Jarrod Gilbert: How an opportunity for world-best crime reporting was missed

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster talks to media about police incidents that happened in Glen Eden at the Henderson Police Station. Photo / NZ Herald

COMMENT

Sometimes good ideas die a natural death. Other times they are murdered.

Back in 2019, when I was part of Te Uepū (the Government’s justice advisery group, chaired by the late Chester Burrows), I had an idea to make crime and justice reporting in New Zealand the best anywhere in the world. Ambitious, I grant you, but there’s nothing wrong with aiming high.

Any big idea needs grunt behind it, so I set about assembling the very best team I could. It was a who’s who of journalism in New Zealand. So great was the team, in fact, that I felt a little self-conscious sitting around the table with them.

The assembled group understood the problems facing modern newsrooms, but as formidable and knowledgeable as the group was, it wanted to make more certain of the issues, so we commissioned some research. Awarding-winning journalists David Fisher and Jonathan Milne took up the challenge and interviewed scores of people from the media and within the justice agencies.

The Fisher and Milne report was comprehensive and challenging. If we wanted to make significant changes – to become the best – there was much work to do. This report helped inform our plan to assist crime reporting.

In a nutshell, the plan was this. We would create a website that pulled together long-term criminal justice data in one place, along with links to explanations on how to read the data (some definitions change over time, meaning direct comparisons are not possible). It would also have a full glossary of terms so journalists could understand the myriad legal-speak coming from the courts and elsewhere, as well as more detailed explanations of the moving parts of the criminal justice system. The website would also have contact details for experts across the board in different areas of crime. Training would be offered, which would bring together journalists and also those working within justice agencies. Annual awards would be given to the best examples of articles or reports and these would then be annotated with commentaries by the journalist who created them as a way of educating younger practitioners. There would also be scholarships that would allow journalists time to create longer, more detailed pieces of work. And given it was to be hosted by a neutral party – the University of Canterbury – those who had scholarships would be offered the opportunity to work with academics or PhD candidates. We also established a means of evaluation to test the efficacy of the project.

We built the website, and began to populate it, to demonstrate how it would work, and how all of the parts linked together to assist in the fast pace of modern newsrooms. I believed – in a hurricane of optimism and arrogance – this would create the tools to allow New Zealand to become the leader in crime and justice reporting. I believed it would prove an example that other countries would follow. We had a number of funding sources teed up, but we knew we needed core funding from the justice agencies, which to this point had only been encouraging. The Minister of Justice was also an enthusiast of the idea.

Then some other factors came to play. The first was a societal shift. There was an idea that the Government was buying journalists through the establishment of the Public Interest Journalism Fund. For anybody with any idea of how journalists work, this argument was nonsense, but nevertheless it was persistent among the public. The second factor was more significant, in my view. That being that at least some communications (read “public relations”) staff within the justice agencies were, in my view, hostile to the idea. Some of the people who attempt to control the narrative had grave concerns about the media having a greater ability to sniff about the place.

While they are largely good people, in my view, some communications staff can be a problem within the justice ministries if you are interested in seeking the truth. They seem to be involved in all manner of things that I don’t consider to be their business. This seemingly occurs because of a consuming paranoia of bad publicity. Some research proposals and projects, for example, are run past comms staff. To some, research isn’t seen as an opportunity to discover and learn, it’s seen as a threat. That attitude has killed all manner of good projects, and their suspicion of journalists could not be higher.

I believe some with the ear of the Secretary of Justice lobbied against this project for reasons that never stacked up, saying journalists would not value it, despite the board of influential media people on our team saying they would.

Anyway, by this stage, the justice advisery group had concluded its work and, despite the best efforts of some great staff at the Ministry of Justice, the project slid further and further down the agenda. To the best of my memory, no formal decline was given to the idea, but one day we turned around to find it unresponsive, face-down in a pool of lost opportunity.

Did the project die a natural death or was it murdered? Who knows. All I know for certain is this: the problems of crime reporting in New Zealand remain.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the Director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.