Express & Star comment: Cruel reaction to Birmingham horror crash is sickening
The appalling road accident in Birmingham city centre has so far claimed six lives.
We also know that it has left six children fatherless, with the death of taxi driver Imtiaz Mohammed.
The horror of the scene has traumatised many of the police officers and emergency services personnel who had to deal with it.
Counselling is being offered to them so shocking was the devastating scene they encountered.
But the reaction of some members of the public to that horror was to take pictures on their mobile phones and then share them on social media. People stopped their cars to crane over railings above the scene in the immediate aftermath to snap images they then Tweeted to their followers.
Such ‘rubber-necking’ is ghoulish in the extreme. That some should wish to gawp and treat such a horrible scene as some kind of entertainment is hard to imagine.
But who on earth would want to share such scenes with their friends or the disparate fringes of their Twitter following?
It raises serious questions about the kind of society we are turning into that people should think so little of exposing others to such scenes.
We in the Press are often criticised for exploiting the misery of others, yet no newspaper would consider publishing such graphic images. The victims, after all, are someone’s brother, son or father. As a newspaper embedded in the fabric of its local community, to visit such trauma on relatives, let alone the general readership, would be unimaginable. And we are governed by an Editor’s Code of Ethics, that would forbid such action in any case.
But no such ethical code is applied to those publishing such images on social media. They can Tweet carnage to their heart’s content, no matter the impact on those who see it, who may be looking at their loved ones
Did these people on Sunday morning have no thought that the photos they were taking were of real people? Have some of us become so inured to such scenes, through computer games or horror files, that they have lost the ability to empathise? In so many cases in the last few years – at the Manchester Arena bombing and the terror attacks in London – the first reaction of many was to help. They show us at our best; a reflection of the kind of people and society we would wish to be.
Those Tweeting the accident images on Sunday night are the flip side. They show what we could become – uncaring, salacious, self-obsessed emotional vultures preying on the misery of others.
If they wish to reclaim some shred of their humanity, they should take down their Tweets and posts and send the images to the police, where they may at least do some good.
