Police work rarely resembles The Shield or Line of Duty. It’s mostly paperwork, online training and referring people to driver offender courses. But sometimes life imitates art. In 2020, international police hacked the encrypted phone network EncroChat, used by organised crime gangs across the globe. For 74 days, they had access to every message and picture used to coordinate drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnap and murder. “It was the LinkedIn of organised crime,” explains Matt Horne, a former gold commander at the UK’s National Crime Agency (not the actor from Gavin & Stacey).
Operation Dark Phone: Murder By Text (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4) is a documentary-drama cleverly built around these messages, which appear like screenplay dialogue across scenes. It’s an arresting insight into how criminal gangs work – and just as revealing, how they talk. “Sweets” are bullets, while a “pineapple” is a grenade. A violent British criminal known as Live-long, lying low in Spain, organises an acid attack on a rival, in between sending pictures of his breakfast. Cucumber slices on labneh with paprika – nice. The trick, he instructs, is to stop the victim getting to a sink. Hold them down a few minutes, so the acid can do its job. Less nice.
