The old school is the best school
Back in the olden days, I used to write a blog about tabloid newspapers. I’d examine their stories to see how the facts had been monkeyed around with to create false narratives. I would get all angry and swear and put in jokes about bums and stuff. It was great. Sometimes. Actually it got pretty wearing and I lost interest long before I stopped doing it, but never mind.
The blog’s been dormant for years now, languishing without updates and denuded of all images from when I deleted them by accident like a chump. You’ll find it if you look.
I don’t think about it much any more, and hardly ever bother looking in the tabloids. But yesterday, for reasons we’ll get into later, I came across a story in the Sun that took me right back to 2008, when the Empire spanned the globe, everything was in black and white and we had to make our own fun with a hoop and some ricketts. I offered to have a look at it like I used to if more than three people asked asked on Twitter, and since about two people did, I thought ‘good enough’.
‘SYRIA CRIME WAVE,’ it says. ‘Hundreds of Syrians in UK arrested over string of offences including rape and child abuse.’
It’s one of those tabloid stories that crops up over and over again about how many foreigners are arrested for this or that and we should all be frightened of them. Back when I was blogging, they used to be about Romanians or Polish people, but hammering Syrians is more in fashion now. Like socks and shower slippers for some reason. (Seriously — the fuck is that)?
It was published less than a year after Aylan Kurdi died and the paper pretended to care about Syrians for five minutes (before cynically using his death to call for the government to bomb his country — really).
Anyway, before we look at this story in particular, there’s one thing you should know about how arrests of foreign nationals are — or aren’t — published.
The police don’t actually publish information on the nationality of the people they arrest because they don’t really know the answer. You have to put in a Freedom of Information request to find out, and all you’ll get are figures for what people said they were when they were arrested. This is never checked and anyone could make up any old nonsense. Even if they tell the truth, you have no way of knowing whether they’re a UK citizen, how long they’ve been in the UK, whether they’re a refugee or what their immigration status is at all.
If you’re not sure why that might be a problem, here’s an article about migrants pretending to be Syrian in order to get favourable treatment in the immigration system. It’s from the Sun.
Before we even look, we know that this story, like all the others before it, will be built on some very shaky ground. Still, it sort of tells us that maybe just under 900 people who said they were Syrian got arrested last year for a bunch of different things.
What’s more important is what it doesn’t tell us.
It doesn’t tell us how many people who didn’t say they were Syrian were arrested. This is important since the story is supposed to be about a SYRIA CRIME WAVE. According to the BBC, police made 949,526 arrests in 2014–15, so this SYRIA CRIME WAVE would account for about 0.09% of all arrests, or around 9 in every 10,000. But that’s not very shocking. You know, for a CRIME WAVE.
It doesn’t tell us exactly how many of these arrests were for immigration offences. Buried in the story is the detail that immigration makes up the largest number of offences, as you’d expect, but we’re never actually told how many. It could be almost all of them.
It doesn’t actually tell us how many people who said they were Syrian were actually arrested for all the offences the story is excited about. We get some details of actual named offences for just three police forces, but that’s it. There’s no table exposing the shocking truth about every heinous thing in the way you’d expect if there were big, shocking figures. Which kind of suggests there are no big, shocking figures.
Here are all the actual arrests the Sun’s CRIME WAVE ‘revelation’ bothers to count:
‘Violence Assault’ (whatever that is): 6
‘Public Disorder’: 3
‘Death Threats’: 3
‘Sexual Activity With An Underage Girl’: 1
‘Sex offences’: 11 (or 9, depending on whether the 2 rapes fall in this category)
‘Rape’: 2
Total: 26
And that’s it. Sure, there are some horrible crimes in there, but it seems that the actual number of people saying they were Syrian arrested for anything other than immigration offences is much closer to 26 than 900.
Even then, we don’t know how many were charged or convicted.
Of course, the story uses these figures it’s inflated alongside some scary colour to make things a bit more ooga-booga. In the first paragraph it talks about the alleged cover-up of a sexual assault by Syrians in Newcastle as if it’s connected with these figures and the need to make an FoI request (it isn’t), and it mentions a murder and a suicide bomb attack in Germany as if they’re in any way comparable (they aren’t). In the end, though, it’s stretching some watery jam very thinly indeed.
But that’s what you expect from the Sun, right? Why stress about it?
I came across the story because Milo Yiannopolous, the guy who was banned from Twitter for his part in a racist harassment campaign against Leslie Jones out of the new Ghostbusters, wrote a silly article on Breitbart, the white nationalist site run by the guy who’s taken over as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, about how he has to leave London because scary Muslims. He cited this article as evidence of how 900 Syrian refugees had been arrested in the UK for child abuse and rape. (It isn’t — it mentions just 3).
The political climate in the UK is very scary right now. Since the Brexit campaign, police have reported an uptick in reports of racist incidents. During the campaign, Jo Cox, an MP with a record of trying to help Syrian refugees, was murdered by a white supremacist for being a ‘traitor’. Just last week, Arkadiusz Jozwik was beaten to death in the street for speaking Polish.
(The other day, the Sun lamented his death on its front page. Then slagged off migrants on page 2. Then lamented his death again on page 5. It was pretty gross. Like using the death of a child to try to get his country bombed.)
These ridiculous little tabloid stories that make you roll your eyes feed into an environment where people might feel threatened by the presence of those different from themselves. They stoke those fears. They give racists the cover to say whatever stupid shit they want to justify and spread their pathetic, spiteful idiocy. They feed hate. And they’re not even true.
This isn’t ‘ha-ha-isn’t-that-funny-look-at-the-ladies’-boobs-phwoar-isn’t-it-a-laugh’ stuff. This shit is dangerous.
