Police on foot

The first police officer on foot in any of this material, with POLICE across the back of his carrier. Everything else we have of the law is a car, a boat or a helicopter.

At 5:08 in the Extended Look the camera looks into a green-lit room. A man stands with his back to us, an outer carrier over a dark shirt, POLICE running across the back panel in spaced capitals. The letters stand well above this site’s floor for lettering on Rockstar’s full-size frame, so this is read and not inferred. His right hand is down at his side with a pistol in it, not raised.

A second armed man stands to the left of him and aims a pistol across the room. His carrier has no lettering on it at all: a plain plate carrier with a row of magazine pouches across the front, worn over a dark long-sleeved top and jeans. A third man is half crouched in front of a wooden chair, bare-chested, with gold chains, a red bucket hat, blue tracksuit bottoms with a white side stripe and red shoes, his arms out low and both hands open in the air. A pump-action shotgun lies on the tiles between them.

The officer’s own colours cannot be given with any confidence. The light on the men, the wall and the floor is green, and measured, his trousers, his carrier and the floor tiles around him all fall in the same band of yellows and greens; the measurements are on the sighting. Under a light like that a colour name for a plain cloth is the lamp talking, not the cloth. Strong colours come through it, which is why the third man’s hat can be called red and his tracksuit blue.

The shotgun pickup at 4:27, forty seconds earlier, also happens in a room with a tiled floor, but its walls are plain brown with the plaster broken away round the openings, and that frame has no dado and no graffiti, so the two frames do not show that this is the same building. What this frame shows, then, is two armed men in body armour, one marked police and one not, and a third man without armour, half crouched with both hands open.

How to recognise it

• POLICE in spaced capitals across the back of an outer carrier
• A pistol held low at the side, not aimed
• A second armed man beside him in an unmarked carrier with a row of magazine pouches
• A pump-action shotgun on the floor between them
• A third man, bare-chested in a red bucket hat, half crouched with both hands open

The frame it comes from

The frame is Extended Look at 5:08.07. It is 3840 by 2160, and the subject occupies 1650 by 1019 of it.

How this was measured

These figures come from the dataset, not from the prose above. We measure everything and claim what counts. How we work

What we still do not know

• Whether the unmarked man is police in plain clothes, a second agency, or not police at all
• Which force this is. The carrier carries the word and no crest, and no badge reads
• Whether police on foot turn up in free roam or only in scripted scenes
• Whether the man on the floor at 4:27 belongs to either group