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus it will focus on the way in which the police appear before others with specific reference to the way in which this has been shaped by mediated visibility in both online and offline media. In doing so, this article will draw on my previous research on the role of mobile technologies in the coverage of Ian Tomlinson’s death (Author, 2015). It will also develop an understanding of the role that masks play in the public sphere by examining the increasing prevalence of images of masked police officers (Ruiz, 2013). These dynamics will be examined through an exploration of the news narratives surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009 and the trial and eventual acquittal of PC Harwood in 2012. It will focus in particular on the role played by images produced by mobile phones and CCTV as they circulated through traditional and new media. These images (and the articles they accompanied) focused on police officer’s uniform, their use of balaclavas and/or riot visors, and their failure to wear identity tags. In the following section I will explore each of these visual tropes in turn. News Narratives and the Death of Ian Tomlinson Tomlinson died during the G20 demonstrations, which took place in central London on the 1st of April, 2009. Initially he was reported to have died of natural causes, but mobile phone images made public in the Guardian on the 7th of April showed Tomlinson being knocked to the ground by an unidentified officer. On the 9th of April, Harwood was identified as the officer pictured striking and then pushing Tomlinson. As a consequence of these images a second (and then third) autopsy was conducted and an inquest subsequently attributed Tomlinson’s death to the use of force which was ‘not reasonable, proportionate and necessary’ (IPCC Report, 2011). Harwood was tried but acquitted of manslaughter in the summer of 2012. After his acquittal it was discovered that Harwood had been the subject of ten official complaints, none of which had ‘been dealt with properly’ (IPCC Statement, 2012). A year later in 2013 the Metropolitan Police Force apologized ‘unreservedly’ for their behavior, 3 dismissed Harwood for gross misconduct and paid the Tomlinson family an undisclosed sum in settlement. My analysis of the online and offline coverage surrounding the death of Tomlinson and the trial of Harwood is based on a corpus of media coverage from April 2009 to November 2012. Nexis was used generate two samples from all the national newspapers. The first sample used ‘Tomlinson’ and ‘Police’ as its search terms and covered the period between Tomlinson’s death and Harwood identification.
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