How the police force has changed - Radio Times, January 2006

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How the police force has changed - Radio Times, January 2006

Philip Glenister and John Simm in Life on Mars © BBC

Steve Crimmins, police adviser on time-shifting cop drama Life on Mars, talks about how the force has changed over the last 30 years.

"Life on Mars is very, very close to the truth. But what must be remembered is that the police service is always a product of its age and will reflect what society expects of us.

In those days there was far more emphasis placed on personal resilience and initiative - cunning, if you like. It was expected that a detective constable would be given a job and that he would get a result. That created an environment that was open to abuse and some did take advantage of it. There was a perception that detectives would spend their afternoons in the pub and that wasn't far off the truth.

The biggest difference between then and now was the pace of work. Things were a lot slower then and you could afford to examine a crime and really take your time over it. You weren't bogged down with the masses of paperwork that all police officers are faced with today.

I think the majority of officers from that era had very high standards of personal behaviour, but if you didn't there was plenty of scope to abuse the system. The police were more effective back then, but 99% of crime was done by someone who lived within a mile-and-a-half of where the crime was committed. In those days, you knew who your bank robbers were. So if we got a bank robbery, we'd just go and kick doors in, lock them up and effectively sweat it out of them.

I'm not saying those tactics are right, but they were right for the age and they worked. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 changed absolutely everything. Now we have to tick all the boxes, but it's created a whole ethos of integrity and honesty. I'm not naïve enough to suggest that there are no bent policemen any more, but the opportunities to be bent are massively limited.

It was almost exclusively male in CID and women were lucky to get through the door. The portrayal in the show of the woman getting sexually harassed is exactly what would have happened. It might not have been meant maliciously, but there was that undercurrent of racist and sexist behaviour and it was probably stronger in CID than anywhere else. The force was racist and homophobic, but that was the way society was. You'd use the words "n****r" and "P**i", but everyone did. It's only as we've been re-educated over the past 30 years that we've learned better.

In the 70s it was expected that the police would personally know the criminals and would go to the pubs where they drank, and every detective would be expected to have a number of informants. That was open to massive abuse, but these days that process is very structured and very strict. Detectives don't have their own informants - in fact there's a massive firewall between detectives and informants. The new system is probably not as effective, but it has introduced great integrity into proceedings. And that's probably true of policing in general."

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