the detectives fighting organized crime is one of the most brutal and quite graphic true crime
documentaries that i've seen in quite a long time certainly a british true crime documentary this
is a new bbc show and two episodes out of five have aired so far i was going to wait until the
end of this series to discuss it but i thought no i'll do it now because then if anybody does
want to watch it there's a better chance of you being able to actually get it on iplayer
and if my opinions change by the end of it i'll do an update but to
be honest i'm really enjoying it so far i don't think my opinions will change
too much now this as the title suggests looks at detectives fighting organized crime it's
you know it does what it says on the tin i thought that would be like massive drug busts and you know
really kind of gangster high enterprises for career criminals which is not something that i'm
that interesting i prefer maybe prefers not the right word but i prefer more localized crime um
more personal crime rather than um big gangs and things but it actually kind of mixes the two and
it works really well um i don't want to go into too much details about the two episodes that i've
aired because i don't want to spoil it um it is really fascinating the details that they go into
but in the first episode it deals with a gang that um are kidnapping people
and so we have the big gang but at the same time we have the kind of one-on-one
um threats with these individual people and we get to actually see um either police or
paramedic body cam footage i'm not sure which it was of one of the kidnap victims once they've been
kidnapped tortured and then just dumped on the road and this state of this person is just
absolutely horrific and it's just so brutal it's i didn't expect that level of um i guess graphic
quality and it's amazing because it's brilliant to see what they actually did because you can
see the how powerful they are and how much of a problem this is you know it doesn't sugarcoat
anything it says this is what's happening it needs to stop and it's it's so awful we hear a 999 call
and there's a lot of kind of cctv footage we follow the detectives
as they piece together bits of information we get to see interviews
there's one i believe it was the second episode where somebody is shot in a street
and they obviously finally arrest somebody at some point and the person they arrest
is you don't when they're interviewing him he doesn't seem nasty you can understand why he
did what he did or rather what led him to doing that and this is where i feel the criminal
justice system really lets people down because well you'll you'll see when you watch it but
people with mental health problems are just ignored um you know people will go to prison and i
also have to point out by the way this they don't necessarily show what happened to these people
and whether they went to prison what sentences they got but i think pretty much most of these
you could google and they're quite high profile cases so i'm sure that information is online
but i think a lot of people with mental health issues who commit crimes go to prison
and they just go to standard prisons maybe a reform prison but still even if they're in a
reformed prison the help isn't there they are treated like prisoners with um who don't have
mental health problems who have the ability to kind of work towards their own reform
um sometimes they're in ipp which means that they haven't even got a release date and they're
the prison system's a mess that's relevant to this show but the point is we get to look at
different individuals um committing crimes it's not just the same gang-based people or anything
like that it's a good mix it's as i said it's quite graphic it doesn't sugarcoat anything
there's a good understanding here for the viewer of what it's like being a detective with greater
manchester police and the procedures they need to go through on the pitfalls it's not all rosy
there was one point where um a detective asked if they could do if they could get dna from
something or it was blood and they wanted to work out if it was mental blood or
um other blood i guess and apparently the technology for that doesn't exist yet which
i didn't know um so it's really informative very interesting we get to hear from a lot of
industry professionals who clearly know what they're talking about and are clearly experienced
but in alongside that level of professionalism you get to feel the emotion you get to feel how
excited they are when they you know when they get the next step or when they can get a conviction or
when they're allowed to arrest somebody it's you're so involved in this and this
is only two episodes in and i'm already really passionate about this i can't wait for the next
three episodes um it airs i don't know when it is because i watch it on iplayer um but it's once a
week three episodes left i cannot wait to watch them if you like true crime definitely check out
the first two episodes um the rna set on iplayer but i believe the second episode will be repeated
on bbc at some point imminently i love the series i hope it's commissioned for a second series
it's brilliant to watch so engaging absolutely love it i cannot recommend it enough