I don’t write diaries often. I am a Brit so although I am an enthusiatic support of DKos and the Democrats from afar, I mostly feel it isn’t my place to write about US politics.
However, I have written in the past about my frustrations as a retired police Detective with the quality of television crime dramas. I wrote a previous diary about a UK series that was an exception — Happy Valley — and I am pleased to say that another new series has come along.
The Jetty is from a different writer than Happy Valley. It is probably not as well written, as there are very few writers of the calibre of Sally Wainwright working in the UK.
However, it manages to tackle some genuinely modern themes whilst avoiding at least 90% of the errors and distortions that police detective dramas usually stray into.
Firstly, this is not a murder mystery. Not really. And that opens up the plot to more realism than murder cases allow. The truth is that murder is relatively rare in the UK. And true “whodunnits” are very, very rare. Almost all of our murders are committed by people known to the victim and are quickly solved.
A murder investigation in the UK is an enquiry by committee. It involves dozens of staff, a lot of computers and is mostly quite dull. Decision making is diffuse. The vast majority of the evidence is captured in the first couple of days, mostly by frontline officers and crime scene examiners. Numerous small choices are made by a variety of statement-readers, action allocators, junior detectives and administrative staff. The officers in charge make the Big Strategic Decisions but mostly do so from behind a desk.
That doesn’t make very good TV, so writers cut it down to two officers — usually a Detective Superintendant or Detective Chief Inspector (because the nominal head of a murder investigation would be of that rank) and a Detective Sergeant. Other police officers are generally unnamed extras wandering around in ill fitting uniforms wearing their caps incorrectly. Everything that happens involves those two main characters, which means that the script requires them to do all manner of “policing tasks” (interviewing witnesses, arresting suspects, searching houses, attending post mortem examinations) that would generally be left to other staff in reality. The Pivotal Scene usually involves the senior officer banging a table and extracting a confession from the suspect, who is either tearful, or giving a monologue like a Bond villain. All poppycock.
I have always thought that the secret to avoiding this is to have a drama about some other crime, as apart from murder and terrorism almost everything else in British policing is done by constables loosely supervised by sergeants.
And here is “The Jetty”. A drama that, at the start at least, is about a 34 year old Detective Constable investigating an arson. Barely even an arson really. More what we refer to as “criminal damage by fire”. And the way it is handled is pretty realistic. Defeatist, disinterested police not wasting time on something they think they can’t solve.
Within minutes the plot brings in some general concerns about “child sexual exploitation”. CSE is a very hot topic in the UK, due to a string of horror stories about groups of men (usually of South Asian, Muslim origin) who pick up girls in their mid-teens and groom them into tolerating sexual advances.
But the reality in the UK is that the headline grabbing stories don’t reflect the wider picture (media distortion? say it isn’t so!). Most men involved in CSE are white. Most CSE doesn’t involve large gangs, but individuals or small groups. The writer of The Jetty knows enough about the subject to portray it fairly realistically.
CSE is also something of a poisoned chalice for the police, as they are excoriated for not stopping it, but it isn’t even technically a criminal offence. The age of consent in the UK is 16, whereas you are a child until you’re 18. Much CSE involves children who are 16 or 17 and they fall into a strange Venn diagram of being victims of CSE without being victims of crime. Even where children are involved in sexual activity before the age of 16, this is generally not treated as a major crime unless there is a lack of consent (I expect the US has a similar approach). Fourteen and fifteen year olds may not be considered old enough to consent to sex, but they are certainly considered old enough to tell police officers to f**k off and mind their own business, and generally do.
“The Jetty” has all this on display. The naive arrogance of the young as they turn their back on adults offering help. Uncertainty about what constitutes the difference between sexual exploitation, and simply a relationship between two consenting people one of whom is much younger than the other. Cynicism amongst overstretched police officers, but not confined to them.
I am only half way through, so I couldn’t spoil the ending even if I wanted to. But I thoroughly recommend “The Jetty” to you as an engaging, if somewhat sombre, antitode to “nonsense” police drama.
I have some quibbles, of course I do. People refer to the lead character as “Detective Manning”, an Americanism that has no place in the UK. Here, Detective is not a rank, it is an adjective. She is a Detective Constable. Her line manager is a Detective Sergeant and their unit head is a Detective Inspector. They are all “Detectives”. She would be referred to as “DC Manning” — although, given the informality of British detectives, she’d mostly be referred to by her first name. The sergeant would be too (generally only uniformed officers refer to Detective Sergeants as “sarge”. The DI would be “sir” or “guv” or “boss” or (for some inexplicable reason, in the West Country, “mister”).
The detectives also drive around primarily in a large marked police vehicle. The kind we use for pursuits and traffic duty. These are in reality fairly scarce, and not available for detectives to borrow to pop down the road to have a chat with someone. They should be in cheap, medium sized unmarked hatchbacks. It is like someone offered the production team the use of a big police car and they were so pleased with themselves they had to put the characters in it.
But I’ll take those kinds of flaws over the usual complete fantasy world of police drama.