In a recent edition of the Spectator, Douglas Murray wrote about Nahel Merzouk who was shot and killed as he tried to escape from the ‘racist’ police, (French racism is not the problem). The subsequent riots caused damage estimated to cost over one billion Euros and led to the arrest of thousands of rioters. The thrust of Murray’s piece was that a ‘significant chunk of the non-integrated immigrant population’ is the real cause of the riots.
He argues: ‘France – like Britain – is one of those countries … people “risk their lives” to get to … we are then told how little we do for them, how terrible our housing and integration system are. We only hear what evil racist countries we are.’
The parallels with the death of George Floyd are unmistakable. The deaths of both Merzouk and Floyd and the subsequent riots were brought into all our homes thanks to modern technology. In America, by the end of June 2020, at least 14,000 people had been arrested and more than 19 people involved in the riots died.
Closer to home, we have our own parallel in the Death of Kumanjayi* Walker who was killed by a police officer who was trying to arrest him. In all three cases, we have the death of black men at the hands of police who were attempting to detain them. In all three cases, we have a chorus of outrage from protesters screaming about police brutality. In France and America, rioters assuaged their pain by looting supermarkets, corner shops, and high-end retail outlets such as Gucci and Fendi. Apparently, the best thing to have in the face of police brutality is an expensive handbag…?
One of the most interesting parallels between the three cases is the disproportionate response from the citizenry of the three countries and the disproportionate and biased coverage from the media.
The death of Kumanjayi Walker in October 2019 has been front-page news ever since and has been mentioned in the press at least 110,000 times. In contrast, according to Google, the murder by Aboriginal man Garsek Nawirridj of his wife has been mentioned in the media 459 times. Garsek who, do I hear you ask? He was convicted of attacking his wife over a protracted period of time in which she was bashed with weapons, stabbed in the back of her leg, strangled with her dress, and finally, dragged for 70 metres along a beach and dumped in shallow water.
The death of another Aboriginal woman, Kumanjayi Haywood, was equally horrific. After over 20 years of marriage, he burnt her to death as she tried to escape yet another beating by hiding in a bathroom. This time the case was mentioned 2,250 times in the media and it is worth considering why three different murders get such different amount of media coverage. The reason why Walker’s death attracted so much attention was, of course, because he was killed by a policeman who was trying to arrest him and it is right and proper that the media should look closely at any death in such circumstances.
The murder by Kumanjayi Dixon of his wife, Kumanjayi Haywood, received five times the amount of coverage of the murder by Garsek of his wife (whose name cannot be mentioned for cultural reasons). The reason for the closer attention by the media to the death of Ms Haywood, is because it enabled the media et al to blame her death on the failure of the police to intervene. Typical of the headlines surrounding the murder of Kumanjayi Haywood was; Seven 000 calls in two hours – why did the police take 12 hours to respond to an Indigenous woman’s pleas? There was no such criticism possible in the case of Garsek’s unnamed wife so she is a mere footnote to the unending stream of murders by Aboriginal men of their wives.
The hierarchy of importance of the murder of an Aboriginal woman can be presented mathematically thus. Being killed by a police officer is 239 times more newsworthy than a murder with no police involvement. If the murder of an Aboriginal woman by her partner can be associated with a failure of police to intervene then such an event is only 48 times less newsworthy.
I accept that statistical analysis based on just three cases is unreliable. But I would suggest that those who don’t accept the accuracy of the process might put the names of Aboriginal women murdered by their partners into a search engine and see how many times they are mentioned. The degree of involvement of the police in the murder is the principal determinant of media interest.
In America today, homicide deaths were 20 times as high for black males and six times as high for black females when compared to their white counterparts and this contributes significantly to the shortened lifespan of the black male. In about 80-90 per cent of the cases, the black victim was killed by a black perpetrator, and about 52 per cent of the murder victims were acquainted with their assailant. In France, we see the same pattern where drug-related gang killings greatly outnumber the number of black and Arab people killed by police.
Last year, a Northern Territory Supreme Court Judge said that, in the period since the death of Kumanjayi Walker, 52 Aboriginal women were victims of homicide – mostly by their partners. She also said that if there was ‘a similar level of violence against women in a non-Aboriginal community in Sydney or Melbourne, there would be a huge outcry’.
How do we explain the astonishing inequality in the way the media covers the violent death of black and Arab people in Western society? John Donne’s famous sermon in which he argued, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind…’ was written 400 years ago and before the invention of mass migration, racism, and the modern media. Perhaps it needs updating. Today we can say that any man’s death outrages me in direct proportion to the involvement or lack of involvement of the police and any black Aboriginal woman’s death at the hands of her partner doesn’t involve me at all unless the police failed to intervene.
*Kumanjayi is a ‘substitute name for a dead person’.
