Senem Deniz Cengiz
15068034
P7/P8/P9/M4/M5/D3
Current Affairs, Media, Support from Public Services
P7/M4
To understand the implications of citizenship and diversity for the work of the public services, it is
important to see the context in which they operate. This also includes examining current affairs that
may affect the public services, how they are represented by media and the support they offer to
citizens.
The three current affairs that will be spoken about in this report will be:
Student Demonstrations
Cutbacks of the Public Services
Increase of fuel prices
Student Demonstrations
This began when the government started to rise the tuition fees, and this led to riots and protests to
happen. The police tried to prevent the riots from getting more serious and dangerous. This affected
the Police Service mainly. There were ambulances and paramedics that were on standby in case the
riots had gotten out of hand. However, this puts the police and the students in a bad perspective.
After a few days after the riot, the media had put out some footage from the riots/protests of the
police and students. The footage of the students showed them being aggressive and with the police
the footage showed them being aggressive towards the students, and with this it led to a lack of
support for the police by citizens. However, the media has a bad eye on the police due to
broadcasting the minority of the police officers who were dealing with the situation aggressively, but
the media gave the students a bad name as well, as they released footage of the students being
aggressive and vandalising places. The media is in control of what they decide to release and show
the public, and with this they can manipulate people. This can cause the citizens to lose trust for the
police because of the footage they have seen and have the image of police being violent instead of
calm and collected. The media is very powerful in many cases, and they can make people fall into
their traps by making groups, or individuals look bad. This can affect the students as the adults, and
elderly will look down on students and think that all are rebels and scary people. However, with the
police many people will lose trust for the police as from the footages, and photos posted by the
media will give the service a bad reputation and will cause people to lose trust in them.
Poverty
Poverty is when people do not have enough money or food supplies for their everyday needs, there
are many levels of poverty.
Absolute Poverty, this is the lack of basic needs for a human life to live, such as food, water, shelter
and heat. Primary poverty is when an individual has no basic necessities. An example of this is, in the
1980s in Ethiopia there was a drought and millions of people were starved to death. Secondary
poverty is when a person has the basic needs, but it is not enough for them, an example of this are
the refugees in Afghanistan where people try to create shelters and feed their families with almost
no basic necessities. Relative Poverty, this is when an individual is not able to participate in a
cultural and social life of a community. The Sunday Times did a survey and it showed that 50% of
people thought that if someone was in poverty, they cannot afford a phone, TV, or a washing
machine. These people are not starving, they have access to the healthcare and education, however
they are poor relative to others in their society. Subjective Poverty is the perceived sense of poverty
where you are poor because you think that you are.
Poverty is a major social issue across the globe, even though there are differences in all of the types
of poverty that affects each nation. Poverty has an impact on the UK police as it can increase the
crime and violence numbers to go up and this will cause a strain on the budgets and the skills of the
, Senem Deniz Cengiz
15068034
emergency services, and aid and humanitarian missions for the armed services. This also affects the
citizens as children that are from a low-income family will miss out of events that many of us would
take for granted.
Public Services Cutbacks
It is estimated that in the next 5 years, 350,000 employees from the public services will lose their
jobs, said by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). With these cuts the level
of crime has increased, and it has been said that some criminal activity will be “screened out” by the
authorities. Also, it has been estimated that one in three crimes will not be worked on as they
believe there is a little chance to solve the crime. These include crimes such as burglary, sexual
offences, criminal damage and theft from cars will not be investigated. These cutbacks have had an
effect with the Royal Air Force (RAF), and this has led to decommissioning multiple aircrafts. On the
14th of February it was said that 100 student pilots were made redundant due to the public services
cutbacks. The media had made the RAF look bad when they got into detail, however, they changed
the story later on and a positive outcome was released. This will affect citizens and the employees
badly as there are fewer employees there are not enough to be on the streets dealing with a lot of
issues, and for citizens they will feel unsafe to go out and will start to lose trust in the services as
they are not doing a lot for different cases.
P8
Media Representation of Uniformed Public Services
The media reports on incidents and operations that the public services are a part of and they can
manipulate citizens on how they want them to see the public services. Members that are part of the
media, are not only members of the public, they can influence how the Metropolitan Police Service
is portrayed. There are guidelines for MPS staff on dealing with media reporters and others so that
the media and police can work together, here are three examples:
1. “members of the media have a duty to report from the scene of many of the incidents we
have to deal with. We should actively help them carry out their responsibilities provided
they do not interfere with ours”.
2. “where it is necessary to put cordons in place, it is much better to provide the media with
the good vantage point from which they can operate rather than to exclude them, otherwise
they will try to get around the cordons and interfere with police operations”.
3. “members of the media do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places”.
The types of media are newspapers (tabloid and broadsheet), magazines, television, radio, internet,
books, journal articles and service magazines.
The coverage can be factual or fictional portrayal as said before. All the public services are portrayed
by the media, but the police and the portrayal of crime dominate real and fictional representations
of the public services. Newburn (2007) notes the following:
25% of all TV programmes are crime related
20% of films are crime based, and when they are not directly crim based about 50% have a
significant crime content
Between one quarter and one third of all paperback book titles are crime-based thrillers.
In the UK, Williams and Dickinson (1993) found out that tabloids portray more crime than
broadsheets. The Sun newspaper contained 30.4% of crime news while The Guardian only had 5.1%
of crime news. Portrayals of the public services take up a great deal of airtime. The question is how
accurately are the services represented? A US-based National Television Violence study found out
that over a four-year period every reality-based police show had contained acts of visual violence –
shoot outs, dangerous car chases and assaults. It also includes portrayals of murder, sexual assault
and robbery at a higher rate than it usually happens in real life. From the study it was found that
