Is Panorama really showing us the bigger picture?
Des McVey comments on the recent Panorama expose
Panorama has a long history of using undercover filming to expose shocking behaviour inside institutions. The recent documentary set inside Charing Cross police station (“Undercover in the Police”), where officers were caught on hidden camera engaging in racist, misogynistic, violent and degrading behaviour, follows a now familiar formula. A previous programme at Edenfield hospital in Greater Manchester showed equally appalling conduct from mental health nurses.
The structure rarely changes. First, the audience is confronted with undeniable footage of misconduct by staff - often at sergeant level or below in the police, or charge nurse level and below in healthcare. Then, we are shown the reaction of a senior figure from the profession. These individuals, introduced as experts with decades of experience, sit down to watch the footage and pronounce their judgement.
Yet the insights offered are astonishingly shallow. Confronted with scenes of racism, sexism, or outright violence, their “expert” feedback is usually limited to lines such as: “That should not happen.” “That is unprofessional.” “Technically, that’s assault.” “He is not a nice person.” These are not expert insights. They are observations so obvious that a child could reach them.
The missing “why”
What is absent, and has been absent across all Panorama’s documentaries, is any deeper analysis of why such behaviour occurs. Why do groups of staff, who may have had good intentions when entering a profession, end up behaving in ways that are so damaging?
Psychology has been wrestling with this question for decades. The Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo famously showed how quickly otherwise ordinary students, when given power over others, adopted abusive and authoritarian behaviours. But Zimbardo is not alone.
• Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments revealed that participants were willing to deliver what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to strangers simply because they were instructed to do so by an authority figure.
• Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments demonstrated how easily individuals will abandon their own perceptions and agree with a group, even when the group is clearly wrong.
• Emile Durkheim’s work on collective behaviour (often discussed alongside later organisational psychology) highlighted how individuals act differently when subsumed into institutional or group dynamics.
Taken together, these studies make one thing clear: human behaviour is not fixed. It is profoundly shaped by power, context, authority, fear, and the culture of the institution. To treat abusive behaviour on the frontline as simply the result of “bad apples” is to miss the deeper truth: it is the barrel — the institution itself — that often produces the rot.
Power, fear, and mirroring
In institutions where staff are tasked with exercising power over others, whether prisoners, patients, or the public, there are ever-present psychological dangers. Fear is one of the most corrosive. Fear of violence, fear of losing control, fear of being overwhelmed. Left unacknowledged, that fear can manifest as cruelty, intolerance, or prejudice.
There are also the complex phenomena of mirroring and emotional contagion. Staff experience similar emotions to those they are charged with managing or “caring” for. When left unacknowledged, staff begin to mirror this pathology or criminology. A toxic dynamic develops in which the institution itself becomes sick, and staff behaviour reflects that sickness.
These are not abstract academic theories. They are daily realities in high-stake institutional settings. And yet the so-called experts called upon to comment in the aftermath of scandal rarely show any awareness of them. That absence is, in itself, a damning reflection of where the true problem lies: not at the frontline, but in senior leadership.
A lesson from a prison wing
I have seen this first-hand. Along with a colleague, I once took responsibility for a dysfunctional prison wing housing 70 of the country’s most dangerous psychopaths. The officers working on the wing were demoralised, fearful, and unsupported by management. Misogyny, racism, violence and intolerance were rife — symptoms of a culture in which frontline staff were being failed.
We decided to intervene at the level of ideology. We created a robust model of treatment grounded in a healthier philosophy of work. We ensured a strong senior presence on the wing, with leaders role-modelling the standards we expected. We openly discussed fear, shame, and disgust. We introduced both group and individual supervision led by those who understood the risks of power dynamics.
The results were dramatic. Staff became more self-aware. They began to understand their own emotional responses and their relationships with the prisoners. Despite housing the most dangerous individuals, this wing outperformed the other three in the prison. Serious incidents dropped, and staff reported feeling safer.
The paradox was that our success reflected poorly on the rest of the institution. Innovation and progress are often stifled in hierarchical systems, particularly when they expose the lack of insight or competence at higher levels of management. In our case, senior leaders, the very people supposedly setting the tone, were among the least experienced and least equipped to understand the psychology of the environment.
The real scandal
This is why I believe the true scandal exposed by Panorama is not simply that some junior staff behave outrageously, but that senior leaders still fail to understand why. They fail to grasp the psychological dynamics of institutions where power is exercised, and they fail to create systems that protect staff from “acting out.”
What is missing in policing, healthcare, and prisons alike is leadership that understands the inevitability of fear, the dangers of power, and the risk of conformity and obedience. What is missing is proper supervision from genuine experts, not box-ticking appraisals or disciplinary processes that only address behaviour after the fact.
Until institutions invest in equipping leaders with real psychological insight — and in providing frontline staff with the supervision and support that helps them process the pressures of their roles — we will continue to see the same symptoms. Panorama will keep exposing “bad apples,” while the orchard itself remains diseased.
A call to action
If we truly want to prevent abuse in our institutions, we need to stop treating junior staff as expendable scapegoats. Instead, we must demand:
• Senior leaders trained in the psychology of power, fear, conformity, and institutional dynamics.
• Regular, reflective supervision for staff, led by people with real expertise.
• A culture where innovation and progress are supported, not stifled.
• Accountability that starts at the top, where ideology and culture are set.
Until we accept that frontline misconduct is not the problem but the symptom, we will keep failing staff, and in turn, failing the people they are meant to serve.
Des. A superbly insightful and powerful piece which deserves the widest possible readership. Thank you.
Brilliant post, Des. It also struck me that there was an interesting parallel with police officers taking extensive steps to evade capture.