I recently had my first viewing of a Panorama rough cut on the issue of fuel crime. With petrol and diesel prices at an all time high and the UK having the highest taxed fuel in the E.U. it is a multi-million pound issue involving the Treasury, organised crime and even former terrorists.
At the bottom end of the crime scale are basic forecourt drive-offs: people who fill up their car and simply drive off without paying. But even this can be big business, with some criminals not only filling up their tanks but jerry-cans in the boot and driving off with hundreds of pounds worth of fuel at a time and selling it on. A few weeks ago, my team told me that they had secured an interview with one of these drive-off criminals. Thought to be a “one-man-crime-wave”, this person was responsible for stealing thousands of litres of petrol and is currently serving time in Strangeways prison (now officially HM Prison Manchester).
Being allowed into Strangeways and securing the interview took a lot of hard work and was a bit of a journalistic coup. All the time the producer and reporter were briefing me about the film and the interview I never gave the ethnicity of the criminal a second thought. We were all too busy focusing on the journalism to worry about his skin colour.
However after watching the first rough cut and discovering that the Strangeways’ convict is black I would be lying if I said my heart didn’t sink and my completely emotional and non-professional reaction was: “why does he have to be black?”
When people talk about improving on screen diversity they usually discuss as if it is a simple issue. But the longer I have worked in television the more complicated it seems to become.
I remember giving a lecture to film students in Johannesburg, when the subject of television’s representation of HIV and AIDS came up. HIV is a massive issue in South Africa with one in four people between the ages of 15 – 49 being HIV positive. The predominantly black students complained that South African TV nearly always portrayed HIV as a black issue. “AIDS affects everybody” one of them told me, “but 9 times out of 10, when you see someone with HIV or AIDS on TV they are black”.
The sad reality is that 13.6% of all black South Africans are HIV positive, while only 0.3% of white people are. That means that if there were an even number of blacks and whites for every 1 white person with HIV there would be 45 black people with HIV. However as black people make up approximately 80% of the South African population and whites 10%, the more accurate figure is for every 1 white person with HIV, there are 360 HIV positive black people. All of a sudden 9 times out of 10 sounds like South African TV is actually underestimating the “black problem” and inaccurately reflecting the reality. What the film students were asking for was favourable portrayal.
On the other hand, a few years ago when rising knife crime statistics had gripped the imagination of the UK press, a BBC Panorama programme was broadcast, which showed journalists going into a youth offenders unit and interviewing 5 or 6 perpetrators of knife crime. All but one of the interviewees was black. In London, it is thought that 46% of people arrested of a knife crime are black. So that’s just 1 out of 2, rather than 5 or 6 out of 7. I hasten to add that this is arrests rather than people convicted, so may well reflect more on policing practice than the reality of knife crime. But even if you accept the London figures as being a fair indication of the racial breakdown of knife criminals, the Panorama programme certainly seemed to over-represent the proportion of black people engaged in this particular crime.
And it did. That Panorama programme was made by a London-based production team. Back in 2009, there is no doubt that knife crime was perceived by a lot of Londoners as a “black issue”. But to those of us outside of London, we found it rather strange. Glasgow actually has the highest rate of violent crime in the UK, and knife crime levels are more than 3 times higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. Having visited several Scottish penal institutions, I am pretty sure almost all those convicted of knife crime are white. If knife crime has a “racial profile” in Scotland, it is most definitely a “white issue”.
On-screen representation of race in current affairs programmes is difficult at the best of times. Good news rarely makes headlines and who wants to be the subject of bad news? I do not believe it should be the role of factual television producers to make programmes that show favourable representations of one diverse group or another. What any factual programme-maker should strive for is accuracy – and on certain sensitive issues that means doing your homework really well.
If there are 360 more HIV positive black South Africans to every white South African, it would be wrong to show a white person with HIV every time you showed a black case study (which is what one of the film students was arguing for). But it is equally wrong for British television to paint a picture that the majority of knife criminals are black when they clearly aren’t (not in London which has the largest black community let alone the rest of the UK). Accuracy and honesty in film-making must be our guiding principle in on-screen representation of diversity and that involves research of knowing what the true figures are.
Unfortunately, there appear to be no figures for the racial breakdown of fuel crime. But taking the rough cut Panorama programme on fuel crime that I saw, as a whole the film identifies over a dozen people breaking the law. The fact that one of the most prolific happens to be black might irritate me emotionally, but journalistically I think my team have probably represented the reality accurately and honestly enough.
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