News headlines this week were dominated by the publication of Baroness Casey’s long-awaited review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police, which was prompted by the public outcry following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police officer in March 2021. As highlighted by Baroness Casey in the foreword to her report, Sarah’s mother Susan Everard spoke courageously and almost overwhelmingly of her torment at the thought of her daughter’s last hours and her outrage that Sarah’s killer “masqueraded as a policeman in order to get what he wanted.”
I consider the fact that other Police officers failed to pull that mask from the face of the rapist and killer who was amongst them, and, indeed, by their actions and behaviour may have helped him – and others – to keep such a mask in place for so long, to lie at the heart of all that is wrong and rotten in Policing.
Baroness Casey eloquently summarises this problem in her report –
“Of course I accept that so many police officers go to work for the right reasons. They are committed to public service, and I thank them for that. But policing needs to accept that the job can also attract predators and bullies – those who want power over their fellow citizens, and to use those powers to cause harm and discriminate. All of British policing needs to be alive to this very serious risk. It needs to keep them out when they try to get in, to root them out where they exist, and to guard against the corrosive effects that their actions have on trust, confidence and the fundamental Peelian principles of policing by consent.
I am unconvinced that police forces are fully alive to that risk, nor that the Met fully understands the gravity of its situation as a whole. If a plane fell out of the sky tomorrow, a whole industry would stop and ask itself why. It would be a catalyst for self-examination, and then root and branch reform. Instead the Met preferred to pretend that their own perpetrators of unconscionable crimes were just ‘bad apples’, or not police officers at all. So throughout this review, I have asked myself time and again, if these crimes cannot prompt that self-reflection and reform, then what will it take?”
As the Casey report highlights, one of the fundamental problems in the management and culture of the Met is that its “processes do not effectively root out bad officers…” and it is too easy for senior officers to “ignore poor performing officers or let those with conduct issues get away with bad behaviour.”
“This Met is tasked with upholding law and order and keeping citizens safe. But it has failed over time to ensure the integrity of its officers and therefore of the organisation. Despite the obvious signals of major failure – with heinous crimes perpetrated by serving Met officers – it did not stop to question its processes.
Policing will attract those who wish to abuse the powers conferred by a warrant card. The Met has not taken this fact seriously…”
The report correctly focuses on the fact that concerns about officers raised through the misconduct or complaints process are not well recorded and are “more likely to be dismissed than acted upon… time and time again, those complaining are not believed or supported. ”
This, to me, is the original sin which lies at the heart of the failure of the Police to properly police themselves, to catch the criminals in their own ranks and prevent abuse of power by bullies, predators and other corrupt actors.
The Police mindset which I have witnessed over three decades of representing the victims of Police misconduct, is that complaints are generally treated as hostile attacks on the Police as a whole and the spirit with which they are half-heartedly investigated or the bias with which they are rejected (after consideration of the same facts which time and time again will lead a civil court to subsequently rule in favour of the victim) is one apparently motivated – in terms of culture and processes – by a fraternal spirit whose primary focus is to protect brother officers (and it almost always is ‘brother’ officers) from the ‘outsiders’.
“Behaviour which in most other organisations would lead to instant dismissal or serious disciplinary action – particularly amongst those who work routinely with vulnerable people – is too often addressed through management action or reflective practice.”
The often very intelligent people who lead the Police seem willfully blind to this failing. The Police as an institution seem to define as a virtue and a point of pride that they ‘stick up’ for their own, like soldiers in a war. But this is not a war – the public are those to whom the Police must, by definition, owe the highest duty, but whom all too often are treated as the alien, the other, the rival team, the enemy.
This is epitomised by every Professional Standards Department investigator who cloaks himself in the language of a judge, purporting to objectively weigh the facts “on the balance of probabilities” but who always starts with his hand holding down one side of the scales and rarely, if ever, removes it completely.
I can think of so many cases I have personally handled in which the initial Police misconduct investigation fully exonerated the officers concerned of any wrongdoing – often delivering that decision in hectoring, lecturing tones, patronising and victim blaming the complainant – only for the Police to apparently ‘reconsider’ the evidence when faced with Court proceedings and put their money where their mouth should have been. I point as a recent example to the case of my client Allon.
