The Look Remains

10/26/2015 - 16h11

The front page on Folha last Monday (19) highlighted a gallery of young police officers in apparently biased poses: short hair, face behind a revolver, looking in the foreground pointing at anyone looking at him. The photos were taken from profiles on social media, and there was no information about the people.

The headline, "On social media, police are heroes and violent," continued on inside pages with two reports. The first, on the front page of the daily news section, revealed the existence of pages which praise police violence, showing photos of prisoners who have been beaten and videos of detention and torture, accompanied by messages of support.

The other one, illustrated with the posed photos, discussed the risks and benefits of self-exposure with uniforms and arms. There are those who think it's good, reflecting professional pride, improving the self-esteem impaired by the bad reputation of the police force and offering an opportunity to get closer to the community.

There are those who believe it is bad, seeing trigger-happy exhibitionism with a lack of seriousness and risk to their safety.

The problem is that the edition assembled stories of different natures, leading to one contaminating the other. On the front page, in the text below the photo gallery, two experts declared that the postings were "something out of the Wild West," and that the police forgot that they represent the state.

None of them, however, referred to the portraits but instead to the barbarities described in the first report.

The mixture of information leaked onto the page with the portraits: beside the profile photos, a graphic listed the types of violent content - filming of deaths, for example.

It is reasonable to believe that greater modesty in displaying arms would be good for an institution whose image is corroded by a violent history, but it is also reasonable to interpret the newspaper's choice to publish the armed people as an attempt to match the two situations and show that this violence is intrinsic to police.

There is another aspect to be discussed: none of those in the portraits were consulted about the publication of their photos. The legal understanding at the newspaper is that an image on open social media is a public image (even if the person is not) and can be used freely in the production of journalistic material.

From a legal standpoint, that could be OK, but it is difficult to defend as ethical taking an image from one digital habitat in which he chooses to be exposed and present him in another context without consulting him.

Especially when, in a specific case, the legal director knocks down a journalistic obligation of the first magnitude - to always contact the other side when publication could harm a person.

The informative background which surrounded the anonymous portraits was negative and, on some police forces, exposure could be punished as an administrative infraction.

You could always say that the police officers are the ones responsible because they exposed themselves on the Web. That is true, but it's also cynical. It's one thing to accept the side effects of information published in the name of the public interest. That does not seem to be the case in exposing the faces, neither necessary nor inevitable.

The Department of Public Safety in São Paulo sent a message which contested the report "(Gov. Geraldo) Alckmin administration omits data about people killed by police in São Paulo" published on Friday, (Oct. 19). You can read the entire message (in Portuguese) on the ombudsman's web page on line.

CHANGES ON THE WEB SITE

Many readers complained about the elimination of the page on the web site which carried an index of stories in the print version of Folha. It was an old format, but useful, simple and still used by thousands of readers.

The newsroom's management said that the page was created when the newspaper still did not publish all of its contents on the main site. The contents remain available "in a richer version, putting together resources such as photos, informational graphics, videos and links."

"Now it is possible to centralize all the interactions with certain contents in the newspaper. The material published on the web site also indexes what came out in the print version, as well as exclusive digital content."

The explanation will not console those who lost the format to which they had become accustomed, but changes caused by new technology are inevitable. What makes no sense to understand is why they are implemented without informing beforehand the readers, who feel disrespected, and rightly so, furious.

Translated by JOHN WRIGHT

Read the article in the original language