Channel 5’s scaremongering crime week left me feeling dirty ...Middle East

Welcome to Lawless Britain. It’s a fetid place, rampant with drug-addicted ne’er-do-wells, where killer kids wielding zombie knives are “style icons”; shopkeepers are terrorised by repeat offenders including Mr Magnet Man and the Notorious Weed Killer Gang while vigilante warriors are forced to take bike theft and pickpocketing into their own hands.

The prisons are human sewers governed by wardens who fancy the “ripped, attractive” detainees, and ought to be torn down and sold off as luxury flats, after which the inmates who haven’t simply walked free of their own accord should probably just be disposed of altogether, because there’s no measure the state – weak, soft, pathetic – is willing to take to deter them.

This is the country we are living in. Or at least, we are according to Channel 5, who this week broadcast a special series purportedly seeking to examine justice, criminal law, punishment and retribution but in actuality capitalising on our fears about personal safety and fractured community.

These alarmist programmes’ true, and very effective, purpose was to appeal to our worst instincts, stir up moral outrage and push us to the extremes of our righteousness. I didn’t just come away feeling depressed after such an expansive look at the rot of our society. I came away feeling dirty.

The “Lawless Britain” series was wide-ranging, but with a remarkable absence of depth. The strand included several angering documentaries about theft, a “shocking” film about HMP Wandsworth (of recent Daniel Khalife escape and sex tape infamy) and a by-numbers look at execution in Texas from Dan Walker.

There was a film about child murderers piggybacked on Netflix’s Adolescence success without grasping that what made it so powerful was its nuance and shades of grey. And a totally ridiculous Anne Robinson experiment invited the audience at home and “ordinary” people – read: incredibly biased relatives of victims who surprisingly enough want the most draconian punishments possible for most crimes – to weigh in on what sentences ought to be meted out to convicts involved in real-life cases.

The more of this provocation I sat through – and let’s face it, all that separated this from a normal week on 5 were a couple of fetish docs, some 70s pop and a couple of Michael Portillos – the more enraged I felt. Not about the state of the nation, but about the state of this programming, which could have been enlightening if it had our best interests at heart and had tried to explore “why” and “how”.

But it didn’t want us to understand the causes of crime – it just wanted us to react. At every turn it elected to default to the narrative devices of CCTV footage with a CSI-lite soundtrack, terrifying eyewitness accounts, randomly chosen historical case studies, irresponsibly selected “expert” talking heads – who mostly seemed to want to brag about their time in jail or their ability to scare away criminals – and endless stories about lives devastated and destroyed.

I know nothing more about crime than when I started, other than that it happens (a lot). This was film-making that complained, without attempting to engage with the society in which crime takes place, just how dire a state our justice system is in, the institutional and political failures that led here, or what people really feel about it.

In fact, there was little perspective at all. A film about child killers that lays the blame for all knife crime at “social media” (what type? Who cares!) and dares not scrutinise nature, nurture or psychology. A film about the death penalty that marvels at America’s obsession with capital punishment without providing insight into their mindset. Mock juries ruled by emotions – one contributor felt death by dangerous driving should get a whole life sentence, a punishment usually reserved for serial killers or premeditated or sadistic murders – demonstrating precisely why we should not all have the power to decide another’s fate.

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Justice, if Lawless Britain is to be believed, is not about fair punishment or redemption, but about an eye for an eye. And preventing crime, it suggested, is our responsibility. If any of us cares about our communities we ought to be performing citizen’s arrests or training in karate to apprehend perpetrators in the corner shop, because the police simply won’t. This vigilantism is glamourised and the very real risks of such recklessness ignored.

I find true crime and the morbid fascination with the minds of bad people that has dominated the last decade of popular culture very troubling. But I hadn’t considered how much worse it is when television swerves the psychology of crime entirely in order to maximise its scaremongering.

Without attempting to understand human nature we will never know how to deal with those who break the law, let alone stop them from doing it. Lawless Britain never really cared about that, however – sensationalism and stirring up fear, division and hatred are so much easier.

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