Witness also the recent response of Merseyside Police to the finding of a judge and jury that one of their officers had not only unlawfully assaulted my client John Kennedy and broken his arm during a ‘welfare visit’, but that this officer and his colleague had, in effect, then conspired to frame John for an offence he had not committed. Merseyside Police refused to accept any criticism of the officers and indeed ‘commended’ them for their actions that night.
These are not signs of an institution which has its priorities right, but one in which there is a deeply unhealthy ‘code of silence’, almost like the oath of omerta which binds a gang together, as I have written about here.
Even when the Police do apologise, it is very often through gritted teeth or in a type of passive-aggressive manner which only succeeds in adding insult to injury, indicating a real failure on the part of the Police to want to learn from their mistakes and change.
What Is The Solution?
Baroness Casey’s charge-sheet against the Met includes the following vices, sadly ingrained in Policing, about which I have been blogging for years –
- Too much hubris, too little humility
- Defensiveness and denial
- Systems which support wrongdoers not whistleblowers
- A lack of accountability and transparency
These are all symptoms of a wider malaise which Louise Casey succinctly identifies in this phrase: “the Met has become unanchored from the principles of policing by consent.”
The key recommendations of her report are as follows –
- Reform of the misconduct process;
- Change of vetting standards “with a relentless focus on identifying and reducing opportunities for predators who seek to abuse the powers of a police officer…”;
- Making it easier to dismiss officers guilty of misconduct;
- A kind of ‘truth and reconcilation’ commission – “The Met should introduce a new process with Londoners to apologise for past failings and rebuild consent”, particularly with ethnic communities, women and children;
- Greater financial and emotional support for frontline officers;
- Listening to Londoner’s voices – creating mechanisms for greater transparency and accountability.
If sufficient progress is not achieved within 2- 5 years then Baroness Casey recommends that “more radical, structural options” such as breaking up the Met into three smaller Policing institutions might be required, or in other words, turning a moribund Goliath into several brand-new Davids. This type of reformation would be similar to the transformation of the Royal Ulster Constabulary into the Police Service of Northern Ireland: exorcising the ghosts of the old system in an attempt to offer a fresh start for all, with transparency and accountability at its heart.
The ‘founding constitution’ of British Policing are the so-called Peelian principles, named after the founder of the Met, Sir Robert Peel. These enshrine the idea that Policing derives its legitimacy from the people, rather than the state – founded upon the “approval, respect and affection of the public” (Charles Reith, 1956) rather than originating from a top-down projection of fear, surveillance and government power. As ‘members of the public in uniform’, constables are supposed to owe their primary devotion to the public – but all too often become enmeshed and corrupted by the pull and lure of loyalty to the uniform.
Baroness Casey culminates her report with the following, powerful plea –
“The Met cannot afford to squander the valuable contributions of people who want to make policing better. It needs to be prepared to listen, to understand that communication goes both ways and that they have to be humble and learn what they can give. The Met does not always know better, and cannot have all the answers…If the Met can rid itself of this tendency to want people to reaffirm what they’re doing as opposed to genuinely looking for insights and changes so it can improve relationships with local communities, then it might start to turn a corner.”
I very much applaud that sentiment and wish to not only echo her words, but to amplify them. It may not have escaped your notice that the examples I turned to above regarding Police failures to recognise misconduct and properly police themselves were all drawn from Forces the length and the breadth of the country, other than the Met (specifically – Hertfordshire, Merseyside, Derbyshire, Devon & Cornwall – the list could easily go on).
The Police could go such a very long way to fixing most of their fundamental problems by co-operating in the creation of a transparent, robust and rigorously independent complaint system; and that process would start by taking on board the fair criticisms which have been directed at them for decades by commentators such as myself.
I would strongly urge the government to ensure that every Police Force in England and Wales is now investigated in the same thorough and rigorous manner; that there be a ‘Casey Inquiry’ into the whole of British policing. If Policing by consent is broken in London, it is broken everywhere and it is not only the leadership of the Met which needs to wake up to that fact and start learning lessons quickly.
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