There’s a great article by Steerpike in a recent edition of the Spectator which is worth looking up and reading. It’s one of those articles that hits a series of nails right on the head.
Steerpike starts out by stating that which many of us know and that is that there are a whole load of public bodies that are quite frankly useless and shit and which have had a pretty bad 2021 in terms of both achievements and public image. But Steerpike then went onto describe the entity that has had the worst year and in my view deservedly so when it comes to failure and a bad public image. That entity is the Metropolitan Police.
Steerpike said:
But in a crowded field, the Metropolitan Police surely take the gold medal for the most incompetent and inept institution. On every count, the force seems to have gone backwards this year. It managed the rare feat of a hat-trick of very public scandals this year without a single resignation. There was the disgrace of the Sarah Everard vigil, when policemen dragged women away in handcuffs for mourning a girl murdered by a serving officer. There was the shambles of the Euro 2020 final, when drunken hooligans marauded around Wembley with the Met nowhere to be seen.
And, perhaps most disturbingly, there was the Daniel Morgan inquiry which branded the force ‘institutionally corrupt’ with chief Cressida Dick personally censured for obstruction and named as one of those responsible for delaying the panel access to the police database. All this, alongside the humiliation of the long-running Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protests at which officers seemed to get more annoyed at by-standers than those actually disrupting the public.
That’s not to mention other disturbing episodes which stain the Met’s recent history. Earlier this month an inquest jury delivered a damning verdict on what they called ‘fundamental failings’ in the force’s investigation of four murders in 2014 and 2015 by serial killer Stephen Port. Accusations from the victim’s families that homophobia played a part in officers being unwilling to investigate comes came 18 months after similar claims that race played a role in the mishandling of the murders last June of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, two mixed-race sisters killed in a north-west London park. The Met initially refused to take seriously family members’ reports that the women were missing; two officers have since been jailed for criminal misconduct after taking photos of the women’s bodies and sharing images of the crime scene on WhatsApp.
Steerpike then went on to say that these failures might be somewhat excused by the public if the Met were doing a good job in tackling the violent, sexual and property crime that afflicts London. The problem that the Met has is that they are not doing this. On top of the failures listed above, the Met has done little to keep Londoners properly safe from crime. Sure they send officers reactively after a stabbing or a sex attack but from what I can gather talking to Londoners, the Met is not doing enough to prevent crime. Also when it comes to property crime like burglaries or criminal damage, the Met quite frankly just can’t be arsed. In situations like that it would be so unusual to see a police officer attend that it is something that would be remarked upon.
The Met is indeed a mess and the rot comes from the top down, from the Commissioner and the senior management down. It is these police managers who decided that what London needed was not police patrolling the streets but instead to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds detailing officers to police what people say online in their Tweets.
Cressida Dick the Commissioner is so obviously a failure and in a sensible system populated with sensible senior officers then the best way to turn the Met around would be to have her resign or be sacked. The problem is that the most likely potential replacements for Dick which are Neil Basu the specialist operations chief at the Met or Stephen House the Deputy Commissioner who have both mired in scandal in the past of one form or another. Basu is known for threatening to prosecute journalists over a leak case and House because of his former force, Police Scotland’s failure to rescue a woman following a car crash and other policing scandals. That these two policing failures are most likely to succeed Dick is testament to the dearth of management talent not just in the Met but in British policing as a whole.
What London needs is an honest reforming police officer who will refocus the police’s work onto those areas of crime that most bother Londoners. The Met needs to get out of the politics game of pandering to the likes of BLM or spending too much time monitoring Twitter and get back into the thief taking one, but I see nobody in the Met’s senior management team who is likely to be able to do that. In the meantime those who suffer will be ordinary Londoners who will continue to live in an environment of ever increasing crime and increasingly worse policing.
Isn’t the actual purpose of many of these public bodies to give unemployables a job? If that is indeed the case, they are probably quite a success, and the more inefficient they are the better. Regarding the Met, there is no political will to sort the problem out, the plebs don’t matter and, with no effective opposition the government can do whatever they like.
Certainly seems to be the case if the idiots at various local councils are anything to go by. Agree on the Met there needs to be a will to sort it out and I don’t see Ms Patel having that will.
An edited version of my response to some of the crap in the original article.
Quoted from the original article
There was the disgrace of the Sarah Everard vigil, when policemen dragged women away in handcuffs for mourning a girl murdered by a serving officer.
End of quote.
Here are a couple of concepts with which the writer of the article may not be familiar.
Truth and honesty.
By truth, we mean the whole truth. If the whole truth is not expressed, then it may be no better than a lie. And it is not honest to express something as truth which is no better than a lie.
And if you don’t like the word lie, perhaps you would prefer “economical with the truth”.
So let’s reveal one of the failures of this writer to express the truth.
These women were not taken away in handcuffs for mourning. Many thousands were present at this protest, seemingly to mourn, and they were not taken away. Many, many more were able to mourn in private, and they were not taken away.
Now let us stand back here.
All of those who attended this mass mourning selfishly imposed their will and the costs of this “mourning” on fellow members of society. In this, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the selfish and childish XR and IB protesters. And it would be little surprise to me at least to find that these “mourners” were later present at such protests.
None of us who were not present can truly know the facts behind this “dragging away”. But what is more likely? That the police deliberately targeted “mourners” merely for mourning? Or is it that these mourners acted in such a manner as to leave the police, in the execution of their responsibility to the wider public, no alternative? There is plenty of evidence which shows that some of the “mourners” desired to use this opportunity as a pretext to express their rage at the police in general, under the convenient pretext of mourning the death of Sarah Everard.
And while we are on the topic of protests and murders, I see little evidence of mourners protesting at the death of “little Arthur”. But then the murderer of Arthur was a woman and not a policeman. And that does not fit in with the prevailing narrative that all men are dangerous (and only men) and that the police are nothing but a menace to law abiding citizens.
This early part of the article only goes to show, a view I have held for a long time, that journalists, with few exceptions, are a menace to society; made even worse as the direct contribution that journalists (and their close relatives, social and political commentators) make to the wellbeing of humans in society is minimal, indeed often negative. In fact, their contribution to “society” is far less than that of the police force criticised in this article.