BOBBY TRAP
By Anna Tate
1972Anna TatePolice and the courts Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
The last four weeks have seen the new ph enomenon of open collaborati on between the police and the British Broadcasting Corporation. You could easily have missed it....
It happens for just a few minutes every Monday evening between 6 and 6.20 pm when clean-cut,warm, knowledgeable young PC Rumbelow appears, uniform and all, as BBC reporter for 'London This Week'. One might well argue that in one way or another between 'Dixon of Dock Green', 'Softly, Softly" and various American programme Imports,. coppers do themselves proud in terms of television coverage. But this latest development is even more to be deplored.
After all, Dixon is a fictional character, a figment of someone's cosily-aberrated imagination. So is the iron-mouthed, soft-hearted Det Chief Supt Barlow. But PC Rumbelow is for real. He is an acting member of the London police force, who has somehow acquired a freelance job with the BBC.
It seems the. corporation are proud of their new recruit. So are Scotland Yard. A public relations coup. Rumbelow is the name and rum goings-on below the, surface of pristine objectivity What one might ask (apart from the distortion purveyed this image of the police) PC Rumbelow's position in relation to the television unions? With 70 per cent of the union membership out of work, is he in the ABS (Association of Broadcasting Staff) or the ACTT, and how does this tie in with the Police Federation? And is this a precedent which will set off a stampede from police headquarters to do the White City Television Centre beat?