Seven people died on the A66 last Saturday in South Bank. Two were police officers, PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough who were killed when a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way down the dual carriageway collided with their marked police vehicle.
Five young men died too. What happened was absolutely horrific. The circumstances surrounding it are deeply disturbing and, as I have written previously, there are legitimate questions to be asked about dangerous driving, criminality, the culture surrounding it and why some young men appear to regard police pursuits as entertainment.
A strange kind of mourning
But something else has disturbed me over the past week. We seem to have forgotten how to let people grieve. And I don’t say that because I approve of everything that has happened since the crash. I don’t.
Some of the vigils have made me deeply uncomfortable. Cars being revved, flares, fireworks and, at one gathering, vehicles being burned out are not how I would mourn somebody. Footage from the Haswell memorial for Michael Cahill showed cars being driven around a field before several were set alight.
Everybody loses
I can disagree with that and I can condemn dangerous behaviour. I can also think glorifying the circumstances surrounding these deaths risks perpetuating exactly the culture that contributed to this catastrophe.
And I can still recognise one very simple fact. Their families have lost their children.
Armchair lawyers
Condemning what happened and having compassion for those left behind are not mutually exclusive. We are perfectly capable of holding both thoughts in our heads at once. The internet, apparently, is struggling with this concept.
Within hours of the crash, social media transformed itself into a courtroom. As it so often does. Trial by social media as it is known.
People began trawling profiles, sharing images and discussing criminal histories. Friends and relatives were cross-examined whilst videos from other accounts were circulated and connections drawn between people, pages and communities.
It’s not a video game
There is legitimate journalism to be done around the online culture surrounding dangerous driving. LBC, for example, examined social media accounts connected to some of those who died and uncovered videos of high-speed driving, apparent drug use behind the wheel and attempts to evade police. That wider culture absolutely deserves scrutiny.
Speculation is counterproductive
But scrutiny and speculation are not the same thing. Evidence of a wider culture does not tell us precisely what happened inside that Passat on that particular night. That is what the police investigation is there to establish, and until it does, the rest of us need to resist the temptation to fill in the blanks ourselves.
That distinction has disappeared online. People don’t want uncertainty anymore. Uncertainty doesn’t perform particularly well on Facebook. Anger does. And what I’ve witnessed this week is that there is an entire online content creator economy waiting to supply it.
The A66 tragedy has become content
Every photograph, every vigil, every family member’s Facebook post, every badly worded tribute and every piece of footage can be screenshotted, reposted and served to another audience. Then comes the vitriol.
I’ve even witnessed balloon releases separate from those related to this incident becoming a target for this. I understand the anger. Believe me, I’m angry too. But I won’t allow content to drive my emotions into attacking others.
Judging from a distance
You have people who have never met these families who suddenly know everything about them. Their parenting, their home life, the children around them, their morals.
Their entire family histories deconstructed from Facebook photographs and court reports by Sandra from Worksop while waiting for the kettle to boil.
It would almost be funny if there weren’t actual grieving human beings at the centre of it. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not defending the behaviour surrounding this. Merely examining how content creation capitalises on emotion.
Circus Grotesque
There was one international outlet that actually packaged the reaction under a headline about the internet “erupting” after the crash, reproducing social-media posts declaring “zero sympathy”.
And here is your modern news cycle in miniature:
Tragedy
↓
Outrage
↓
Reaction to outrage
↓
Article about reaction to outrage
↓
Facebook post promoting article about reaction to outrage
↓
Four thousand comments
↓
Advertising revenue
↓
Next tragedy please
This is happening while local journalism itself is being hollowed out. Newsrooms have shrunk. Reporters are expected to produce more stories, more quickly, across more platforms.
Medieval justice
Meanwhile Facebook pages, TikTok accounts and self-appointed “community news” services can publish almost anything instantly with barely any regulation. Everyone is fighting for the same commodity. Attention.
And anger is extraordinarily good at producing it. The result is something increasingly resembling the old village stocks, except the stocks are digital and potentially several million people can throw rotten vegetables.
Poverty porn
There is also a class element to this which we shouldn’t pretend isn’t there. Because Britain has always enjoyed gawping at poor people. We just used to put them on television. Now we have TikTok and YouTube.
