Media Representations of Police and Crime

Shaping the Police Television Drama

M. Colbran

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137334725
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

This unique book explores the social processes which shape fictional representations of police and crime in television dramas. Exploring ten leading British and European police dramas from the last twenty-five years, Colbran, a former scriptwriter, presents a revealing insight into police dramas, informed by media and criminological theory.

1

Introduction

1. Background

The first time I ever had a conversation with a police officer was when I became a scriptwriter for The Bill (1984–2010) in 1990. It was standard practice for new writers to spend time at London police stations shadowing police officers, as the executive producer and script editors of the show believed it was extremely important for writers to have a good knowledge of the world they would be writing about.

I was told to report for an early shift at Bethnal Green in the East End of London. My guide for the day was a young Asian female officer who showed me round the station and then took me out in one of the patrol cars with another colleague so that I could start to get a sense of the scope of police officers’ activities during an average shift.

What was so striking about my first day with the police was how familiar and yet unfamiliar the sights and sounds of this new world were. The offices, the cells, the dispatch room, the endless corridors, the banter, the sense of hierarchy, the camaraderie, the black humour . . . all these seemed as though I had seen them a million times before, which, of course, I had – in television crime series and police films throughout my adolescence and my early twenties. But what was unfamiliar were the things I had rarely seen in films or drama series – the tedium of driving round and round the streets of Bethnal Green waiting for a call, the lack of dramatic car chases or grappling suspects to the ground. I was struck by the mundanity of so much of what the police were called upon to do: dealing with a confused old lady who had locked herself out, a young man discharged on a Friday afternoon into the community after months on a psychiatric ward, finding himself without gas or electricity and causing a disturbance in order to get help. I observed at first hand how, contrary to the images with which I was so familiar from television drama, the police operate primarily not as crime-fighters or law-enforcers, but as providers of a 24-hour emergency service, available to respond to those in need (Cumming et al. 1965; Bittner 1967; Bayley 1994; Reiner 2000b).

For the next 13 years, I worked for The Bill as a staff writer and on a range of other shows. But it was not until I started to study for an MSc, and began to read the extensive literature on television police drama and about the world in which I had played a part for so long, that I began to think more deeply about the stories I had been writing, which had been viewed by anything up to 18 million viewers.

Around that time, I also read Howard Becker’s Telling About Society (2007), a book that, in many ways, helped me to crystallise my thoughts about this project. In his introduction, Becker describes how he lived for many years in San Francisco, near Fisherman’s Wharf, a hilly part of the city, and how often, looking from his window, he would see exasperated tourists examining their maps, observing the large hills standing between them and where they wanted to be and realising that the map’s ‘straight line that looked like a nice walk through a residential neighborhood, one that might show them how the natives live’ (Becker 2007, p. 2) was, in fact, an arduous trek uphill.

Becker asks ‘Why don’t the maps those people consult alert them to the hills?’ and answers by suggesting that the maps were meant for motorists, being originally paid for by ‘gasoline companies and tire manufacturers’ (Becker 2007, p. 2), and that drivers probably worry less than pedestrians about an uphill trek.

However, Becker then suggests that ‘those maps and the networks of people and organizations who make and use them exemplify a more general problem’ (Becker 2007, p. 2). He argues that all representations of social reality, maps, documentary films, statistical tables and the ‘stories people tell one another to explain who they are and what they are doing . . . give a picture that is only partial but nevertheless adequate for some purpose’ (Becker 2007, p. 3). Moreover, all these representations are created in organisational settings that constrain what can be done and define the purposes of the work. He argues that this raises a hugely important and interesting question: how do the needs and practices of organisations shape representations of social reality?

Those first pages of Becker’s book set me thinking both about the stories I and my friends and colleagues had been telling about the police, policing and crime in The Bill and in other police shows, and about the research I wanted to undertake. In short, I wanted to explore why we, as storytellers, told the stories we did about the police and how the organisational settings in which these stories were created shaped those representations.

However, as I read the literature, I found there was a significant gap in the research; very little had been written about the production of police series or the organisational dynamics, ideology and imperatives of media workers in creating such shows. There has been one study to date of production processes in television police drama, but in a Canadian context (Lam 2014). There is also a considerable body of literature on the content of police shows. This can be divided into two key areas: first, content analyses of patterns of representation of the police, crime and criminals in police dramas and crime films; and, second, the changing presentation of the police over the last 50 years. In terms of the former body of work, discussion frequently centres around the depiction of police, crime and criminals in the media and how such representations typically diverge from the ‘official’ picture painted by statistics and self-report or victimisation studies found in British and American research (Allen et al. 1998; Reiner et al. 2000; 2001; 2003; Reiner 2007a). These divergences include a concentration on serious or violent crime against the individual, the risk of crime being quantitatively and qualitatively more serious than the statistically recorded picture, the demographic profile of offenders and victims being older and of higher status than those processed by the criminal justice system, and a high clear-up rate of crimes by the police (Greer and Reiner 2012).

