This three-part, rather cheaply-titled Channel 4 series was the culmination of a unique collaboration between the Somerset and Avon police internal investigations unit and a fly-on-the-wall television documentary team. Giving themselves over almost completely to the cameras, including their own body-cam footage, the force is exposed to trial by its own television with a number of cases selected from a great many more, for inclusion in the series.
The three programmes highlighted a number of cases taken at least some way up the line by their own investigators and as such seemed to be themed, the first concerning cases of sexual abuse on members of the public by serving officers, the second on demonstrations of alleged racial discrimination against minority groups and the third on what you might call blue-on-blue incidents where police officers perpetrated sexually motivated crimes against much younger female colleagues at police training college, including sexting and inappropriate sexual advances.
I'm going to come out and say that I wasn't convinced of culpability by all the cases shown here, especially those in the second show, but certainly most all of them did get results of some type usually involving the enforced resignation of the offenders although rarely resulting in any wider criminal convictions. In the first two episodes, the Investigation of Police Criminality Unit (IOPC) despite their diligent and sympathetic efforts to convict the accused usually failed to prove their case either to a court or to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Certainly the current female DCI seems determined to root out all the bad apples in her constabulary but it's clear she'll have the devil's own job doing not only that but of also conveying her internal spring-clean mission to certain strands of the wider community, some of whom seen to have their own anti-police agenda, admittedly born of years of perceived discriminatory attitudes against their own interest-group.
However, with the recent convictions of the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick still very fresh in the memory as well as the damning statistics posted at the end of the final episode about how many complaints are made against police officers and the shockingly low conviction rate, there is clearly a huge amount of work to be done before anything like full confidence is restored in our police forces the length and breadth of the country.
