The concept couldn’t have been sexier: a real-life Line of Duty. That’s how film-makers Hugo Pettitt and Ashley Francis-Roy pitched their documentary series to Channel 4 commissioners and the top brass of Avon and Somerset police, whose corridors they wanted to shoot inside. It was late 2020, TV audiences were awaiting the final series of AC12 bent-copper hunting. In their docuseries, Pettitt and Francis-Roy would be embedded within Avon and Somerset’s very own professional standards department and counter-corruption unit – their cameras granted access for the first series of its kind involving a British police force.
“We expected secret squirrel-style cases,” Pettitt said, “maybe without the explosions and guns, but still an enjoyable journey of officers solving cases and crimes, rooting out individual officers.” While precise formats differ, access-driven law-enforcement shows like this have become a mainstay of modern British television. Major returning series including 24 Hours in Police Custody (also Channel 4), BBC One’s The Met, Special Ops: Crime Squad (UKTV) and Sky’s The Force – alongside a constant stream of limited series and single documentaries – ever-popular with audiences, drawing out drama by following criminal investigations, or bobbies on the beat.
“What we weren’t expecting to find,” said Francis-Roy, the series director, “was a misconduct process that was unfit for purpose in addressing seriously concerning behaviour; a broken system that meant expectations of the public weren’t being met day to day.” After four years of filming, the result – To Catch a Copper – bears little resemblance to the blue lights programmes we’re accustomed to; a damning three-parter leading viewers to question not just the behaviour of a few bad apples, but whether a system by which the police police themselves needs urgent, radical reform. The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer occurred midway through filming, as did the prosecution of serial rapist and former Metropolitan police officer David Carrick – igniting nationwide concern over these issues.
To Catch a Copper follows misconduct cases advancing through Avon and Somerset’s internal processes. Four of these are: an on-duty officer accused of taking advantage of, and having sex with, a vulnerable, drunk woman on a night out after offering to drive her home to safety; a young man allegedly stopped and searched, assaulted, arrested and strip-searched after appearing to be racially profiled on the streets of Bristol; a woman in the midst of a major mental health crisis on the Clifton suspension bridge aggressively apprehended. Two officers then seem to assault and spray her with PAVA (similar to pepper spray), all captured in alarming footage from police bodycams as she’s transported to a police cell. “Told you I was going to PAVA someone tonight,” one of the officers is heard saying. In another case, a young black man complains of head and neck pain, and feeling confused and off-balance, while being taken into custody – all symptoms of bleeding on the brain. His request for medical attention is denied. Just 18 minutes after being locked in a cell, he collapses and vomits. Despite this being visible on CCTV, an ambulance is only called three hours later.
In none of these four cases has a finding of misconduct against an officer yet been upheld. In the stop and search incident the IOPC found there was no case for misconduct. A gross misconduct hearing in front of a panel is due to be held later this year in relation to the bridge incident, although the officers involved have already resigned. After close to five years suspended on full pay, the on-duty officer accused of having sex with an intoxicated member of the public retired before his misconduct hearing but was later acquitted by a crown court in 2021. A subsequent gross misconduct hearing before a panel also found the allegations not proven. Avon and Somerset say national pay guidelines were followed. In the case of the young man in the cell the IOPC agreed with Avon and Somerset that while it was acknowledged mistakes were made, these were not considered to warrant misconduct.
“There was such a difference between what you or I would expect from officers,” said Pettitt, “and what the investigation outcomes were. And I was talking to them almost every day for three years straight.” Even then, Francis-Roy believes, many instances of misconduct never came to their attention: “Many cases go unreported or don’t progress. Lots of people told us they don’t report issues to the professional standards department because they don’t trust it.”
In a statement to the Observer, Avon and Somerset chief constable Sarah Crews apologised to the public. “We’re sorry for the harm and distress the cases featuring in this programme have caused,” Crews said. “I want people to see that we understand their concerns, and we’re taking robust action to tackle all forms of misconduct … This programme will inevitably show the challenges and complexities of the misconduct regime we work within; a regime which is undergoing further significant change in the months ahead.”
Over the period of filming, 5,178 complaints were filed against Avon and Somerset officers and staff: 4,175 resulted in no action, 43 officers were dismissed, and three convicted of criminal offences.
To Catch a Copper takes a definitively old-school approach to documentary film-making: sustained access allowing space to probe. There are parallels, certainly, with the landmark 1982 documentary A Complaint of Rape, which was revolutionary in its approach to documenting UK law enforcement. As part of a fly-on-the-wall BBC series titled Police, producer Roger Graef filmed officers aggressively interrogating a woman reporting being raped. She was asked inappropriate personal questions about her sex life, mental health and menstruation, after which her testimony was dismissed. Officers accused her of lying. It became a national story, attracting then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s attention, leading to major reforms. “This film was a reference point for us,” said Francis-Roy. “It shocked, changing the way people saw policing. Ours is a different type of series to Police Custody or The Met, which tell stories of investigations with police heroes. The danger is that they lose focus on using access to help an audience understand what’s happening to change things for the better, instead focusing on the dramatic entertainment value of true crime. Ours is not a series about the police, but about policing itself.”
