Public Outcry

A child is killed by joyriders on a local estate, and the grief arrives before the facts do. Cade's authority runs straight into the raw emotion of the community, and there is no procedure that protects a chief constable from that. The title says it plainly: this is an episode about everyone else's verdict. A joyriding death is the kind of loss that follows a family for years, and the estate knows it before the news crews do.

The death is high-profile from the first moment. Every decision Cade and his officers make gets examined in public, and the professional composure the force relies on wears thin alongside personal grief. Nobody in the station is allowed to just do their job, and the episode is shrewd about what that does to people used to being in control. The pressure comes from outside, but it lands on the people inside, and the script keeps the two tangled together. There is no retreat behind rank. The case does not close neatly while the community is still counting its dead.

Martin Shaw is Chief Constable Alan Cade, with Julian Glover as Andrew Blake and Bosco Hogan as Deputy Chief Constable Wes Morton. Gillian Bevan plays Det. Supt. Rose Penfold, Michael Cochrane is Nigel Crimmond and Davyd Harries is Sam Lester. Shelagh McLeod appears as Maria Romero, Peter Temple as PC Dave Stocker, Paul Trussell as PC Brian Brown and Paul Arlington as Supt. Alex Raymond. Jeffrey Caine and Len Collin wrote the script, and Tom Cotter directed.

But what stays with you is the weight of command, institutional and moral. Cade carries it without fuss, which is Shaw's quiet gift, and the episode is the better for it. Public grief meeting police procedure is a well British crime drama keeps coming back to, and Public Outcry shows why it has not run dry. The best episodes of this series know that the hardest cases are the ones where the community is watching, and this one never lets anyone forget the audience.