In a large office somewhere in Bristol, a police officer is watching bodycam footage of two of his colleagues arresting a woman for causing a public nuisance on the Clifton suspension bridge. Viewers of To Catch a Copper have just seen the same video and, if we were in any doubt about our reaction being the correct one, the cop reviewing the tape is mirroring us at home. He sits there open-mouthed.
Four years ago, Avon and Somerset Police allowed documentary cameras to track the work of its Counter-Corruption Unit. That’s the equivalent of AC-12 in Line of Duty, but this unit’s brief covers any wrongdoing on the job, not just bent coppers. As yet, To Catch a Copper offers no dark conspiracy or infiltration by organised crime. Instead, in a first instalment themed around the mistreatment of vulnerable citizens, it reveals the disgusting behaviour of some individuals, and the infuriatingly inadequate responses of the relevant authorities.
That jaw-dropping footage begins with female officers arriving at the Clifton Bridge, having been called out to intercept a woman who has been threatening to jump from it. Where one might expect careful compassion, there is rough contempt: the woman is restrained against the squad car with a hand pressed to her throat, fitted with a “spit hood” after trying and failing to spit at one of the officers, then pepper-sprayed in response to her kicking out. Back at the station, the woman – who is belittled and dismissed throughout – is pinned to the floor and searched, hands all over the back and front of her trousers as she screams and screams. “I’m ashamed,” says the investigator watching the recording.
Not quite as bad is another clip where two male officers assist hospital staff in preventing a female patient from absconding. Again, she is obviously in crisis (“I want to die!”), but is mocked by the officers, who laugh about her having possibly wet herself, and are at one point heard using the phrase “fucking bitch”.
It’s shocking, perhaps all the more so because all the officers concerned knew perfectly well that they were wearing body-mounted cameras. But at the halfway point of the episode, there’s not much to speak to the idea that we as British citizens have lost our trust in the police as a whole. The UK has more than 147,000 police officers; even a well-run institution would have a few bullies and abusers. Systemic problems are what denote a rotten law-enforcement apparatus, not one-off incidents, even startling and disturbing ones.
When the programme does move on to wider phenomena, the first one put forward leans towards exonerating the officers caught on film. Being a cop on the beat means meeting a succession of people who are all having the worst day of their lives: one upsetting encounter with a desperate person is followed by another, and another. Documentaries such as the BBC’s Ambulance have shown how the destruction of social care and mental health services in Britain has placed unreasonable burdens on paramedics, making them deal with problems that should have been headed off elsewhere. This also applies to the police. One of the officers who attended the hospital says his working day is “all safeguarding, vulnerability and mental health”.
But this would excuse cold detachment, not grotesque mockery or fearsome aggression – so, in the cases we’ve seen, surely those officers at least were summarily fired? Here comes the potential systemic problem: neither the Clifton Bridge case nor events at the hospital led to any disciplinary sanction. It’s reported that in 2022, less than 1% of the 81,000 complaints made about the police resulted in formal misconduct proceedings.
The programme adds a third, already notorious case study: that of Sgt Lee Cocking, who volunteered to drive a heavily inebriated member of the public home in Weston-super-Mare on Christmas Eve 2017. Having been charged with the imprisonable criminal offence of misconduct in public office, Sgt Cocking convinced the jury that post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by a previous bad experience at work had left him psychologically unable to stop the woman making him pull into a pitch-dark layby, climbing on to him in the driver’s seat and having sex with him. His police misconduct hearing agreed with the court verdict. On the programme, a police officer describes Cocking’s defence as “farcical”, but the case is potentially an outlier, its usefulness here complicated both by Cocking’s medical condition and by a jury having concurred with the police’s internal disciplinary process.
Returning to that process with regard to all the concerns raised by the programme, the Avon and Somerset chief constable, Sarah Crew, expresses her own frustration, going as far as to say that “hopefully this documentary will make a case” for reform. Hopefully, in subsequent episodes, it will make a more focused one.
• This article was amended on 30 January 2024 to remove an incorrect reference to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
• To Catch a Copper is on Channel 4.
