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rfmcdonaldCBC British Columbia reports that Paul Pritchard, the man whose video the Robert Dziekański taser incident at Vancouver International Airport led to a far-reaching investigation of the RCMP, has been honoured with a citizen journalism award.
It should be noted that the RCMP hasn't come across well at all, with missing documents and faded memories and the standard litany that would one expect of a police force that protects its own. This is an excellent example of why you have civilian oversight of the police, and the military too. So much for the integrity of a Canadian icon.
The notion of citizen journalism raised in this article interests me, naturally enough since I do keep A Bit More Detail and contribute to Demography Matters and generally have a prominent enough Internet profile (not prominent enough, maybe, but that's a separate topic). Pritchard's video only received the publicity that it did because he could communicate his knowledge of the video and its contents to a broad audience thanks to mass media, without which his video may well not have gotten the attention that it did. As institutions like the National Post collapse makes me wonder about journalism's future. Most of my posts here and elsewhere are annotations of one kind or another. Without the content provided by established outlets, where would we get our news from, and how badly would it be biased by partisan or other issues?
The man who used a digital camera to record the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport says he feels guilty he didn't try to elp the Polish immigrant even though others honoured his actions Tuesday with a citizen-journalism award.
Dziekanski, 40, died Oct. 14, 2007, following several shocks from a Taser four RCMP officers used to subdue him after he caused a disturbance.
The incident might never have received much attention if Paul Pritchard had not decided to grab his digital camera and start recording the actions of the distraught Dziekanski before police arrived.
Dziekanski did not speak English and, after a long flight from Poland, had been left to wander for hours in the restricted zone of the arrivals area after being processed by immigration authorities while his mother waited for him in another part of the airport.
After the incident, Pritchard, who was on his way to his family's home in Victoria and had been waiting in the international arrivals lounge at the time, handed his video over to the RCMP to use in their investigation. The police promised it would be returned in 48 hours.
But when the RCMP's public statements about the incident conflicted with what Pritchard and other witnesses said they saw, Pritchard demanded the RCMP return the video so that he could release it to the public.
When the police refused, saying releasing the video would compromise their investigation, Pritchard hired a lawyer, held a news conference and threatened to use legal action to get it back.
The release of the 10-minute video, which contradicted the police version of the incident, led to widespread public outrage around the world and diplomatic tensions between Canada and Poland. It also resulted in the deepest scrutiny of the RCMP in decades in the form of a special inquiry into the incident, led by retired British Columbia Appeal Court Justice Thomas R. Braidwood.
It should be noted that the RCMP hasn't come across well at all, with missing documents and faded memories and the standard litany that would one expect of a police force that protects its own. This is an excellent example of why you have civilian oversight of the police, and the military too. So much for the integrity of a Canadian icon.
The notion of citizen journalism raised in this article interests me, naturally enough since I do keep A Bit More Detail and contribute to Demography Matters and generally have a prominent enough Internet profile (not prominent enough, maybe, but that's a separate topic). Pritchard's video only received the publicity that it did because he could communicate his knowledge of the video and its contents to a broad audience thanks to mass media, without which his video may well not have gotten the attention that it did. As institutions like the National Post collapse makes me wonder about journalism's future. Most of my posts here and elsewhere are annotations of one kind or another. Without the content provided by established outlets, where would we get our news from, and how badly would it be biased by partisan or other issues?
