Nick Thorne recounts the over-reaction of mall security (and the local police) to an alleged incident of photography at the Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow:
It took a high-profile internet campaign to get a shopping-centre chain to reconsider its irrational photography policy. After security guards at Glasgow’s Braehead Shopping Centre stopped Chris White from taking a picture of his own four-year-old daughter, White set up a Facebook page called ‘Boycott Braehead’. In just three days it was ‘liked’ by over 20,000 people. Capital Shopping Centres has now announced that 11 of its malls will from now on allow family and friends to take pictures of each other.
So, parents can now take snaps of their kids eating ice cream, like White did, without worrying about security guards telling them they’re committing an offence, as White was told, or being taken away for questioning by cops who threaten to use anti-terror powers to take snappers’ cameras away, like an officer warned White. That’s splendid.
White’s Facebook campaign went viral and Braehead Shopping Centre was forced to apologise for its overreaction. Common sense won the day. But why was the photography policy implemented in the first place? And why was an innocent, everyday occurrence interpreted as a potentially dodgy, abusive incident?
A statement from the shopping centre explained that staff had become suspicious ‘after they saw a male shopper taking photographs of a child sitting at their counter’. The security guard who went over to investigate said that he had at no point been informed that the girl was White’s daughter. The automatic assumption, it seems, was that a man taking a picture of a child must be some sleazy scumbag.
