Brittany Diehl, Constables on Patrol, Dennis Wert, Discovery, Discovery Channel, documentaries, Hubie Coleman, Kim Benton, Paul Castline, Pennsylvania, Ray Benton, Rocky Younkin, true crime, TV
May 4, 2025
by Carla Hay
Culture Representation: Taking place in Pennsylvania, the documentary special “Constables on Patrol” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans and Asians) who are constables and the people who get served warrants by constables.
Culture Clash: The constables have to deal with hard-to-find people and often have to walk into situations that could be dangerous.
Culture Audience: “Constables on Patrol” will appeal to people who want to see a short-attention-span version of “Cops,” but the documentary is just a series of superficial-looking arrests.
“Constables on Patrol” is a poorly made, reality show-styled documentary that rushes through each arrest with choppy and unappealing editing. Viewers won’t get to know much about the Pennsylvania constables who were chosen to be the stars of the show. “Constables on Patrol” is described in press releases as a TV special, but it looks more like a pilot episode for a series that was rejected.
No one is credited as the director for “Constables on Patrol,” but the documentary was produced by Magilla Entertainment, the company behind other reality show-styled shows on Discovery, such as “Moonshiners,” “Master Distiller,” “Diesel Brothers” and “Dirty Mudder Truckers.” “Constables on Patrol” follows three sets of constables in different cities in Pennsylvania. Constables (who have existed in Pennsylvania since the 1600s) are considered law-enforcement helpers to police officers.
Constables do things such as serve warrants and arrest people who can’t pay immediately for unpaid fines. The two biggest differences between constables and police officers are (1) constables are elected officials and (2) constables are not paid a flat salary but instead are paid for every warrant that they are able to serve. Much of the time spent in a constable job is looking for people who have made themselves hard to find because they’re avoiding arrest.
These are the three sets of constables who are featured in “Constables on Patrol”:
- Hubie Coleman and Rocky Younkin (who are based out of Connellsville, Pennsylvania) are nicknamed The Tricksters because they use a variety of tricks and gimmicks (including wearing disguises and pretending to be people in other jobs), in order to get arrest people or serve them with arrest warrants. Coleman (who says he’s been a constable since 1994) and Younkin (who’s been a constable for much longer than that) are shown hiring.
- Ray Benton, his wife Kim Benton and their daughter Brittany Diehl are constables based out of Claysburg, Pennsylvania. The show calls this trio of constables the Family Dynasty. Claysburg (which has a population of 1,291, as of the 2020 census) is located in Blair County. Ray is also the coroner for Blair County. Diehl is also a police officer.
- Paul Castline is the leader of a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based group of constables that the show calls the Tactical Team, which includes trusted members such as Dennis Wert. The members of the Tactical Team act like they want to be a S.W.A.T. team. They approach each job as if they’re about to take down powerful and violent gangsters, when their typical jobs as constables are actually serving arrest warrants on people who didn’t pay things such as parking ticket fines. However, constables have the authority to arrest people for violent felonies. It’s just not shown in this documentary.
The documentary’s editing jumps back and forth between these three sets of constables and often interrupts the chronicle of one search to switch back to show another search. It makes the documentary look disjointed and distracted. And some of the conversations that the constables have with each other look semi-scripted—or at least look like the constables did re-takes of what they said in conversations.
The people who get served warrants or get arrested are only identified by their first names, but in most cases their faces and voices are shown unaltered. The constables are shown going only to people’s homes, even though people who have warrants for their arrest can be arrested at places other than their homes. In the documentary, many of the warrants served are to people who look like they have drug problems and/or mental health issues.
Sometimes, unexpected things happen, such as when person gets served a warrant at a house but another person gets arrested. This happened in Harrisburg, when someone named Deneke was served with a warrant for failure to pay fines and cost and harassment, but Deneke was able to pay the fines on the spot and doesn’t get arrested. However, the constables found out that Deneke had a house guest named Frank, who had a separate warrant for his arrest, so Frank ended up being arrested.
Also in Harrisburg, someone named Marcus has warrants for various things, including failure to pay fines. He’s found with a “crystallized substance,” so he ends up getting arrested for a more serious charge of suspected drug possession. The documentary includes the obligatory disclaimer that everyone who’s arrested is innocent until proven guilty.
All of the arrests are shown so quickly, “Constables on Parole” doesn’t bother to tell viewers anything about the people arrested, other than their first names and the reasons why there were warrants for their arrests. The show also never includes follow-up information on what happened to the cases of the people who were arrested. A little more information about these arestees would go a long way in making “Constables on Patrol” more interesting by telling more about why these arrestees ended up in these warrant situations.
“Constables on Patrol” also skimps on information about the constables featured in this documentary. Coleman and Younkin have the vibe of a comedy duo, but the documentary offers no sense of what they’ve learned about their partnership and how it’s evolved over the years. Ray Benton mentions that his wife and daughter are very competitive with each other when it comes to the number of warrants they serve, but you see none of that rivalry in the documentary. Castline (who is shown working with his team in Harrisburg and in Philadelphia) seems to be a mentor for the younger members of the team, but that dynamic is also briefly skimmed over and never shown or explained.
The most memorable part of “Constables on Patrol” is when Coleman and Younkin go on the hunt for an elusive woman nicknamed Bingo Betty, who has a warrant for failure to respond to passing bad checks. The constables need Bingo Betty to come out of the house where she has been tracked down because they don’t have a warrant where they can enter the house. Coleman and Younkin hire an unnamed man to pretend to be a telegram singer who warbles a Frank Sinatra song in front of the house. The fake telegram singer shouts that this is a singing telegram gift sent by a friend to Bingo Betty.
The telegram singer hoax works. Bingo Betty comes out of the house, out of curiosity to get a closer look at this singer. When she finds out it was a trick to get her arrested, she cheerfully laughs and jokes with the constables while she’s being arrested. One of the constables remarks that Bingo Betty seemed like she was high on an unknown substance. There’s a lot of people in this documentary who look like they use illegal drugs on a regular basis. Coleman and Younkin work with a disheveled and raspy-voiced “informant” named Mucho, who looks like he has what can tactfully be called “meth mouth.”
You will learn nothing substantial about any of the people featured on “Constables on Patrol.” It’s not the fault of the constables, who are no doubt hard-working members of law enforcement. It’s the fault of the documentarians. However, because the constables are paid for every warrant served, you can tell that the people they’re looking for are just numbers to some (not all) of these constables.
All the quick-cut editing in “Constables on Patrol” can’t disguise that this documentary becomes dull. It has a mind-numbing, repetitive formula of the constables going to people’s homes, knocking on doors, and if the person they’re looking for is there, that person might be arrested. A montage at the end of the documentary shows video clips of what looks like footage that was filmed for other episodes. “Constables on Patrol” is such a flimsy entry in the long list of documentaries/reality shows that follow law enforcement officials on the job, audiences won’t care enough to want to see any other “Constables on Patrol” episodes.
Discovery premiered “Constables on Patrol” on March 11, 2025.