When I was recovering at home after a brief stint in hospital in 2021, I spent weeks watching British crime dramas. I became adept at telling the red-herrings from the genuine clues, and the wrong ’uns from the unfairly accused. I didn’t care that these shows were often formulaic. In fact, that was part of the appeal.
Increasingly, that formula includes the bent copper. This week, BBC One aired the finale of Better, its latest contribution to the medium-budget crime mini-drama canon. Leila Farzad stars as DI Lou Slack, a corrupt Yorkshire detective in search of redemption after becoming involved in the world of organised crime. The Capture, another BBC One offering that is now on iPlayer, follows DI Rachel Carey (Holly Grainger), who finds herself battling corrupt police, politicians and MI5 agents, as she tries to bring the dystopian practice of “correction” – a deep-fake technology used to convict potentially innocent people – into the public realm. Last year, ITV’s Karen Pirie ended with a Fife police chief being unmasked as the murderer of a St Andrews barmaid.
British crime dramas are now full of police officers who have broken the law and are using their position to cover up their crimes. Line of Duty, the most obvious example, may have set the trend, with Jed Mercurio’s twist-heavy BBC show creating event TV from a complex web of organised crime and police corruption. But in the years since, we have seen series four of ITV’s Unforgotten (2021) conclude with several serving police officers busted for covering up a decades-old murder. And, last year, BBC One drama Sherwood – the Guardian’s second best TV show of 2022 – told the story of how undercover police infiltrated communities in the UK, culminating in the unmasking of a “spy cop” who had been secretly living in a former mining town in Nottinghamshire for 40 years. Its storyline was inspired by the real-life activities of the Special Demonstration Squad – an undercover unit of the Metropolitan police that saw some of its officers having relationships and fathering children with members of the protest groups they infiltrated.
Could the rise of bent coppers on British TV screens be linked to changing attitudes towards the police? “Right now, there is not a great deal of trust in the police to deal with crime,” says Patrick English, director at polling company YouGov. “Only about 40% of the public have confidence in them, and this has been falling steadily over the past couple of years.” YouGov polling in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard picked up a spike in the proportion of people saying they did not trust the police to deal with crime locally. In general, its data also suggests that trust and confidence in the police in London is noticeably lower than in many other regions of the UK.
Sherwood writer James Graham says Everard’s murder and the police’s widely criticised response at a Clapham vigil for her, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement’s campaigning against police racism and brutality, were “without question” in his mind when he wrote the show. “During the summer of the pandemic, there were multiple crises in the Met police,” he says. “This brought back memories about the ways police handle protests and industrial disputes.”
To Graham, Sherwood was about making connections between the past and the present. “The show came from this impossible wound that was created by the Metropolitan police coming up to these communities and the legacy that lived on from that,” he says. “The anxiety that so many of us have towards our relationship with the police and the contract with that institution is a long-term problem.” An independent inquiry into undercover policing became a lens through which Graham could explore “corruption and a collapse in basic ethical standards”.
The spy cops scandal is just one of a stream of stories that have dented public confidence in the police. Last March, there were protests after a Black teenager known as Child Q was strip-searched by officers at an east London school. In February, Met officer David Carrick was jailed for life for 85 serious offences, including rape, over a 17-year period. And just this week, this paper reported that more than 1,500 UK police were accused of violence against women in just six months. Less than 1% of those accused were sacked.
TV crime dramas spotlighting well-known stories of police discrimination feel like a response to this drip-feed of present-day scandals. In 2021, the ITV drama Stephen followed the family of Stephen Lawrence as they fought for justice for their son after he was murdered in a 1993 racist attack. (A campaign that was, not uncoincidentally, spied on by undercover officers). Last year, ITV drama Four Lives explored the true story of police mishandling of the Stephen Port murders, following inquest findings that institutional failings and homophobia hampered the investigation into Port’s crimes.
Internal discrimination within the police is now appearing in fictionalised dramas, too. ITV drama DI Ray (2022), written by Maya Sondhi and produced by Jed Mercurio, tells the story of DI Rachita Ray (Parminder Nagra). The first series ends with Ray leaving the force after senior colleagues are racist towards her. In Karen Pirie, the eponymous detective is written off as a “diversity hire” by her male peers. There was also a subplot in which a black witness withheld information because he feared racist officers would try to charge him with a murder he didn’t commit.
I am not the first person to wonder whether I am being manipulated by crime dramas that are more critical of the police. As trust in the institution sinks, Happy Valley’s local PC, Catherine Cawood, has inspired politicians – even though she is not real. After the final series concluded in February, Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, declared, in total seriousness: “We need a Catherine Cawood in every town.” Allison Pearson of the Telegraph proclaimed: “Catherine Cawood could sort out the Met.”
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Writing in the New Statesman, Amelia Tait described Happy Valley as “conservative copaganda” – a form of pro-police propaganda. The show is critical of the police system, but she thinks that only makes it more effective at painting Cawood as a hero and a good apple. This narrative, Tait writes, is “the only way pro-police messaging can survive today in a country where Everard’s name is known in every household”.
It is true that, for every “bent copper” on British TV, there is a “good cop”, such as Cawood who ultimately saves the day, from Line of Duty’s anti-corruption crusaders to the heroine of Unforgotten’s first four series, Cassie Stuart. Dramatisations of real-life police failures also tend to focus on the heroism of the cop who eventually puts things right. In the first episode of Sherwood, DCS Ian St Clair delivers a speech to his colleagues. “The tradition is that we police by consent,” he says. “We have a long way to go to earn back some of that trust.” Graham says this scene was deliberate, so that the audience can trust St Clair to “guide them through some really complicated personal and institutional politics”. In other words: he is a good cop.
Clearly, there is a demand for crime dramas that portray British policing as flawed, and confront viewers with these ethical questions. If even so-called “copaganda” is now inviting audiences to think more critically about the police and their relationship to them, then St Clair might be right that public consent – and trust – is fragile.
“I would have been absolving myself of responsibility if I hadn’t written about how people can be divided by these institutions, or the complicated history that different marginalised communities have with police,” Graham says. “There’s a great tradition in British drama that, even if shows are ostensibly entertainment, they are capable of tackling these social and political issues.”
