Riding the journalistic rollercoaster...

12:30pm Thursday 17th July 2008

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This week has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

We have, of course, been covering the recent murders in the borough in-depth and it's been an eye-opening experience. As an ordinary human being, the reaction to such events must naturally be shock, revulsion and sympathy for the families of the men that died. But as a journalist, the reaction is a lot more cynical and there's a certain ghoulishness in the approach to reporting.

It called to mind Looney Tunes cartoons I used to watch as a child, in which a character's pupils would suddenly turn to dollar signs when he or she came up with some money-making scheme. But in this case, it was the reporters' pupils turning to headlines - and it wasn't long before some rather morbid jokes were made.

It's strange to think I might one day become so hard-bitten that I'll be of the same mindset. I do understand that, to a certain extent at least, some of this must be a way of distancing oneself from the violence and keeping a clear head. We have a duty to report these events to the public and I suppose there is a danger of becoming too involved or losing objectivity, but I don't think it's something I'll get used to in a hurry.

What's more, it was startling to see how quickly people started to pin their own agendas to this - within hours of the story going up online. Unavoidably, it's common for campaigns to be spurred by such tragic events, but it made me feel physically sick to see some of the comments that started to appear after so short a space of time.

And as a consequence of what's been happening, Operation Blunt Two, the Met's initiative against knife crime, has been in overdrive this week.

I joined about twenty officers on a knife arch operation at Leytonstone Station on Wednesday afternoon and although I didn't actually witness anyone being caught with a weapon, it was fascinating to watch.

At about 12 o'clock, the black plastic "arch" was set up at the east entrance to the station, a Tardis-looking thing with built-in metal detectors and a series of flashing lights. Various members of the public were asked then to pass through it over the course of the afternoon and those that set the detectors a-beeping were stopped and searched.

Most of them fell into a certain inevitable profile, but there didn't appear to be any racial discrimination and no one made much of a fuss. In fact, it was more a sort of bored frustration, as though these operations were simply becoming part of day-to-day life - and sadly, I suppose they are.

I had mixed feelings about it myself. It's reassuring to see that the police are doing something positive to tackle knife crime but it's also depressing that it should be necessary.