Former police officers have come forward and spoken to the press about allegations of severe misconduct by Metropolitan Police officers. Over the years I’ve read many accounts of Met officers acting badly and in the eighties I personally encountered officers whose relationship with the truth could charitably be said to be ‘distant’ and who had no qualms about lying under oath in court. The Met is not I’m afraid a ‘clean hands’ police force. It wasn’t a clean hands police force in the 60’s and early 70’s but the corruption was partially cleaned up when Sir Robert Mark took over as Commissioner in 1972. Unfortunately since then the corruption has returned but unlike in the sixties and seventies where cops were taking money from pornographers and armed robbers in exchange for favours or favourable treatment if arrested, today’s corruption is more political and managerial rather than financial.
There has always been some corruption and bad practises associated with the Metropolitan Police however these latest allegations by a former detective and other former officers including one who specialised in child abuse cases are absolutely gobsmacking. According to the Daily Express, which is in turn quoting from an investigation carried out by the Sunday Telegraph, a South London child abuse unit was governed by a target driven culture that led to tampering with evidence and to innocent people being accused of and arrested for alleged sexual offences.
The Express said:
Former detectives in Scotland Yard’s child abuse investigation team have claimed they were ordered to arrest and caution innocent people to meet targets, while one officer was allegedly told to tamper with evidence at the scene of the suspicious death of a baby.
A number of police officers who have since left the force have broken ranks and alleged that one of the Metropolitan Police’s most sensitive units is ‘broken’ and therefore children could be at risk.
The incendiary allegations made to the Sunday Telegraph include orders to arrest and caution innocent people over abuse offences and police ‘ticking boxes’ to falsely claim that work had been done.
It would be bad enough to see these alleged abuses taking place in general policing or in specialised robbery units as there is ample evidence from past historical corruption in the Met that such abuses can lead to miscarriages of justice or the police failing to apprehend or prosecute criminals. But it is far far worse to see these sort of alleged abuses taking place in specialised units that are involved in curtailing child abuse. We might be looking at a situation where major abuse crimes have gone unpoliced whilst innocent people have been fitted up for abuse crimes.
If there is indeed this sort of corruption and bad management going on in the Met’s specialised child abuse units then it might explain why there are few if any of the ‘difficult’ abuse cases, such as the Grooming Gangs being uncovered in London. After all these cases are particularly difficult both from a policing perspective and a political one to deal with. It’s quite possible that a bent abuse unit might instead of pouring resources into a Grooming Gang case that might have serious political fall out, could instead focus on cases that can be more easily cleared up or even cut corners to such an extent that innocent people end up being pressured into accepting official cautions for abuse that they did not carry out.
The article in the Express does not make it clear whether those innocent people who were arrested and cautioned for abuse crimes were merely arrested and given the official arrest caution or whether they were pressured into admitting something that they did not do and therefore accepting an official police caution. If it is the first then that is a blatant abuse of process as police should not be arresting people who have done nothing wrong. If it is the second scenario then it means that the Met are making up evidence sufficient to justify a caution and pressuring those arrested, who might be vulnerable or suggestible, to accept the official caution, with all that this entails for criminal record and sexual offender register purposes. If the second scenario is correct then it means that not only are there entirely innocent people who have had their lives ruined by being unjustly tagged as a nonce but also that the real abusers who commit terrible crimes might have got away without being apprehended.
The Express added:
Some detectives allegedly made complaints about the actions of their superiors which they claim were ‘covered up’ while some in the Met acted as if it was an ‘old boys’ network’, the paper reported.
Tom Coling, who served on the child abuse investigations team in south London, claimed that the ‘ineffective’ and ‘bullying’ management asked him to carry out a series of ‘unlawful’ acts including orders to unbag and replace evidence he had seized while investigating a baby’s death.
Several of his former colleagues claimed that they were pressured to caution people who they believed were entirely innocent because the units were ‘target driven’. Officers have also alleged that they are too frightened to raise concerns about their colleague because of a ‘culture of protection’ in the police.