Yet, as Greer (2010) argues, while the reiteration that the ‘media distort crime’ should be a starting point for media criminology, he suggests that too often this assertion is ‘the outcome of the research process: the point of departure becomes the final conclusion’ (Greer 2010, p. 4). He suggests that, despite media criminology being in the ascendancy, much of that research appears to be ‘of a less and less theoretically, methodologically and empirically rigorous nature’ (Greer 2010, p. 2). He proposes that the reasons for this are threefold: a lack of theoretical and methodological engagement with the media side of the crime–media relationship; a distance between the researcher and the object of enquiry; and a preoccupation with assessing the ‘nature and extent of media distortion – whether inflected through race, gender, class or other variables . . . against a more or less explicit conception of the “nature of reality” beyond representation’ (Greer 2010, p. 4).

This was the starting point for my research – to attempt to address Greer’s (2010) concerns. Drawing on both media and criminological theory, and through an in-depth ethnographic study of the long-running police show The Bill and interviews with personnel from nine other police shows from the early 1990s to the present day, this book sets out to understand the social processes through which media representations come into being and how such processes shape and constrain those stories. As Becker argues, any representations about society, whether a film, a novel or a police series, make most sense:

when you see them in an organizational context, as activities, as ways some people tell what they know to other people who want to know it, as organized activities shaped by the joint efforts of everyone concerned. (Becker 2007, p. 15)

In the same vein, rather than trying to assess the level of media distortion in such representations, I revisited Becker, who argues that ‘any representation of social reality – a documentary film, a demographic study, a realistic novel – is necessarily partial, less than what you would experience and have available to interpret if you were in the actual setting it represents’ (Becker 2007, p. 20). Instead of comparing media representations of police, policing and crime to a conception of the ‘nature of reality’ (Greer 2010, p. 4), I aim in this book to explore the ‘several operations makers of representations must perform to get to the final understanding they want to communicate’ (Becker 2007, p. 20). Given that any representation of society always leaves out elements of reality, my intention is to understand which elements are included, which are left out, what criteria inform the makers when making these judgements and, indeed, whether it is the role of the makers of these representations to inform and educate as well as to entertain.

Although many production studies are framed in a ‘tripartite’ structure or an integrated theoretical framework, which seeks to understand the complex relationships between media production, media texts and audience reception (Henderson 2007), the aim of this book is to explore the process of storytelling on The Bill and other police shows from the last 25 years in an organisational context. In particular, I wish to explore how commercial imperatives, the ideological frames of the creative personnel, working processes and the constraints of the format affected the construction of stories and the changing representation of the police on The Bill and other police shows. I follow Greer, who observes that:

The study of media content can provide important insights into the role of expressive cultural forms in interpreting our social world and constructing particular versions of reality. But this research is at its richest, and surely has the greatest explanatory potential, when the process of production is considered as well as the product that results. (Greer 2010, p. 3)

For that reason, this book focuses solely on the production process and on the creation of stories on these shows.

I chose The Bill as the main case study for three reasons. First, the show always placed particular emphasis on procedural accuracy and, for that reason, may have been seen to be particularly influential on audiences in terms of making claims for authenticity (Leishman and Mason 2003). Second, because of its frequency, it was possible to portray a much more diverse and broadly representative array of different kinds of police officers and police work than most series or one-off films. Last, as I mentioned earlier, I was myself a scriptwriter on The Bill and this gave me unique access to, as well as direct participant experience of, the social world of its production.

I also explore the effect of production processes on the representation of the police and policing on other British and European dramas. Becker (2007) argues that the form and content of representations vary because social organisations vary. For that reason, I wanted to explore the process of storytelling about the police on shows made for different broadcasters across a period of 25 years. This would enable me to situate changes in the working processes and representations of the police that I observed on The Bill, as a writer and as a researcher, within wider changes in the television industry. It would also enable me to explore whether the trends and changes in production processes that I observed on The Bill were reflected across the industry or were very different on other shows.

The shows chosen were: Between the Lines (1992–94), The Cops (1998– 2001), The Vice (1999–2003), The Ghost Squad (2005), Scott & Bailey (2011–present), Broadchurch (2013–present), True Crimes (2013), Suspects (2014) and one European drama, Spiral (2005–present). These shows were selected for this study for a number of reasons. Five of these shows – Between the Lines, The Ghost Squad, The Vice, True Crimes and Suspects – were created by former personnel from The Bill. Of these, the first three were made as a reaction against the concentration in the first 18 years of The Bill’s existence on ‘the small change of policing’ and as an attempt to tell, as one producer put it, ‘more complex stories about the police’. Two were selected because of their emphasis on authenticity in storytelling – Scott & Bailey and the French drama Spiral – and the final show, Broadchurch, was selected as an example of a new direction for the police procedural – the victim-led story.

1.1 Research questions

In order to understand how representations of the police, policing and crime were constructed on The Bill and on other police shows from the last 25 years, and how such depictions were affected by the organisational dynamics, ideology and professional imperatives of the personnel and institutions, I decided to ask four main research questions:

1. How was the production process organised in terms of the creation of stories? Who was involved in this process? What were their roles? Did these change over time? If so, what impact did these changes have on working processes, working culture and content?

