Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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This is despite the failures of successive home secretaries, from Theresa May’s disastrous slashing of the numbers of officers by 20,000 – only now being very belatedly addressed – to Priti Patel’s treatment of the police as little more than handy photo opportunities. Harper examines key episodes from the Met’s recent history, with frank contributions from insiders, in a book that should be essential reading for the new commissioner. He notes the problems the Met now faces as a result of the enormous rise in cybercrime, unrecognised by the government until 2017, when the Office for National Statistics finally started logging online fraud and computer misuse, and then found that 5m offences had been reported in the previous 12 months. Harper quotes late on a story from an anonymous lord justice of appeal that a scammer at his door was impersonating police.

The result is a devastating picture of a police force riven with corruption, misogyny and incompetence.In the case of murderer Wayne Couzens, who killed Sarah Everard, Harper highlights how the police referred to their colleague as a “former” officer to deflect blame.

Consider the recent memoir by the first black Met Police man Norwell Roberts, and his experience of malice at some stations, and not others.You can equally make the case that the Met has always stumbled dysfunctionally from one scandal to the next, and that morale among officers has always been at an all-time low. She was made to reveal her sources in the Met as Murdoch tried to shift blame from the managerial strata to the workers in newsrooms. This means while we have heard the stories before, Harper offers an insiders’ angle, and it is revelatory in its findings. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence.

Sir Richard Henriques, the retired high court judge who witheringly reviewed the failures of Operation Midland, is quoted as suggesting that there are “far too many ranks” in the Met, no fewer than five above the rank of chief superintendent. In the 1990s, as Harper does cover, it was the Stephen Lawrence murder or rather the bungled investigation. Are those quoted, and those speaking anonymously, by querying the institution having a dig at it, and the individuals who worked and still work for it? Today, our everyday experiences leave us with no difficulty in believing that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the ranks.

There is, then, more than one side to the ‘fall’; internal and external, the Met’s culture (which is being aired more thanks to social media, and the Met last year brought in Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour) and how it’s serving the public by preventing and investigating crime. Among those quoted for the book are the ‘frauditor’ Peter Tickner, and retired senior cops Roy Ramm, and Bob Quick, and QC and judge Sir Richard Henriques, author of the riveting memoir From Crime to Crime; men featured or quoted in Professional Security Magazine over the years. The book charts Scotland Yard’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public. They include criminals working as officers, ranging from the corrupt to the psycho­pathic, to sweeping cuts that make the job virtually impossible, huge rises in “new” cyber crime that require new skills and resources, and the drug laws that give criminals easy access to huge incomes, which in turn fuels other criminal activity.

If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair?The Met police has had an annus horribilis, from the jailing of its officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard, to scandals involving sexist and racist “banter”, to the conviction of two officers for posting photographs of the murdered sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and culminating in the controversial departure of Cressida Dick and the arrival last month of her replacement, Mark Rowley. A fish may rot from its head, as author wondered in a concluding chapter, but you could be more forensic and ask whether the problem in the hierarchy is rather of a lack of grip from the top down to stations (and why does one station have a better occupational culture than another? That Mackey stayed in his vehicle led to visceral anger from rank and file cops, as stoked up (or reported on, take your pick) in the mainstream media. One senior officer says the Met should now be reviewing every missing persons case in the UK, and comparing it to Couzens’ movements. This was the time when corruption among detectives was so endemic that the commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, famously declared that the measure of a good force was that it “catches more crooks than it employs”.