Police are looking sheepish

REAL-LIFE television police shows are perennially popular. Bobbies on the beat, scooping up drunks from city centres, chasing car thieves down motorways … What’s not to love?

The only people who enjoy them more than the public are the starstruck cops who take part.

Yet the moral equivalence of such shows has always troubled me. What if someone who is arrested, in front of millions of viewers, turns out to be innocent? If it’s a matter only between the police and the arrestee, then fine: but what if a large slice of the country is watching?

That is what happened to sheep farmer Ross Hutchinson, who was charged with sheep rustling more than a year ago. His arrest by Durham Police was enthusiastically filmed and broadcast by BBC1’s Countryside 999 series.

When the case finally came to court last week, Hutchinson’s defence team produced DNA evidence that the sheep were his all along. The prosecution had no case to put forward and the whole sorry mess was thrown out of court.

Yet clearing his name has taken a year out of his life and cost him £15,000 in legal fees. That’s a lot of lamb chops.

People who saw him on TV will still think he is guilty. And to add insult to injury, his elderly father was also arrested in front of the BBC cameras and held for five hours in a police station. I am a huge supporter of the police and the difficult work they do. Yet at a time when forces are stretched to the limit and under severe financial pressure, should they really be capering about with television crews?

Should they even be making programmes featuring real people with real problems at all, especially in the name of cheap entertainment?

As if being a sheep farmer wasn’t hard enough without a bunch of BBC creatives making his life a misery. Mr Hutchinson has been badly wronged. And someone — either the police or the Beeb — should at least try to make that wholly right.