Dispelling the Fear of Crime, One Bad TV Show at a Time

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'm going to do a TV review. Last night I watched a show on BBC1 called Caught Red Handed. I'm not a big fan of police hidden camera shows in general, I was simply killing time until something else came on, but this show was refreshingly positive, albeit probably unintentionally so. It was also hilarious for reasons I will explain.

Most hidden camera shows have badly shot CCTV or camera car footage overdubbed with smart-arse comments from some B-list celeb. They require no effort or budget at all to make, and the most creative part of the show is how they manage to edit it to make it look like the cops are always in the right, despite following that asian driver "on a hunch". Caught Red Handed was more like a documentary than a reality show. Yes, it had lots of hidden camera footage of cars jumping red lights at railway crossings, but the main part of the show followed an undercover police officer who was essentially trying, usually unsuccessfully, to set up a honeypot. He had a laptop that he seemed desperate to get rid of. He left it on a park bench in a "crime hot spot", and returned later to discover, to his dismay, that it was still there. Later he left the laptop outside a cafe, again in an area described by the narrator as having a rise in the number of recent thefts, and was disappointed when he discovered that someone had handed it in to the cafe owner. Leaving it near a pub had a similar result, someone picked it up and handed it in as lost property. In the interspersed footage, we see the police officer lamenting the fact that nobody has stolen his laptop, and describing the whole thing as "a little bit frustrating". Eventually he did manage to convince someone to take it and arrest them on suspicion of theft, but the guy they caught turned out to be known to them and on the run anyway. Cue more negative comments from the undercover officer who was hoping to catch someone who had sold it on, rather than someone they knew was dodgy anyway.

So what did we learn from this show? Basically, if you leave a laptop in a so-called 'crime hotspot', it will probably still be there when you get back, and if not, someone's probably handed it in. The police, on the other hand, are openly frustrated that there just isn't enough crime for them.

Still, nice to see a slightly more realistic police camera show for a change, rather than the "be afraid, be very afraid" nonsense that seems to be commonplace on the less popular Freeview channels that only really serves to scare the elderly into thinking they can't leave their houses for fear of being mugged.