2. How were stories created? On what knowledge did the show’s makers draw in order to create stories? Why could some stories about the police never be told?

3. How did factors such as organisational pressures, commercial imperatives, constraints of the medium and ideological values of those involved in the story creation process affect stories about the police, crime and criminals being told? Were some factors more important than others and, if so, why? Was this a constant or did this also change over time?

4. How did the show’s makers work with police sources, both serving officers and any (retired) police advisers who worked for the show? What were the benefits for the police in co-operating with the show? How were police advisers recruited? What was their role? Did this change over time and, if so, why? What influence and sanctions did the police advisers have over stories? How important was authenticity? What steps did the makers of the show take to ensure authenticity?

In order to provide some context for this exploratory study, I briefly discuss why mass media images of policing are important in society. I then review, first, the existing literature on the content of crime news and fiction, discussing the depiction of police, crime and criminals, and how such representations typically diverge from the ‘official’ picture painted by statistics and self-report or victimisation studies found in British and American research. Second, I discuss the extensive literature on the changing representation of the police in television drama. In both cases, I suggest how my research into production processes extends our understanding of what Greer and Reiner (2012) term the ‘causes’ of media representations. I then review the existing literature on production processes in news and fiction, both empirical and theoretical. I discuss the work of Hall (1980), Johnson (1986) and Du Gay et al. (1997), including the ‘circuit of culture’ (Johnson 1986), in which it is argued that each moment in the circuit of production, circulation and consumption of cultural objects ‘depends on the others and is indispensable to the whole’ (Johnson 1986, p. 284). I then explore how this concept influenced the theoretical framework adopted by Ericson et al. (1987; 1989; 1991) in their study of crime news-making. Finally, I discuss the similarities between the aims of the research undertaken by Ericson et al. (1987; 1989; 1991) and those of my own research, and how I use a similar theoretical framework based on Du Gay et al.’s updated ‘circuit of culture’ to analyse my findings.

2. The importance of mass media images of policing in society

For many people, the mass media are the main source of knowledge and perceptions of the police (Skogan 1990; Reiner 2000b; Mawby 2003). As Reiner (2000b, p. 138) argues, ‘police activity bears most heavily on a relatively restricted group of people at the base of the social hierarchy, who are disproportionately the complainants, victims or offenders processed by the police’. Moreover, as Reiner (2010) observes, even in this group, for which police contact is more frequent, police activity is largely restricted to young males. It is rare for middle-class or upper-class people to have any adversarial contact with the police other than for traffic offences (Reiner 1994; 2000b; 2003), yet, as Reiner (2010) points out, ‘the most crucial sectors for determining police prestige, power and resources are the majority higher up the social scale’ (Reiner 2010, p. 177). For these groups, Reiner argues that the mass media are the main source of perceptions of and preferences about policing.

There is considerable evidence to bear this out. In the Policing for London survey, 80 per cent of respondents said that the news media were their principal source of information about the police, while 29 per cent of respondents got their information from ‘media fiction’ (Fitzgerald et al. 2002). In the British Crime Survey (2006–7), 59 per cent of people said they got their information from television and radio news, with 10 per cent citing media fiction. Indeed, as Reiner (2010) suggests, Sir Ian Blair, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, was not entirely joking in his 2005 Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV when he observed that ‘lots of people in this country are actually undertaking a permanent NVQ on policing – it’s called The Bill’.

Reiner also suggests that, on occasion, ‘the media representation of policing feeds back into policing practice’ (Reiner 2010, p. 178). As an example, he cites how, in 2005, Sir Stephen Lander, the then newly appointed Chairman of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), suggested that SOCA’s priorities would be ‘set by the brainboxes in the Home Office, according to analysis of the prominence of different kinds of crime, measured by column inches in the press’ (‘UK’s Crime-Fighting Agency Will Use the Press to Set Agenda’, The Independent, 10 January 2005).

Thus, mass media images of policing would appear to be of considerable importance in terms of shaping people’s perceptions and knowledge of policing and, on occasion, may help to shape policy and practice. Of course, as Jewkes argues, it is impossible to gauge precisely how such texts are ‘read’ and ‘people are not blank slates who approach a television programme without any pre-existing opinions, prejudices or resources’ (Jewkes 2006, p. 14). Nevertheless, given that many people will have limited contact with the police, it is still reasonable to assume that our ideas about what the police do and the role of policing in society are informed by what we see on screen or read in the news or online.

However, as this book sets out to explore, the media-constructed image of policing ‘does not float free of the actualities of policing, but it is not a mirror image of them either’ (Reiner 2010, p. 178). The aim of this book is to understand how working processes, organisational dynamics and the ideological frames of the show’s makers not only conspire to produce a ‘refraction of the reality of policing’ (Reiner 2010, p. 178) but also determine what aspects of the police role and of police work are omitted from television drama.

3. Literature review

Although there is on...