There’s a lot involved in reporting crime.
I found this out the hard way. It takes a lot of hours walking and talking to people to get a story started. It usually begins having tracked a strange occurrence. It forks off into the distance and at a particular time life reappears and it begins to return to normal. In a short space of time the story is ready.
It’s just how it is.
I remember meeting a gentleman in London during the early days of covering the trafficking story in the UK. I was hanging around near the Natural History Museum. He came up and tripped off talking to me about my story and saying different things about it. I was surprised he knew I was working on it.
I hadn’t told anybody. It was still new in my teeth, so to speak, and I was prepping myself to be predator-like on whoever it was who was involved. I wanted to sap the life out of the issue that I saw evolving in front of my eyes. I was grateful for the chance to hear someone say the same about it as I had done.
It was kind of him to stop by.
As our conversation ended, he touched me gently and said, “I live where loyalty counts for a lot”. It was a gesture of goodwill in a short space of time where we shared our grievance over the soon-to-be trafficking crisis hitting our shores hard. It was this quip that helped me to see what lay underneath a basic job in hand.



