The Chelsea Racists

Am I alone in feeling both depressed and concerned about both recent events on the Paris Metro, and the way the story is now being played out?

As surely everyone must know, on Tuesday night video footage circulated of a group of Chelsea fans preventing a black man accessing a carriage on a Paris Metro train, before chanting en masse “We’re racist and that’s the way we like it”. Obviously, this behaviour is both deplorable and indeed criminal.

It didn’t take long for social media and the op ed columns of the major media outlets to fill with people expressing their horror, highlighting Chelsea’s long history of issues with these sorts of views, linking the incident to the John Terry court cause of a couple of years back, and calling for the perpetrators to be identified, banned and punished. So far, so good.

However, the story has subsequently moved into a secondary phase, as such stories now always seemingly must. Images of the fans inside the carriage have circulated, with a plea to identify and help bring them to justice. From what I’ve seen, it’s impossible to tell from the still images which of the individuals were involved in physically preventing the victim from accessing the train, and extremely difficult to tell which of them were even involved in the vile chanting.

All of which brings us to today, when a 20 year old is having his name splashed all over the papers as the face of the incident. As far as I can make out, he’s been identified as having been in the train carriage by someone off Twitter (I may be wrong, but “Ash Williams on Twitter” has been the only source I’ve seen to date), which is apparently now good enough for most of the UK’s national press to begin contacting everyone he’s ever known, ransacking his social media accounts and turning up chilling details of other unsavoury far right bellends with whom he has previously associated.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/19/chelsea-fan-in-paris-metro-video-posed-in-picture-with-nigel-farage

Now, for all I know, this kid is the worst person who ever lived. But I can’t help feeling extremely uneasy about the way this is playing out. This is surely a matter for the police, who have now received a formal complaint from the victim, and will presumably contact other eye witnesses, rather than Twitter and the press. The police who, despite their flaws, have access to better evidence, will investigate more thoroughly, and will prosecute when the facts merit, rather than because it’s been 24 hours and we really need to move this story along.

Even if this individual was indeed in the train carriage (and that doesn’t seem to have been demonstrated with any degree of certainty) there is nothing to confirm what he actually did or said on the night. For all we know he could have been stood in silence, deploring what was going on around him. Equally, he could have been the ringleader. The point is that at this stage, we have pretty much no idea of his level of culpability, and yet he’s being roasted at the stake this morning as the face of British racism.

I’m sure that ten minutes after I hit “Submit” on this, the accused will probably turn up on the BBC News confirming that it’s all true and he regrets nothing, but I will remain uneasy at these social media witch-hunts and the willingness of the press to both fan and exploit them. When we see something shocking, it’s tempting to want to participate in rounding up a posse to bring the bad guys to justice, even more so when you’re being roared on by a similarly minded crowd, but ultimately there are real human lives involved in this stuff, and I think the whole thing merits a slightly higher degree of due diligence than it appears is currently being deployed.

The incident has also brought to mind Jon Ronson’s excellent recent piece in the NY Times on the furore which engulfed Justine Sacco after she was foolish enough to make an off-colour joke on Twitter. While Sacco’s joke isn’t directly comparable to what went on in Paris in terms of its severity, the subsequent pattern is similar: righteous shock and outrage, which is then co-opted to enable all sorts of bullshit in the name of justice. It’s worth a read.

Anyway, I suppose all of this is a long-winded way of saying that lynch mobs suck, and the next time you’re invited to join one by some loudmouthed Twitterati who’s spent ten minutes getting worked up about the issue on his morning commute and will move on to something else tomorrow, it might be worth passing. Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, just in case anyone reads the above as excusing racism or minimising the issue: racism is very, very bad and what happened in Paris was a serious incident which should be thoroughly investigated. By the police.

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