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The media piles pressure on police to give
answers, but suspects must live with an irremovable stain of
suspicion
Yesterday, just in case everybody else knew something that I
did not, I rang an editor friend and asked for the word on
the street about Madeleine McCann. He answered that no one
has the slightest idea where the truth lies - despite the
Portuguese police naming Kate and Gerry McCann as formal
suspects in the investigation of her death. The case
possesses everything headline writers could dream of: a
pretty child victim; photogenic middle-class parents who are
also doctors; apparently bungling foreigners. Amid a miasma
of allegation and sensation, coverage is remorseless,
speculation infinite.
The story provokes in some of us the sort of guilt that our
ancestors must have felt on finding themselves unable to
avert their eyes from a public execution. We shudder at the
circus, sure of its repugnance but uncertain whom to blame.
Crime in which children are victims causes police, media and
public alike to take leave of their senses.
It has become the only truly heinous crime. Few people feel
much hatred towards fraudsters, bank robbers, or even most
killers. But no prisoner convicted of a crime against
children is safe in jail. The trials of such people provoke
gatherings of vengeful housewives who make the tricoteuses,
the women who knitted beneath the guillotine, seem sisters
of mercy.
In the case of Madeleine McCann, the public would like the
guilty party to turn out to be a Portuguese with a long
history of offences against children, who could reasonably
be branded as a sex fiend - like the Spanish waiter who in
1996 killed the British schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson in France. If
instead the McCanns are charged and convicted, anger will be
all the more bitter, because people will feel that for
months they have been deluded into wasting sympathy on them.
These remarks may sound ugly, but so is what is happening in Portugal. The
McCanns now live in the shadow of declared police suspicion.
If they are innocent, this is appalling. If there is
evidence against them, natural justice cries out for them to
be charged rather than merely denounced.
Child victims often induce police officers to act rashly,
because they are under such pressure to produce a result.
This is as true in Britain as it is in Portugal, as the officers probing
the shooting of Rhys Jones might acknowledge - likewise
those who investigated the 2002 Soham killings of Jessica
Chapman and Holly Wells.
In the latter case, in a small East Anglian community, it
was only days before Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr were
arrested. In a city, identifying a killer is often much
harder. Last year's search in Ipswich
for the killer of five women became protracted. A succession
of suspects were questioned, with identities blazoned across
the front pages. Even when a man was eventually charged, it
is hard to imagine that the lives of the earlier detainees
have been, or ever will be, quite the same. Nobody will
easily forget that they were deemed capable of being
multiple murderers.
Such people surely deserve stronger protection under the
law, as do the McCanns and Robert Murat, the British man
formally named as a suspect earlier in the Madeleine
inquiry. In his case, relations at home found themselves
being quizzed by reporters eager to discover whether he had
any history of sex crimes. Most of those arrested during the
Rhys Jones investigation - and subsequently released - have
been spared publicity only because they are minors.
It is widely suggested that the Portuguese police conducting
the Madeleine inquiry have been incompetent. But British
officers are just as capable of promoting false allegations
when the heat is on them to make an arrest. During the
search for Jill Dando's killer, I remember having a private
conversation with two senior policemen. They told me a pack
of nonsense, which I am confident that they themselves
believed. Both said that they thought it most likely that
Dando's assailant was somebody with whom she was already
acquainted: "Her personal life was much more complicated
than anybody realises, you know."
Their purpose, of course, was to convince the media that
they were not sitting down on the job, that they were making
progress towards an arrest. This is the usual motivation for
police leaks, though cash handouts from reporters to junior
officers also play a part. Either way, a duty of discretion
is breached.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and such
like got one big thing right in their fiction: detection as
practised by professionals is often sadly inadequate. But in
real life amateur sleuths can't fill the breach, so if
police can't find murderers, nobody does.
A high proportion of homicides are domestic crimes, in which
the guilty party is obvious. If these cases are stripped out
of statistics, a dismaying number of murderers escape
justice. When an arrest can be achieved only through what
Hercule Poirot would call the use of the little grey cells,
outcomes are elusive. I once heard a criminal barrister -
today a senior judge - mock police procedures: "Their idea
of detection is to decide which of the local firms to fit up
for a given job!" He was not being entirely facetious.
The police, in their turn, have plenty to say about the
cynicism of media and public. There is a readily recognised
scale of popular sentiment about murder, at the bottom of
which come gangland killings, especially black on black. If
one drug dealer kills another, to most people it is a matter
of indifference. Prostitutes receive only slightly more
sympathy, because they are widely supposed to have brought
their fates upon themselves. If enough of them die, however,
as in Ipswich, serial
murder generates a frisson of its own.
Popular sentiment focuses overwhelmingly upon the deaths of
so-called innocent parties, above all children. Figures
suggest that Britain,
and indeed
Portugal, are remarkably
safe places for the young to grow up in. The chances of a
child meeting a violent death are no greater than they were
in the era of Victorian values.
But in this, as in all matters relating to crime, perception
is unrelated to reality. Media coverage gives credence to a
belief that European society is plagued by monsters stalking
the young. When a child dies, every police officer knows
that his or her force's reputation is at stake in
identifying a plausible murderer.
These crimes sell a great many papers, which neither
Iraq
nor Darfur will do. Some
colleagues would accuse me of an absurd squeamishness,
because I hang my head in shame at what our trade, as well
as the Portuguese police, has made of the McCann story. They
would say the world has been ever thus, since the days of
Jack the Ripper.
But it seems reasonable to recoil from the situation that
now exists. Unless an outsider is caught and convicted of
Madeleine's death, the reputations of the McCann family are
irreparably damaged. Before charges or any trial, an
irremovable stain of suspicion has been cast by police, and
broadcast by the media. Even if the McCanns are indicted
tomorrow, the principles of natural justice have been
flouted in the most shameful fashion. |
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