Can I stick with fictional cops, please? They’re far less brutal
To Catch A Copper Monday, Channel 4 Trigger Point Sunday, ITV1,
Iintended to lead this week with the drama Trigger Point, and the return of our old pal, Lana Washington (Vicky McClure), the Met Police explosives officer who now has to face a bomb about to go off – ‘Don’t move, don’t move… you need to stay very still!’ – at every ad break. But then I watched To Catch A Copper, about the real police, and I can’t get it out of my head. Wish I could, but can’t. It was such a shocking, distressing, horrifying hour of television. It’s the opposite of propaganda, whatever that is.
I’m kicking myself. I’ll certainly know for the future: stick to cops of the fictional kind. I generally like to live my life in ignorance, and if you do too… stay away. Put down that remote and put it down right now. In this instance: move away, fast.
To Catch A Copper is a documentary series following the work of the anti-corruption unit of one force, Avon and Somerset. It’s billed as ‘a real-life Line Of Duty’ but it isn’t. This isn’t about highlevel corruption or ‘bent’ coppers or chief constables who are freemasons doing that funny handshake. This is about everyday officers, and the main takeaway from the first episode (of three)? Your everyday officer is malevolent, predatory and misogynistic and has nothing but contempt for the general public they’re meant to be serving.
The first case we encounter involves a woman who is having a mental health crisis and threatening to throw herself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The officers who attend show no kindness or compassion and immediately arrest her for being a public nuisance. They pull her by her hair, fit her with a ‘spit hood’, hold her by the throat, disable her with pepper spray. ‘It’s awful because it’s… awful,’ says one of the investigating officers watching the bodycam footage. ‘Where is the humanity?’ Was I especially naive to be so shocked? It makes you wonder: if the police behave like this while wearing bodycams, what happens when they are not? Or did they simply not care, figuring that this woman wasn’t the type to put in a complaint? (The footage was discovered when the investigative team was looking for something else.)
Another case was a mental health patient in a wheelchair who had been swerving in and out of traffic. The police had been asked for help in returning her to hospital by NHS staff. These officers mock this woman and one even mutters ‘skanky bitch’. As for the third case, a woman who was drunk in town is given a lift home by a police sergeant who, she says, then had sex with her in a lay-by.
We hear her initial 999 call: ‘Is it OK or not?… I know you won’t believe me… I feel upset and disgusted by it… I can’t get over it.’ The sergeant claims that she jumped him, and he was the victim of sexual assault, and he couldn’t push her off or call for help because he suffers from PTSD. ‘It’s farcical,’ says an investigating officer, ‘particularly as he never reported it.’ But a jury cleared him of a criminal offence and he retired on medical grounds (with full pension) before he faced a gross misconduct hearing.
What is farcical is the lack of accountability. The first two officers leave the force before their hearing. The ones involved with the mental health patient are required to partake in ‘reflective practice’ which, as far as I could see, means a non-challenging conversation with a fella who tells them, nudge-nudgewink-wink, that it’s better for them to have this talk than for matters to ‘go upstairs’.
There were, apparently, more than 80,000 complaints against the police for 2022/2023 and, as the force nationally runs to 147,000 officers, doesn’t that make it rather more than a few bad apples? Is it possible that Sarah Crew, Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset, who gave her permission for this series, is as frustrated as anyone? And wants us to know about what she’s up against? I can’t answer that. I just wish I hadn’t watched.
On to Lana Washington, our fictional copper in Trigger Point who, at the outset of this second series, is back in London having spent six months in Estonia teaching Ukrainians how to disable bombs. She’s giving some kind of talk in the city when, what do you know? A bomb goes off in a power plant, and she can actually see the fireball from the window.
She’s first on the scene with Danny (Eric Shango), her number two and the world’s least-written character. My favourite moment from the opening episode was her choosing to tell her boss and one-time boyfriend, Thom (Mark Stanley), that she loves him while he’s standing on a pressure plate that could set off a bomb – ‘Don’t move, don’t move… you need to stay very still… I love you!’ Or if it wasn’t that, it’s when she first arrives at the plant and the firefighters can’t gain access to the site to douse the blaze because two bombs have been placed on the reverse of the main gate. How is Lana going to get to them? The firefighters cut her a hole in the fence further down and wait tensely while she deploys her ‘snips’ and ‘disruptors’ to make the gate safe. Hang on, couldn’t the firefighters have just gone through the hole in the fence too?
It is all ridiculously preposterous, with about three cliffhangers per episode now. But McClure’s performance brings it home and it’s fun in its forgettable way. It won’t haunt you. Like some other police shows I could mention…