The Detectives: Fighting Organised Crime
BOXSET
Granted unprecedented access to Greater Manchester Police over a period of two years, the filmmakers of this gritty documentary series followed a team of specialist detectives who are working to combat organised crime in the city of Manchester and its surrounding areas.
The members of the Major Incident Team do not have an easy job. Over the past few years organised crime gangs (OCGs) in Greater Manchester have grown in strength and numbers, getting involved in deadly turf wars centred on the high stakes area of drugdealing. Increasingly, guns – much more easily available than they were before – are used, and murders are becoming commonplace.
“These are very dangerous individuals indeed,” says one of the detectives. And the footage that is assembled proves her point. In one episode the team are investigating the shooting at point-blank range, by a group of three masked men, of a rival drug dealer on a residential street in broad daylight, with children playing nearby. Captured on CCTV, it is a truly shocking piece of film to watch.
You have to admire the detectives’ hard work and dogged determination to see justice done, tracking down the perpetrators and trying to get witnesses to testify. The latter is difficult as everyone is understandably terrified of the possible repercussions of identifying the gang members. It also takes a special kind of person to sit patiently in an interview room listening to a suspect glibly reply “no comment” to every question put to them. Extremely compelling, but very disturbing, viewing.