On days when the Grahamstown police station gets its act together to supply us with information concerning the latest crimes in the area, you will read on Page Two a half column or so of News in Brief.
On days when the Grahamstown police station gets its act together to supply us with information concerning the latest crimes in the area, you will read on Page Two a half column or so of News in Brief.
A student once accused us of trivialising items in this column because we only give them a short paragraph or two.
This is particularly cruel when you consider that the most common crimes reported in News in Brief are rapes and murders.
These are the most horrendous crimes imaginable and we would never want to trivialise the horror and trauma suffered by the victims, their families and their friends.
There are several reasons why most of these crimes are covered in only a few lines on Page Two. The first is that for the most part we are dependent on the police for such information, and the SAPF does not appear to able to consistently supply the media with information about serious crimes.
Secondly we do not have enough reporters to be able to write the type of articles that such incidents deserve.
Finally, it is difficult to write detailed articles about rape because those accused of this type of crime enjoy significant protection from the law – far more, for example than a picketpocket would.
We go to considerable effort to extract the relevant information from the police and in some cases we are able to allocate a journalist to a particular case.
We will sometimes go the extra mile if any of the individuals involved have a high profile in our community or if the crime itself is particularly unusual.
Unfortunately we are not able to do justice to the many stories about the steady stream of violent crimes committed in our town.
It is even more unfortunate that the police – and even the entire justice system – cannot cope with the perpetual torrent of criminality that appears to overwhelm their best efforts. The question is: what do these unfortunate circumstances say about our society?
