The review of the Metropolitan Police by Lady Louise Casey, released today, was commissioned after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021.
The police reaction to protests about that murder, committed by a serving Met officer, led to brutal attacks on protestors by other Met police.
Many of us were horrified, yet again, by those who supposedly protect us.
Today's report says that the Met has institutional problems with racism, misogyny and homophobia.
I am not surprised. It seems like we have known this forever.
From personally witnessed experience helping a friend, I know the police have no interest in protecting women and are misogynists when it comes to complaints that they are failing to do so.
The trouble is that we have a Home Secretary who I think to be a racist. There is no gay person in Rishi Sunak's cabinet, and misogyny is rife in politics. I do not see all Tory women, let alone men, standing up against it either (and I stress, all because there are very obvious exceptions).
Will there be reform in that case? I would hope so but I am not an optimist.
But on this issue, I do think Labour would undoubtedly be better. I do not much like her economics, but Yvette Cooper would be a good Home Secretary.
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The reason that situations like the Met occur is because there are too many at the top who are incompetent and should be sacked.
It is they who employ and promote staff who should never be in the job to start with.
Until such people are removed from the Met the problem will persist.
Declaring the organisation institutionally racist, misogynist or homophobic may sound like an effective first step but like all forms of collective punishment it is a mistake.
Racists, misogynists and homophobes will mostly avoid proportionate accountability and staff who have spent a career fighting discrimination will be treated just the same as the perpetrators.
The problem will simply sink to a less obvious darker level.
I’m afraid I don’t share your optimism on Labour being better.
Almost every policy announcement out of them seems to say they’ll be even tougher on the public than the Tories. Seems like every day we have announcements of more crackdowns, more officers, tougher sentences, more laws banning things. I think they’ll throw more money into the police for sure but there won’t be any meaningful reform and it will just mean more police officers. That just mean more racists, homophobes, transphobes and misogynists in positions of power.
I don’t see how anyone can look at that report and decide we need more police officers out there, but here we are. T
The whole system needs radical reform and any plan that doesn’t massively increase public spending in poor communities will end up doing more harm than good.
What we dont have of course is anything approaching a crime reduction strategy. As The Police have pointed out they are spending a great deal of time dealing with the mentally ill when that should be done by mental health services. We have a major issue with alcohol related public disorder but certainly in England no curbs on its price and availability. I might also add that watching the cheap TV raises a lot of questions about the sorts of vehicles that are allowed on our roads in terms of speed, performance etc.
Also of course we have the message given to the police by the politicians. If it was that we wanted certain offences treated seriously rather than getting protestors heads kicked then things might move in the right direction.
Finally and perhaps most obviously what about The Met? It seems to me that the job of Commissioner isn’t do-able and that there is a case to split it into a Police Force and a Security Service that deals with all the issues of guarding etc that crop up in London.
I worked with Cleveland Police quite closely in the 90’s, when I worked in criminal defence. I would suggest that one of the issues is that police officers are representative of the society from which they are recruited which, naturally, includes racist misogynist homophobes. However there is also the issue of motivation – why do people want to join a police force? Many do so because they see it as giving them power over others, and power to assert their own beliefs of what is right. Clustering people with that attitude together is unhealthy.
My best friend at school joined hte Met when she was 19. She had 18 weeks’ police college training during which time it was heavily instilled in them that all police officers always lose all their non-job friends. Which was a self fulfilling prophecy.
A wider recruitment base would help, as would management at all levels taking responsibility to deal with unacceptable behaviour, rather than to encourage it. Ult6imately, however, I think we need policing as a part of society, rather than policing of society.
This is one of if not the most rational no b/s posts I have seen on this site. My only criticisms are (1) not stating clearly the reason for a police force which is – in the UK, to maintain the status quo and nothing more. (2) regarding recruitment. Yes they are drawn from society but very selectively. Anyone even remotely left of centre is rejected. Having lived and worked in three mainland European countries and living now in a fourth, France I can from experience state that only the Dutch police can clearly be said to be an honest representation of their society ‘as a whole’. It would be impossible for me to have a friend in the UK who was not only a sergeant but a member from the age of 15 in the Dutch Communist party.
An excellent idea which I believe started in the 60s was that each ‘buurt’ /neighbourhood had a dedicated officer whose job it was to meet and know everyone who lived there. One duly knocked on my apartment door and wanted to know what I did, what drugs if any I used ( I smoked hash, no problem in the Netherlands) and I told him my attitude to hard drug dealers – public execution, he smiled.
So whenever a crime took place on his patch he was the first person that was contacted for accurate and speedy intel.
Cyndy has absolutely nailed it in one with – I think we need policing as a part of society, rather than the policing of society. This can only happen with a total reset. I cannot see the Establishment ever allowing this to happen since the reset would have to include itself – all systems tend toward self perpetuation.
Given that the MacPherson Report declared the Met Institutionally racist in 1999 and we are here in 2023 with yet another report finding that they have problems with a range of institutional discrimination, I have zero optimism that these findings will change anything.
I hope I am wrong, but the history and political background indicates otherwise.
