Stephen Nolan has spent the past two years riding with Police Service of Northern Ireland officers on Belfast streets, and he says the result is a six-part series that strips policing down to its rawest form. In Peelers: The PSNI For Real, Nolan said he sat through 12-hour shifts in the back of a police car while officers chased stolen cars, tackled drug dealers and moved into hostile crowds.
He said the experience changed how he understood the job. “I needed to see the real job of being a cop for myself, but nothing prepared me for what it really involves,” Nolan said. He said he sometimes fell asleep while the peelers were racing to the next incident with blue lights flashing, only to wake up for calls that could turn violent within minutes.
One of the moments that stayed with him came when police were confronted by a large and volatile crowd demanding that a convicted sex offender be driven out of his home. Nolan said officers defused the scene and safely escorted the man away. He also saw police deal with addiction problems, attacks on officers, raids on drug dens and a drunk mother who had crashed her car. The six-part series follows those encounters as they unfolded across Belfast over two years.
The backdrop matters because Nolan’s film is set inside a debate that has never been far from policing in Northern Ireland: how much people expect from officers, and how much they are asked to absorb on the streets where they live. Nolan said many members of the PSNI feel pressure to move away from the places where they grew up because of the risks that come with the job, a reality that gives the series a sharper edge than a standard fly-on-the-wall production.
He said that was exactly why he wanted the project to be more than television. “We expect an awful lot from these officers and need to have a community-wide conversation about the issues that they are having to deal with and what their roles could involve,” he said, adding that real life policing is needed to understand what officers do properly. For Belfast, the series is not just about police work; it is about the cost of carrying it out in public, every day.