Increasingly, police shows on British screens don’t appear to regard this as their remit. Instead, programmes rely on a symbiotic relationship between documenter and documented for cameras to continually be invited back. Sacha Mirzoeff is a commissioner at Channel 4, who oversaw this show and the channel’s other police offerings. “Across the board,” he said, “documentaries are becoming a far more commercial proposition with very limited scope. We’re in danger of losing the heart of documentaries, being present in the here and now – most police shows today tell stories retrospectively. It’s harder than ever to get inside, especially if you want to hold integrity. We’re thinking about police commissions carefully: not motorway cops on the side of the road, even if that brings audiences in.”
The tilt towards more true-crime police programming has been decades in development. Duncan Campbell, a former Guardian crime correspondent and author of We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds, points to this shift beginning in the mid-1990s: “It was then the police started becoming fantastically litigious, with the support of the Police Federation. One of the reasons a lot of media coverage of the police more generally became friendly and careful was this constant threat of libel actions which were expensive to fight.” The fallout from the News International phone-hacking scandal beginning in the early 2000s, he suggests, also reshaped the relationship between police and press, after details of contact between journalists and police – including information on payments to police sources – came to light: “Details of emails between reporters and officers being made public eroded more informal relationships.”
This reflects a wider professionalisation of police communications. A 2015 Press Gazette investigation found UK police forces were spending more than £36m a year on PR and communications. Truly investigative documentaries represent a reputational risk for forces, whereas social media channels – or narrowly focused formats – allow them more direct control of messaging.
Between 1985 and 2000, Steve Haywood produced both Rough Justice (BBC) and Trial and Error (C4) – documentary series which investigated miscarriages of justice. “Shows like these just don’t exist any more,” he says. Global streamers are less focused on localised investigative programming. “And a decimation of resources in TV and criminal law means neither local solicitors nor production companies can properly investigate. When I was at the BBC, I often had to commit limited resources to something that might never come to fruition.”Suffice to say, it’s unlikely To Catch a Copper will be back for season two. “Early morning raids and doors getting bashed in? That’s a programme for certain, far simpler to make over and over.” Haywood is also not convinced a wider audience appetite remains for his style: “We take poor policing for granted now – we’re no longer shocked by injustice and malpractice.”
Convincing the West Country constabulary to allow the crew into one of their most underexposed units was a complex negotiation, aided by the fact series execs had worked with the force repeatedly over many years. Pettitt arrived on the project with a catalogue of true-crime credits. “When you work in these environments regularly,” he said – his credits include Drugsland and the US version of 24 Hours in Police Custody – “it’s hard not to become part of the team, and accept what you’re told by officers; take all they say at face value. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of that in the past.”
Pettitt found members of the public already perceived this to be the case: “I thought it would be straightforward to get victims, their families, and community leaders onboard,” said Pettitt, “giving them a voice and a platform. But that was the hardest part. Film-makers have started to be seen as another arm of the police.”
Some critics argue this has become the case. Kevin Blowe, campaigns director for the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), said: “The police are increasingly offering to participate in television programmes that can help them to counter criticism because policing faces a crisis of legitimacy quite unlike any other public service.”
It’s certainly hard to imagine other major institutions being offered endless hours of free, on-screen puff-piece PR while swathes of the public – and some of their most senior figures – regard racism, sexism and violence to be a pervasive national problem. In June 2023 Avon and Somerset’s own police chief asserted her force remained institutionally racist. “Television involving the control of access by organisations in crisis is not accountability,” said Blowe. “That’s always propaganda.”
Quantifying the impact of police representation in popular culture is not straightforward. Professor Nickie Phillips is the director of the Center for Crime and Popular Culture at St Francis College in New York. “Studies that look at how representation of police in media affects public perceptions of law enforcement have been inconsistent,” she said. Still, research can offer some insight. “Attitudes to policing, informed by age, race, location, political affiliations and the like, are generally stable over time. A study looked at this from 2020 to 2021, during a period of negative portrayals of policing around George Floyd’s murder. It showed after a brief dip in positive attitudes, previous levels were quickly returned to.”
The fallout from ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office dramatisation of the Horizon scandal has proved that linear broadcasters can still force institutional accountability. If day-to-day exposure to police programming only reaffirms viewers’ embedded attitudes, audiences deserve alternatives to the hagiographic approach.
So how did To Catch a Copper pull off theirs? “We found a police force willing to take that risk,” said Francis-Roy, “and a chief constable who saw how inviting a documentary crew in might help her understand her force in a way she couldn’t on her own.” In essence, a different kind of mutually beneficial relationship. As Crews told the Observer: “We knew that taking part in this documentary would be a controversial decision. Public institutions can be reluctant to open themselves up to this level of scrutiny, but people will see that we’re facing the issues, however uncomfortable, which I hope will help to improve trust and confidence in our ability to police by consent.”
The result is great public service television, the like of which it’s hard to imagine other police chiefs queuing up to facilitate again.
To Catch a Copper is on Channel 4 at 9pm from Monday, 29 January.