I am also not optimistic. The report concludes that the Met should be broken up if it cannot change. The time for that is long overdue. An organisation that has smaller units with strong leadership and local accountability should be easier to turn around. It is significant that the Met has seen funding fall in real terms.
I am afraid I don’t agree. If it not the size of the Met that is the pronlem. Nor, I think, is it a problem exclusive to the Met. We need a change in our concept of policing.
I think both are needed.
A separation of services (I don’t see guarding people/stuff as policework) and an honest discussion about what a modern police force should be for.
This report probably applies to Police Forces throughout the UK.
When the Met was established in 1829 the Home Secretary was Robert Peel. He agreed to and had published nine principles for law enforcement. Those principles take his name. The theme of all of those principles is policing by consent. Any training programme for police officers must have those principles at its core. If I were questioning any force about the effectiveness and impact of both its training and its continuing professional learning the principles would form the basis of my inquiry. And I suggest that every police force should be required to carry out an annual self-evaluation of how they have followed those principles. The self-evaluation reports should be publicly available and submitted to a responsible external body.
The Police forces in this country are mismanaged across the board. For example, as a boy I used to see the ‘local bobbie’ on a regular basis and there were even more local police stations – many now have been closed down and amalgamated into big anonymous offices or bases.
My market town’s local police station has been closed down (quitely of course) for three/four years.
I agree with Cyndy’s assertion ‘I think we need policing as a part of society, rather than policing of society’.
But the politicians and bean counters don’t see it that way. It’s all about cutting costs and proclaiming your effective management of services by arguing over the poll tax you charge – courtesy of our rancid political system. And the result is anything but what Cyndy wisely advocates.
Our senior officers become ‘budget holders’ not senior policemen or women, and the emphasis for managers in our sick society is managing money – not people or services – so that sick politicians can claim they are good managers.
I know one or two policeman. I know that their authorities have had huge cuts; that the backroom staff have been cut and the paperwork heaped on officers who should have a presence on the street. Their pay has also been affected – I’m convinced that some politicians in this country won’t be happy until we’re emulating the U.S. with the poor policing the poor and private security guards and lawyers looking after the rich.
I once worked with local police and the gay community in my major regional city on a project where the police put in extra patrols to stop hate crime in known gay cruising areas. It worked and there was mutual consent and cooperation. What do you think happened to that project from 2010, when austerity bit?
I know that the police are daily dealing with the consequences of failure in other public services – from mental health to probation. They are many times mopping up in the gaps created by the failing state we are living in and are ill equipped to do it. But no one gives a damn because the police are the last back stop in many cases, albeit not always the best one.
As with other public services, some police start to blame the people they are supposed to be looking after as pressures and disgruntlements rise. I see this in my housing organisation too – I forget the technical term for it – but it happens. They turn the blame onto those who need them. It’s all part of how you destroy things. The police need more police but instead they get ‘officers’ with less power and training to assist. It’s all done on the cheap.
In conclusion, I’m not denying that we have unacceptable problems with the police.
But if we don’t consider what else is going on, how can we truly address their problems which also belong to us? We are heading down the route of more gizmos to manage order in society (CCTV – drones now! ) to save costs when in fact the best way to get policing by consent is for the coppers to ‘fucking be there’ in person and getting consent by the way they do it.
Even this is abused – think about Thatcher’s use of the police to fight the unions and the potential for any government with authoritarian tendencies to misuse the service. The police therefore are also always at risk of being conflated with political agendas too. What sort of so-called democratic state allows such abuse? Thatcher’s abuse of the police force in the 80’s was actually a portent of the abuse of executive power we’ve seen since 2010 in my view.
Some of these are serious issues and need to be discussed more widely but they all add up to the same thing. We deserve better but so do the police. If we don’t recognise that then where can improvements come from?
Look up!
Currently on BBC iPlayer is a series about the Met Police called ‘Bent Coppers’. Deals with the 1970s and 1980s. Only Robert Mark managed to weed out a lot including senior officers. But after he retired things soon reverted back to the normal. Worth seeing.
Having two ex-coppers and an ex-SOCO/photographer as part of my sibling group has given me a ‘strengths-eye’ view of it all. They all agreed after May devastated the force and backroom that the only way back was an reconstituted backroom and a lot of feet on the street, coupled to a new, in-house, recruitment that did not weed out the liberal/left/gay but the homophobes/racists/misogynists already in the force. There were a lot of good coppers that were progressively made redundant, burnt-out, pissed-off or harassed till they quit. 40-odd years of Tory exacerbated issues, although the Met has always been bent (which why neither of my sibs wanted to work there).
Good post John,
I got to know a policeman who was a fellow member of an audio forum. He was most unusual in being a ‘real’ Christian who never got promoted because he didn’t have a funny handshake or tolerate any corrupt practices. He worked in a major English city was responsible for co-writing a book on abuse in the family. He patrolled the toughest parish in that city was responsible for a huge drop in crime because the people trusted him. Shamed big business into coughing up £250K to build a playground for the local children.
A female inspector, a fast tracked university candidate decided that he was no longer needed guess what happened to the crime rate once he departed.