They were guarding a murder scene, protecting not just the dignity of two women stabbed to death but the forensic integrity that would bring their killer to justice. PC Deniz Jaffer was 47, PC Jamie Lewis, 32: both experienced officers, not dumb kids.
Yet they climbed over the cordon, took out their phones, photographed the corpses of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, then clicked through to a WhatsApp group. Later Lewis photoshopped his face between the dead women. Because these men felt six fellow officers, plus a doctor and dentist, presumably friends, would enjoy images they captioned “two dead birds”.
I’d like to know why. Even though if someone had violated my dead child, I’d lack the gracious restraint of Mina Smallman, the women’s mother. I’d want them destroyed.
Is this a new manifestation of an old problem, misogyny (perhaps combined here with racism) in the police? Maybe you can get inured to murdered women enough to see them as carrion in a ditch, meat on a slab (crime figures certainly show a surfeit of “dead birds”). Plus dark cynicism makes you the cool guy, gliding above tragedy. During the Sarah Everard investigation a probationary officer sent an obscene graphic to mates, joking about luring women into the woods.
Anyone who has spent time with emergency workers or medics is used to gallows humour. It helps those who scrape bodies off roads or look at paedophiles’ hard-drives for a living to process their demons or keep them at bay. But the line between dark jokes and obscene callousness is blurry. And now offhand, tasteless remarks about atrocities might be overheard and reported to superiors.
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Instead there are WhatsApp groups: pub-loads of mates in your pocket, circles formed around a shared outlook and humour. They are online omertàs: your secrets won’t be shared because you know theirs. Lewis sent “dead bird” snaps to his “A Team” group and not one of 42 Met officers thought to complain. How bad must their everyday “banter” have been?
The old hatreds fester in new enclaves. But technology has sent all our moral compasses off course. It was 1977 when Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay on photography, which she saw as an “appropriation”. She noted that the shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, “just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more”. Sontag was writing before the internet, mainly about professional photographers. What would she have made of social media postings or how mainstream online porn grows ever more violent to excite jaded libidos?
Lewis and Jaffer were doing what social media rewards us all for: proving they were there. “I’m watching that demonstration kick off!”, “I saw Paul McCartney in the street!”. Each photo is a flag in the ground: this event, person, place is mine. Press “like”, share, validate me. Look, I’m here with my mate at a murder scene.
The moral boundaries are ever-changing. At a funeral, I gently told a young man that photographing a loved one’s coffin was inappropriate. He replaced his phone, slightly ashamed. But he hadn’t meant ill: taking a picture was his default reaction. Just as visitors to art galleries insist on snapping every painting, if he didn’t possess an image of his grandfather’s coffin, had he really seen it?
But maybe I’m out of step and photographing hearses is fine when an Instagram search for #funeralselfies throws up countless young people admiring their own church outfits, or practising mournful expressions. A prominent US influencer recently posted a pouty portrait, right beside her father’s open coffin.
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A few years back on Tottenham Court Road I watched a man pick up a rubbish bin and strew the contents, before running down the street, ranting. He was clearly mentally ill. But his jeans were low-slung, revealing his buttocks. It was, if you were cruel, quite funny. I saw several bystanders had taken out their phones. Perhaps it went viral: “Look at this crazy dude!”
It should be remembered that the police only mirror our own mores. After attending the scene of a suicide, in which a student had thrown himself off the tenth floor of his Bournemouth halls of residence, a policewoman told the inquest: “I was shocked to see cameras flashing as people then took pictures and video.” She shouted for them to go inside, terrified the dead man would appear on social media before his family was informed.
Visiting Mexico I was shocked to see its “nota roja” tabloids have front-page photographs of bloody corpses, fresh victims of its drug wars. Dead women are particularly popular, since ten are murdered every day. Feminist groups have challenged their gory sexualisation, saying, as Mrs Smallman said of Bibaa and Nicole, that these women are made victims twice over. Yet editors claim they’re merely highlighting the horror of femicide.
We wouldn’t tolerate such newspapers and yet social media platforms are complicit in similar degradation. When boys in Florida filmed a man drowning in his pond, they uploaded it to YouTube. When a British backpacker was found dead in the sea, her body, with a highly distinctive tattoo, appeared on Instagram. Her distraught brother was told the image didn’t violate the platform’s terms. Only after a public outcry was it taken down.
“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” wrote Sontag. And now we are all cocked and loaded at all times, with only our consciences between us and our targets.
