As Line of Duty completes its successful and possibly final series, just how close to reality was it?
As it happens, the end of the run coincides with the publication of Rot at the Core, an in-depth investigation into the life and times of one of Britain’s most spectacularly corrupt police officers, whose career ended in disgrace before his death in a prison cell.
The authors are a former detective superintendent, Graham Satchwell, who investigated corruption in his own force, and Winston Trew, a victim of the bent officer, whose wrongful conviction from nearly 50 years ago was only recently overturned.
“The first series reminded me of the film LA Confidential, which also told a powerful story, but like many US cop shows piled up the dead bodies far beyond the reality,” said Satchwell.
“Before Line of Duty we had not seen that in British drama. It jarred on me at first because it’s just not realistic, but now I am so lost in the sheer enjoyment of the show that it doesn’t matter any more.”
“I have to say I found it hard to believe,” said Trew. “It’s a nice idea to have a woman from a gangster family who becomes a police officer [the character DCI Jo Davidson, played by Kelly Macdonald] but the idea that one lot of heavily armed police hunt down a pair of their fellow armed officers, and it looks like there’s going to be a shootout between them, was – well, all a bit too Hollywood for me.” The reality, he said, was that actual police corruption was subtler and more mundane.
“The one omission in Line of Duty is the role that has often been played in police corruption in this country by Freemasonry,” said Satchwell.
“Putting that aside, it tells several fundamental truths: firstly, that organised crime groups frequently have detectives ‘on side’. This is not a new phenomenon and goes back to the days of Billy Hill in the 50s and the Krays in the 60s.”
As for the role of the anti-corruption branch AC-12, “police corruption is not rare and investigating it is a lonely business. It creates mistrust and dislike by other officers,” he said. “As we have seen in Line of Duty, cowardly, politically minded, over-ambitious senior officers are common and often fail to act against suspected corruption in their ranks because they fear they will be perceived as having failed.”
The subject of Rot at the Core, which is now being promoted by its publishers as “the real Line of Duty”, is the late DS Derek Ridgewell, who was possibly responsible for more individual miscarriage of justice cases that have since been overturned than any other police officer in Britain. More cases involving his corruption are due to be heard at the court of appeal later this year, following referrals from the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Ridgewell, a sociable and plausible man, not unlike the “Dot” Cottan character played by Craig Parkinson in an earlier Line of Duty series, fitted up countless people in the 1970s for crimes they had not committed, while he was himself involved in stealing more than £1m – the equivalent of £4m today – in goods that the police had access to, which he sold via a well-known south London criminal family.
Remarkably for the 1970s, the proceeds of his crimes were salted away in five bank accounts, including one in Zurich, and a safety deposit box. He also, as a humble detective sergeant, owned property and businesses.
When he was eventually caught, along with other corrupt officers, he hired Bernie Perkoff, the top lawyer used by many gangland figures, but was convicted of conspiracy to rob and jailed for seven years in 1980.
Asked by the governor of Ford prison why he had embarked on such a corrupt path, he told him: “I just went bent.” He died in his cell in 1982 at the age of 37. Satchwell, a contemporary of Ridgewell in the British Transport Police, suggests in the book that it is possible he was murdered.
Trew, the son of a Jamaican police sergeant who brought his family to Britain in the 1950s, was arrested at the Oval tube station in 1972, along with three friends as they returned from a Black Power meeting in north London. The young men, who became known as “the Oval Four”, were beaten up and framed by Ridgewell for attempted theft and assaulting the police on the London Underground, and jailed. It was one of a series of such cases that became known as the Stockwell Six, the Waterloo Four and the Tottenham Court Road Two.
Trew became a lecturer in social studies at South Bank University before suffering a stroke in 2003. While recovering, he decided to investigate his case using the National Archives and the Freedom of Information Act, and uncovered the levels of corruption in which Ridgewell had been involved.
While trying to have his own conviction overturned he met Satchwell, who was able to use his own contacts to discover other previously hidden information about Ridgewell, and they decided to collaborate on a book.
In 2019, the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett, quashed the Oval Four’s convictions and told them: “Our regret is that it has taken so long for this injustice to be remedied.”
For Trew, one major difference between Line of Duty and his own experience in 1972 was, of course, the presence of black officers such as Chloe Bishop (played by Shalom Brune-Franklin) and Farida Jatri (played by Anneika Rose) in the current series. “When we were all fitted up, there were only white officers around.”
There is one chillingly contemporary aspect to the book in Trew’s description of his arrest. “The man holding me was angry and began applying pressure to my neck. I could hardly breathe. He was trying to strangle me, I thought. He then whispered in my ear: ‘Let’s see how fucking clever you are now’.”
One brave witness, a Mrs O’Connor, tried to intervene and eventually gave evidence for Trew at his Old Bailey trial in 1972. She told the court: “The boy’s eyes seemed to be coming out of his head and his mouth was open as if he was choking to death … That’s why I intervened to stop it.”
Despite her evidence, Trew and his friends were all jailed. “That sense of injustice stayed with me all the time – even when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it,” he writes in the book. “Before long, it became a feature in my dreams-cum-nightmares and had a recurring theme: I was trapped in a place from which I could not escape.”
“I have to say that the story of Ridgewell and how he got away with it for so long is as close to a Line of Duty story as anything else I have come across in real life,” said Satchwell this week. “Good men stood by and did nothing.”