Police covering for other police and covering up misconduct is quite frankly the ‘same old same old’ when it comes to the Met. It’s why officers get away with bad behaviour and also why a man nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by colleagues and who then went onto murder Sarah Everard, was allowed to continue in the police with few if any questions asked. Readers should be extremely concerned about the allegations of evidence tampering, this is something that if it came to light prior to or during a trial of someone who had genuinely harmed a child, could have caused the trial to collapse and the guilty offender go free.
As for the allegations that one of the Met’s child abuse units was ‘target driven’ then that also is a matter for concern. Targets are fine in private sector areas like sales and marketing as they are major drivers of performance in those areas. Employees want to reach or exceed those targets because good or exceptional performance brings with it rewards. However in certain areas of the public sector, targets and a target culture can bring with them negative results. An obsession with meeting or exceeding targets can, in areas like that of policing, result in resources being removed from other areas of policing and put in the target driven areas or officers cutting corners in order to meet or exceed those policing targets.
The Metropolitan Police have, of course, denied that these allegations have any truth in them whatsoever. They might indeed have no foundation but the Met is now so bad and so distrusted that even if the allegations are not true, they are, because of the culture of the Met, very believable. Sadly the reputation of the Met has declined so much in recent years what with the politicisation and the failure to put sufficient resources into the areas of policing that Londoners desperately need, that it’s easy to look at the Met’s denial of substance of these allegations and say ‘well they would say that wouldn’t they?’
Whistle-blowers are sometimes not all that they seem, some are cranks and grifters and publicity seekers but I’m not getting that vibe off of the whistle-blower in this story. Here we have a man who appears to have been dedicated to his police job but who left to retrain as a family law solicitor, no mean feat and something that for me puts him in a different category to child abuse grifters like Jon Wedger. Also rather than go to tin foil hat outlets like UK Column News, which some who claim to be whistle-blowers have done, he’s gone to a major national newspaper which not only has the resources to check whether what he’s saying is truthful or credible, but which is also an outlet that would have a lot to lose if they got this story badly wrong.
It remains to be seen whether or not the claims made by Mr Coling and the other officers about malpractice and dishonesty at one of the Met’s child abuse specialist units. However as I said before, the Met is now so bad as a police force what with the politicisation, the kneeling for BLM/Marxist thugs, the by now obvious double standards by which they police, the splurging of money on ‘hate crime’ units whilst London’s Black population suffer horrific intra-communal violence, that claims like this are all too believable. If such malpractice and dishonesty was going to happen anywhere, it would of course happen in the Met.
Earlier this month I expressed exasperation at the Home Secretary and London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s decision to keep the failed London police chief Cressida Dick in post. I didn’t completely buy into the statement by the Home Office that ‘there was nobody else suitable for the job’. I suspected that Dick’s tenure at the Met has turned the job of Commissioner into a poison chalice and that Dick was being kept in place because there was more scandal, in addition to the Sarah Everard murder, coming down the line. If the claims made by Mr Coling and others can be shown to be broadly true and that there has been malpractice and dishonesty in one of the Met’s child abuse specialist units, then this might be that other scandal that I suspected would be coming down the road to hit the Met.
The idea that Dick has been left in place to soak up the proverbial shit from both the Everard scandal and other at the time unknown scandals is given some credence by a claim made by the Daily Mail about the worsening relationship between the Home Secretary Pritti Patel. The Mail is claiming that sources close to Ms Patel are stating that the Home Secretary believes that the Met is ‘rotten from the bottom to the top’. The Mail article also claims that Cressida Dick has been obstructive and ‘defensive’ over the Everard case and that Ms Patel wants to reform the way police chiefs are appointed, partly in order to get the best person for the job but also, in the case of London, to remove Sadiq Khan’s effective veto over who should run the Met Police.
These latest revelations about the conduct of the Met and the current scandals that afflict this force do show that something is badly wrong with the Met and how it is run. It’s not being run in such a way as to properly protect Londoners or give them confidence or trust in the way that they are policed. Londoners deserve better policing than what they are getting.
