Quality Journalism

I just caught this piece of Chicken Little-ing that was in Saturday's edition of the finest rag in town, the Courier-Mail. Oooh, 'Newspaper of the Year', it reckons. When a paper's Assistant Editor can be that bloody stupid, I submit the 'newspaper of the year' should pull its head out of its arse.

In brief, the article is about the introduction of digital radios into Queensland (specifically, Brisbane, but there's more to come) policing. These radios are encrypted, and OMFG teh police are KEEPING SECRETS we're THREE DAYS from EVERY POLICEMAN IN AUSTRALIA BEING CORRUPT help help we're being REPRESSED!

Now, the article makes it sound like the radios were introduced, like, yesterday. They've been in use for about two or three months. That's right, the restriction of media freedom that *is* radio encryption is so bloody important that a breathless article about how now the police have no checks on them can come in a couple of months after the fateful event occurs. Now there's a man with his finger on the pulse.

Working, as I do, at the Police Communications Centre, I have a fair idea of the kinds of information flow that happens in and around crimes and crime scenes. And I can state, here and now, quite categorically, that Mr. Koch's (I prefer not to pronounce the last bit as a guttural) fears are:

BULLSHIT.

As any investigative journalist, nay, someone with a functioning brain, would know, police corruption is not something that happens over the police radio. I'm sorry, but police do not say they're stopping off at illegal brothels for free nookie, they do not record that they let someone off because their bribe was big enough, they do not talk about how they beat suspects with phone books. Even, and this is the really tricky part, even if they actually do those things. Which most, if not all, of them don't.

As for his claims that police will not inform the media about crimes and such if it does not reflect police in a favourable light? Again:

BULLSHIT.

Everything that comes through the PCC, of a certain type - everything - goes to the media section. We do that. People should know the big things going down. And because we are not on the scene, we don't know how the police are going to turn out. You see, it doesn't matter. We pass it over. Not only that, his characterisation of police traditionally disliking their own media section came as something of a surprise to the police I work with. If he was an investigative journalist... he'd have found this out already.

Now why did the QPS invest in a multi-million dollar encryption dooberwacky for the radios? It's fairly simple - we deal in people's shit. A lot of things that police need to know (are the people here suicidal, are the people there sane, are the people elsewhere living in piles of their own shit, what are the occupant's names, what sort of traffic history do they have) are things that really don't need to be announced to the world at large. Or at least to anyone who might happen to have a scanner. With the encryption, police can pass their personal mobile numbers over the air for other coppers to contact them without worrying that some freak with a scanner, a pen and some paper's going to start prank-calling them. (And the mobile thing can come in very handy, so don't scoff.) We can say that certain houses belong to QPS members, without worrying about some dickhead with a scanner and a grudge trying to set fire to it.

And that's not even mentioning the criminals that keep scanners in their houses or vehicles the better to evade police...

But one final thing before I end this rant... I'm quite fond of this little paragraph of his.

It is not being melodramatic to state that this move is the most serious threat to police accountability in Queensland since Tony Fitzgerald brought down his 1989 findings that the service was then riddled with corruption.

No, Mr. Koch. It's not melodramatic. It has to make some vague kind of sense to be melodramatic. Tony Fitzgerald was the opposite to a threat to police accountability. What is melodramatic is your claim that there will be nothing newsworthy because police won't tell the media anything. Or maybe it's not melodramatic, just piss-poor lazy, given that it's a journalist's job to find things out. Heaven forbid.

In summation, Mr. Koch, your article is paranoid, self-important, opinionated, irrational...

BULLSHIT.

In other news, Escape Velocity: Nova is evil, evil.

In still other news, I'm currently as hoarse as a hoarse thing.