Racial murders
Marcus at Harry's Place complains about the press coverage of racial murders of whites, based on new figures the Observer has obtained from the Home Office:
Between 1995 and 2004 there have been 58 murders where the police consider a racial element played a key part. Out of these, 24 have been where the murder victim was white.
It's certainly not how the media have reflected things recently. Compare and contrast the attention given to the murders of Stephen Lawrence in London and Kris Donald in Glasgow if you need proof.
A Police Officer says its hard to get the media as interested in the murders of young, white, men, and the Observer journalist says this is because there are fears of stoking up support for the BNP. Marcus adds [of the BNP]:
Their traditional claims that working class Britons are being treated as if they didn't count is actually given evidential support by this sort of attitude.
There's two things I think worth saying here. Marcus's assumption that White Britons means simply 'the traditional working class' is too simplistic. The article says:
Of the 24 white victims also included those who were Jewish, 'dark-skinned' Europeans or gypsies. In addition, seven of those were killed by white attackers.
Second, as I note in the comments, I'm not sure the Police Officer is correct, and I the comparison of Stephen Lawrence (murded 13 years ago) with Kriss Donald (murdered two years ago), is misleading. In the case of Stephen Lawrence, a) the killers weren't caught, and b) it seems likely that police racism was a contributory factor (and c) it was in London). Initially, before all of that, the Stephen Lawrence case did not receive a lot of coverage. Take the Times (all data from searching NewsUK). For Stephen Lawrence, there was one mention on April 24th, and then the next wasn't until May 3rd (10 days afterwards) and then because the local MPs had complained about the lack of police and societal outrage (it was the 3rd racial murder in a few weeks, or at least that was said at the time). The Times had 8 stories on Kriss Donald's horrific murder in ten days after it happened. Now, some allowance must be made for the Times having more stories on everything now than then, and the later figures including the Sunday Times whereas the former don't. However I think it is hard to claim there was more coverage of Stephen Lawrence's murder than Kriss Donald's.
I think a better argument might be that all murders receive too little press attention, but I suspect a tone of negativity would put off readers (I remember a comment about the Daily Mail editor saying this one).
posted by Matthew @ 10/22/2006 03:50:00 PM
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