Working-class communities become fascinating when something terrible happens in them. Cameras arrive and people’s homes are photographed. Their Facebook accounts become source material whilst their criminal records become a national conversation. Whole families become characters in an unfolding drama.
What happens when the circus leaves town?
South Bank, Grangetown and surrounding communities are now being discussed nationally in the context of gangs, deprivation, dangerous driving and organised crime. Those are real issues and they deserve serious journalism. The Guardian’s reporting this week also found residents desperate to point out something that becomes lost in this sort of coverage, most people living there are ordinary people trying to live their lives.
The right to grieve
What particularly bothers me is the policing of grief. There seems to be an expectation that only certain people are entitled to mourn.
The families of PC Blades and PC Clough have received an enormous and understandable wave of public sympathy and rightly so. Over £1mn has now been raised. They deserve every ounce of that compassion. Two men went to work and never came home. But compassion is not a finite resource.
No winners here
Offering humanity to another grieving family does not take some away from them. You don’t have to pretend the five occupants of the Passat were innocent victims of circumstance, and you don’t have to ignore criminal convictions and you don’t even have to like them.
You simply have to understand that somewhere, somebody’s phone contains thousands of photographs of their child who is suddenly never coming home. That reality doesn’t disappear because the person who died had committed crimes.
Toleration matters
Grief isn’t always pretty. It can be angry, chaotic and inappropriate. Sometimes even offensive. People do things while grieving that the rest of us would never dream of doing.
There is an old saying about what happens when you back an animal into a corner. Eventually, it lashes out. Human beings aren’t all that different, we are also animals after all.
So, when people are grieving, frightened and angry, then find themselves being watched, photographed, picked apart and judged by thousands of strangers online, we shouldn’t be surprised when some react badly.
Let it pass
That doesn’t excuse threats, abuse or dangerous behaviour. But perhaps before pointing at every angry response as further proof that these are simply “bad people”, we should ask whether the relentless public prodding might be making an already volatile situation worse.
Let me reiterate. That doesn’t mean everything done in the name of grief should be excused. If somebody endangers another person, commits criminal damage or commits an offence, that should be dealt with accordingly.
But there is a difference between holding somebody accountable for something they actually do and turning an entire grieving family and community into public entertainment.
Is this entertainment?
The same social media which may have helped cultivate a culture where dangerous driving becomes entertainment is now hosting the public punishment afterwards and that should trouble us.
The algorithm doesn’t care which side you’re on
The algorithm didn’t care when a video of somebody apparently outrunning police generated views and didn’t care when a furious reaction video condemning them generated views either. It is engagement to keep you scrolling and it is monetised.
Tabloid frenzy
Traditional media should provide a weight to counterbalance this but instead it too often joins in. Chasing those exact same clicks.
There is important journalism to be done surrounding this and questions we must ask. How did this culture develop? Why are young people attracted to it? What role does deprivation play? What role does organised crime play? Where were the interventions? What happened to youth services?
How do we stop another generation of children growing up believing being chased by police is something worth filming? And, above everything else, what actually happened in the hours before seven people died?
Those questions require reporters with patience and most importantly it requires evidence.
Real journalism is required
This fact finding work is considerably harder than scrolling through somebody’s Facebook page looking for something outrageous enough to screenshot and share.
The A66 tragedy deserves scrutiny, undoubtedly, but none of that requires us to surrender our humanity. There are families on both sides of that collision whose lives have been permanently changed.
We can condemn criminality, challenge dangerous behaviour and demand answers. We can even look at the way someone chooses to mourn and think it’s completely inappropriate. None of that requires us to strip grieving families of their humanity. It only compounds the issue.
A time for sober reflection
We should be very careful about reaching the point where we believe somebody has to pass a public morality test before they’re allowed to grieve. That is not a society any of us should be comfortable with.
Especially when bereavement itself becomes content. Watching thousands of strangers gather online to decide who deserves compassion and who doesn’t isn’t accountability. It’s just a witch hunt.
We’re just standing around the digital stocks whilst somebody, somewhere, is making money from selling us a basket of rotten vegetables.
Thank you to Ray Casey for contributing to this article.
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