The date is January 2016, the place is court two of Woolwich Crown Court, and the trial of the men accused of carrying out the most spectacular British crime of the decade: the theft of around £14 million of jewellery, gold and cash from the Hatton Garden safe deposit company over the Easter weekend of 2015. The ringleaders, Terry Perkins, Brian Reader, Danny Jones and Kenny Collins, have already pleaded guilty and the four men in the dock are accused of playing minor parts. This is, in prosecuting counsel Philip Evans’s phrase (repeated in every daily newspaper), ‘the largest burglary in English legal history’.
This is the sort of crime story that doesn’t come along very often; a ‘project’ crime, one that requires planning and cunning and offers a massive reward. Part of the fascination is that this is ‘old school’. Old being the operative word. Perkins is sixty-seven, Reader seventy-six, Jones sixty and Collins seventy-four. Hence their nickname, the ‘Diamond Wheezers’. There are witnesses with Runyonesque nicknames like ‘Billy the Fish’ and ‘Jimmy Two-baths’, and hidden police tape-recordings of the protagonists chortling about ‘the biggest robbery in the fucking world we was on’. But there is puzzlement, too, that the thieves seemed unaware that their mobile phones and computers could help incriminate them. It is as if they are trapped in a sort of criminal aspic. The end of the trial prompts massive press and television coverage but there is a feeling amongst the crime reporters in court that this is an end-of-an-era event.
The twenty-first century has presented the criminally inclined with new opportunities that were quickly seized and developed: the cyber-thief who hacks into bank accounts and transfers the money to foreign banks; the menacing troll who threatens and blackmails; the online con artist with promises of profit or bogus pleas for help; the people smuggler, taking advantage of fleeing refugees; the sex trafficker, exploiting vulnerable women; the anonymous internet dealer in drugs and pornography on the dark net. The days of the high-profile blags are numbered. Bank robberies and break-ins declined, as security and technology advanced, down from 847 nationally in 1992 to 108 by 2012. In London, the numbers fell from 291 to 26 in the same period.
At the same time, technology and the digital age has not just influenced the nature of crime, but the methods of reporting it. Crime reporters, like all journalists, are now under pressure from above to show that their words are being read, something that their editors can now monitor, even to the extent of telling how long readers linger on a particular story. The twenty-four-hour news cycle, initiated towards the end of the twentieth century by rolling news on television, became de rigueur as newspapers were transformed into ‘news providers’ in an online world. In late 2014, the Telegraph group noted that four key skills for their reporters would be ‘social, video, analytics and search engine optimisation’. What about ‘journalism’ asked one online wag, and you could almost hear the bodies of W. T. Stead and Duncan Webb turning in their graves. Too often ‘search engine optimisation’ means shoving the name of a celebrity into a story to snare the casual browser. No time to research and delve deep when the demand is for measurable internet hits.
The opportunities created by new technologies have been harnessed to some effect by journalists but the digital age, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone, has also presented new pressures. In 2014, for example, it transpired that nineteen police forces in England and Wales made more than 600 applications to uncover confidential sources of journalists in the previous three years. Requests to use anti-terror legislation to access reporters’ communication records were made in thirty-four police investigations into suspected leaks by public officials, the Interception of Communication Commissioner’s Office (ICCO) found. Sir Anthony May, the then interception of communications commissioner, said that police forces ‘did not give due consideration to freedom of speech’ and that the Home Office guidelines did not sufficiently protect journalistic sources. How secure would a confidential source – a police officer, a lawyer, a criminal on the run – feel when they make contact with a crime reporter in the future?
So where is crime reporting heading? Will crowd-funded reporting feature more heavily in the future? The journalist Peter Jukes, for example, successfully explored this to allow him to tweet the big 2014 Old Bailey hacking trial in its entirety. A year later he and Alastair Morgan, the brother of Daniel Morgan, the private eye murdered in 1987, started a crowd-funded podcast in Britain to explore ‘the most investigated unsolved murder in British history’. They had taken their cue from Serial, the amazingly popular American podcast to re-examine a 1999 murder.
As for the future methods of crime reporting, these are unlikely to stand still. The drone, for example, ‘is a wonderful tool for getting above a crime scene’, according to Martin Brunt of Sky News. ‘I think the authorities are very keen to stop us doing that . . . but I am sure they will become part of our tool box simply because they can get vision footage where we can’t. They will become the norm.’
So – will all reporters have drones to monitor crime scenes? Will trials be streamed live? Will juries vote online? Will detailed reporting be crowd-funded? Will blogs and podcasts replace the crime bureaux of old? Will police forces and security services be able to intercept every email and text message so that reporters will once again have to meet their contacts down shady lanes? Who will Hold the Front Page when there are no more front pages to hold? Who will be the crime correspondent to report the first murder in space? And if it bleeds, will it still lead?
Of course it will.