There has recently been a great deal of scrutiny over the relationship between the police and media in modern Britain, particularly after the 2011–2012 Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking sought to establish the nature of contacts between police and press and the extent to which the latter interfered with criminal investigations (notably, in the case of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler in 2002). Alex Rock’s book takes inspiration from Lord Leveson’s questions about the culture and practices of police and media, focusing on the way the Metropolitan Police (Met) negotiated their public representation via the film industry during the period 1919–1956. Showcasing impressive research into behind-scenes correspondence, with careful analyses of the editorial decisions made between senior police officers and filmmakers, the book gives a strong sense of the politics of policing in this era. Rock surveys the production processes of noted propaganda films including The Girl from Scotland Yard (1947), The Blue Lamp (1950), and The Long Arm (1956), using the backstory to these films to evoke officers’ fears about the public’s changing attitudes toward the Force.

A particular strength of Rock’s work is its granular documentation of the emergence and work of the Met’s Press Bureau, founded toward the end of the First World War. Rock suggests that this context is key to understanding how police wished to control the flow of information to the public, rather than seeking transparency, highlighting the influence of Army culture on the Force during the interwar years. The fundamental mistrust of how filmmakers and press reporters would portray police work is underlined in the example of a series of “failed” early films, in contrast with the flourishing Empire Marketing Board propaganda of the interwar years. By chapter 3, as the book moves chronologically into the Second World War era, Rock shows how a new set of personalities in the Met fostered a more collaborative process, particularly with Ealing Studios, who would go on to create the most commercially successful films about the police at mid-century. However, the more harmonious relationship with film studios belied the enduring desire for a tightly controlled police image, seen in the example of the Met’s refusal to allow filmmakers to show any guns within police stations, despite the widespread practice of storing Local Defense Volunteers’ rifles. Rock’s exploration of these issues adds fresh layers to often tense cultural debates about whether or not the police should be armed, and the historic prejudice against their appearance as a paramilitary unit (even though they often served as such). In this sense, it's slightly surprising that Rock does not reflect on the Met’s links to the work of the Black and Tans during the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence, as another counterpoint to the police’s image-management.

This book also provides a fascinating insight into the position of senior women police officers during and after the Second World War. Chapter 3 concludes by documenting internal arguments over the representation of women police in The Girl from Scotland Yard (and the much-abhorred use of the word “girl” in the title), during which senior figures such as Superintendents Dorothy Peto and Elizabeth Bather sought to tread carefully around admitting to the public the extent of dangerous undercover work performed by women constables. Returning to this theme in Chapter 5 in relation to the film Street Corner (1953), Rock unearths an important set of reflections on the feminist movement and its implications for female police within discussions between Bather and female director Muriel Box. Indeed, Rock’s interrogation of gender and the representation of the Met is perhaps the most important feature of this book for historians of modern Britain, though historians of crime, policing, and the media will find the detailed commentary on the evolving work of the press bureau equally useful. Similarly, for those of us who have long used The Blue Lamp as a key touchstone for understanding the idealization of modern policing, both in teaching and research, Rock’s longer history of how it was produced will be an invaluable aid.

Though there is much to praise here, the book does suffer from a rather narrow engagement with existing scholarship, particularly omitting to engage with important related works of social and cultural history. Louise Jackson’s 2006 book Women Police is absent, as is Mark Roodhouse’s 2013 book Black Market Britain, surely pertinent to the sections on representations of the black market in police films. Rock’s suggestion that the prehistory of press-police/media-police relations between 1919 and the mid-1960s is “an unknown quantity” (246) misses detailed studies such as Adrian Bingham’s 2009 book Family Newspapers and his 2016 article on the reporting of the Moors Murders; Alice Smalley’s 2017 PhD thesis on the police and press in the early part of the century; and my own 2015 article on interwar press-police relations as negotiated by “celebrity” Met detective Frederick Porter Wensley, among other studies. Consequently, the book occasionally struggled to make broader connections between policing and society that would have made it more applicable to a wider readership.

Overall, The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry is an engaging study, rich with archival research and packed with fresh insights into the culture of police and media during the early to mid-twentieth century. It is a valuable contribution to the existing literature, and offers plenty of food for thought about the legacy of the Met’s efforts at image-management on citizens’ expectations of “policing-by-consent.”