Our Crime is a new four-part documentary series that's airing on BBC3 over the next month. Using youth crime as a lens it presents the effect of modern technology on society. It doesn't aim to analyse a connection, and it doesn't make the mistake of saying there is a definitive link, but it does give us an insight on youth crime that simply wasn't possible before video phones, social networking, and internet messaging.
The first episode, Robbed, airs tonight and looks at gang crime in London and Liverpool. Examining three different cases from the past five years we're shown a groups of teenagers - some as young as 13 - committing violent robberies and muggings. Not only are we shown the CCTV of them committing the crimes, but we also see the chat logs of them boasting about it to each other, pictures of them posing with their weapons, and the videos they filmed minutes after the attacks, still on a high from the assault.
As stated in the episode's opening, we're the generation that films everything. Its been allowed by the rapid development of personal technology in the past decade and it's still difficult to comprehend the changes it is having on society. Giving every phone owner a camera has led to revolutionary citizen journalism like the video footage of the 2007 protests that was secretly transported out of Burma. Yet, this is one of the first times that someone has taken such a concerted look at how technology has affected crime. And frankly, the results are shocking.
Keeping what amounts to a video confession on your own phone seems idiotic, but the film makers go to great length to show that these boys aren't stupid, they're naïve. Some of these gangs evaded arrest for months. On a surface level, when it came to their crimes, they knew what they were doing. Wearing masks and gloves, they left little evidence at the scene. But once the criminal act was done their criminal persona slipped. They were so comfortable in this culture of recording everything that they didn't connect it with crime. So they'd video the stolen moped, chat about stamping on their victim's face, plan the next nights activities, and never did it click that they were creating incriminating evidence. They were just doing what was natural.
The gangs themselves are never interviewed, instead the picture we build of them is through a blend of the media they created of themselves, the police who investigated their crimes, and their victims. The effect is strong, if we were to to meet the teenagers who committed these robberies it might be possible to forget about the victims. After all, it was the boys who were the active participants. But by viewing the reverse it is impossible to detach the two. So, throughout the interviews the boys actions loom large. The connection is emphasised by projecting CCTV footage of the assaults onto the interviewee's faces as they speak.
Our Crime is a deftly made documentary that suggests lines of thought rather than making them explicit. Its interviews are far from sensationalist and their purpose is not to make you scared but instead to make you question whether technology is, in fact, separating us, not drawing us together. Over the next month I'm certain the series will expand our understanding of the subject of youth crime, but I don't know if we'll get an answer as to how to solve it.
Robbed is showing each day this week and will be available to watch again on iPlayer. Next week's episode airs on Monday and looks at the London riots.