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Police harness the popularity of the “true crime” genre to help solve cold cases
Adam Shand, the host of Inside the NSW Police Force, shares how the podcast series is harnessing the popular true crime genre to help the state’s police achieve breakthroughs in cold cases and correct community misconceptions about policing.
After 40 years in journalism, Adam Shand says, he wanted to do something with a strong social purpose.
“I was running out of enthusiasm for entertaining people solely. There’s got to be a point to this, particularly where you are dealing with sensitive topics like murder and missing persons. I am very critical of media who throw out sensational stories that get people’s hopes up then dash them because they don’t follow the story and they don’t investigate it,” Shand told us in an interview.
These are some of the themes that came together when Shand was invited to start making the NSW Crime Command podcast in 2020, a pilot for what later became Inside the NSW Police Force. The official podcast of the NSW Police, uses in-depth storytelling to take listeners through real investigations and provide insights into the lives of police officers. Shand and his production partners Piccolo Podcast and Media Productions funded the pilot until sponsorship from Police Bank helped to ensure a sustainable future for the series.
Helping to solve cases
Shand says it’s the first time in the world that the techniques of the true crime genre have been harnessed by police themselves in order to inform the public of the work they are doing and to appeal to the community for further information on complex cases. “This is not about entertainment. This is about solving real crime and bringing things to a resolution,” Shand said.
As we reported in a previous Spotlight article[RT1] , the podcast was recently instrumental in helping police achieve a breakthrough in the mystery of a blackened jawbone of a 15-year-old boy found washed up on a Central Coast beach in 2020.
“True crime has been a hugely successful genre around the world, which I think has solved no more than a handful of crimes. Whereas here the professionals are now using the same medium. And the black bone story really typifies what’s possible. Because we access information and expertise that we wouldn’t otherwise.”
Shand says Inside the NSW Police Force is like no other true crime podcast because of its access: “There’s no wasting time going down rabbit holes. If we go in the wrong direction, the police will soon cut us off.”
He says the podcast is certain to feature more breakthroughs as a wave of new technology, including new types of DNA testing, sweeps NSW policing. In Australia, more than 38,000 missing persons reports are received by police each year.
Dispelling misconceptions and tackling tough issues
The podcast also aims to dispel some of the misconceptions about policing and provide an insight into what working in the force is really like.
“I’m really enjoying portraying our detectives and men and women in uniform in a different light because they are the same us as, yet I continually hear people talking about ‘us and them’,” says Shand. “I always like to say that the difference between us and them is they put themselves in harm’s way for us, and I think that’s pretty admirable.”
Shand says the podcast plans to tackle some of the tough issues that don’t get talked about much outside the force, like stress and PTSD, and how to keep people in work or bring them back in and help them with recovery so that they can have financial security.
You can access the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. See here for more information: