Former police officers highlight the ‘inaccurate’ moments in Adolescence that we overlooked

Netflix’s Adolescence has been uplifted for its depiction of incel culture and how young boys can be warped by online content, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some inaccuracies when it comes to real-world police procedure.

Adolescence does not claim to be a true story despite having similarities and inspirations in real-world events, but with that in mind, here’s how Adolescence differs from what would actually happen in similar criminal cases.

The police officer found an inaccurate moment in the strip search

With three decades of experience at Merseyside Police in Liverpool, Laurence ‘Lol’ Carr has spoken to Unilad about the few inaccuracies he noticed in Adolescence. Admittedly, he doesn’t usually watch police dramas “as I get too frustrated at the wildly inaccurate representations.”

Nonetheless, like many of us Laurence felt drawn in by Adolescence and during his watch took issue with only two moments. In fact, he said the show was pretty spot-on in terms of police representation.

“There were though, one or two areas of inaccuracy,” he said, noting that “overall” it was fairly accurate.

The first Adolescence inaccuracy came in episode one when Jamie was strip-searched at the police station.

“The question I have is… What for?” he said.

In an interview with Time Out, police officer Steven Barclay delved deeper into the scene and said: “With a 13-year-old suspect, there would be a specialist unit involved. They would have been talking to Jamie like a teenager, instead of playing bad cops.

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“If you start being horrible to suspects, they clam up. Especially with a kid, you don’t want him to get upset. I would literally say to them: ‘Mate, I’ve arrested you. I don’t know what’s happened and I know this is shit.’ You want them to feel comfortable. I could never do their job, but the sexual offending team ​i​s nice to sex offenders for that same reason.”

The school visit was also questionable

In episode two, Ashley Walters’ character DI Luke Bascombe goes to Jamie’s school in the hopes of finding the alleged murder weapon and more information about the mysterious incel culture.

“And the school scenes were probably not something that may happen in that way. I didn’t understand why the priority in finding the weapon became the school when it seemed Jamie had not been back to school since the murder,” Laurence, who worked on murder investigations, told Unilad.

In the interview with Time Out, Steven further explained: “I don’t even think you need to have been in the police force to understand you wouldn’t just get to police officers walking into classrooms as they do in episode two.

“There’d be a long list of kids that they wanted to speak to – and it wouldn’t be by request. They would not be walking into classrooms willy-nilly: ‘Hi everybody, something bad’s happened.’

“It’s a murder enquiry, you wouldn’t go into classrooms and start chatting about it, because kids could say something and then it’s evidential. It would be so well planned with the school, with counsellors, with parents.”

Even the very first scene was riddled with inaccuracies

First and foremost Netflix’s Adolescence is a fictional drama that does not claim to be wholly accurate of what would actually happen in similar real-life cases. That being said, even the very first scene was somewhat questionable when it comes to police procedures.

“But if they found the body at 10.30 pm why are they waiting until the morning to arrest him?” Steven told Time Out. “That’s one thing the police are really good at. They move fast. Is the raid realistic? I used to do raids like this and if we’d had firearms officers in this situation, we would have looked at each other and gone: ‘This is a 13-year-old boy, we don’t need two big lads with a shield.’ Yes, a knife is a deadly weapon, but they have baton rounds (rubber bullets). You would have so many things to de-escalate in that situation.”

There was also the lack of “evidence preserv​ation” and situational recordings that could have landed DI Bascombe in legal trouble in the real world.

He explained: “But the search was poor. The police use specialist search teams. You literally do training for it. You get paid extra money. You get brought in at three am in the morning for murders. You don’t throw mail on the floor.

“You don’t pour shit on the bed like it was in the 1970s and rummage through it. It would all be documented with cameras. DC Bascombe has his camera off in the van and the solicitor would say: ‘Why’d you turn your camera off? What did you say to my client?’ Nowadays, a police officer’s word is good for nothing if it’s not recorded.”

Adolescence is on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image credit: Netflix