The optimist in me believes that the Metropolitan Police is a failing rather than failed police force. It is quite clear for anyone to see that the Met cannot properly keep order on the streets, protect the law abiding or investigate properly the many crimes of burglary, car theft, criminal damage, violence, gangsterism, domestic disturbances and social disorder that make life a misery for all too many Londoners.

In addition to the Met’s failure to deal with these sorts of crimes and make London both safer and a better place to live, from what I’ve heard from traditional Londoners, both black and white I need to say, who have not yet fled, the Met have also lost a lot of public support. This cynicism about the police goes way beyond the sort of stuff that I heard about when I was younger and living there. It’s no longer grumbles about officious cops breaking up dockers dice games or officers smoking confiscated weed in their cars on Wanstead Flats, it’s much worse that that.

What I’m hearing from my contacts there is that many people feel abandoned by the Met. They know that the Met will find resources for speed traps on roads or to run things like their ‘Hate Crime Hub’ or to pose and posture about for this cause and that. People I’ve spoken to are additionally very aware that the police are quite willing to wheel out senior officers to blather on in council magazines or local papers about ‘community’ and ‘respect’ or whatever is the currently fashionable buzzword. But they also know that should they get burgled or attacked in the street or have their car stolen or broken into, the Met’s response is often to not give a toss.

The only reason I consider the Met to be failing rather than failed is that they are still managing to investigate serious crimes such as murder and be able to prepare cases that can be passed on to the Crown Prosecution Service for action. They might not be getting all the murderers, just as they are not getting all the rapists or robbers, but they are getting enough to not be classified as completely and utterly useless.

The Met Police is also classified by me as failing instead of failed because there are still some lower level officers and older more senior officers who care about real policing. They try their best to prevent crime and effectively and efficiently search out and investigate offenders. But they are let down by the culture of their senior management teams. These decent officers are unfortunately forced to play the dirty bent hand they’ve been dealt by their senior management teams and police in accordance with the orders of this management. The upper levels of Met Police management have allowed themselves to be captured and manipulated by various identity politics groups and be led by destructive ideologies many of which appear to have emerged from the diseased fundament of academia. The result of this capture of senior management by identity politics groups is that the bad, in terms of the situation that the senior management have created and imposed, drives out the good by which I mean the decent, honest and policing focused officers.

Without the good officers who stay and try to police properly despite the wibblings of the Met’s incompetent and ideologically captured senior management, the Met could indeed be quite readily described as a failed police force. If these decent officers go, either to other forces that might be better managed, or just leave the force, then there will be nothing left of a Met Police that aspires to police properly. All that will be left will be a gang that is made up, from top to bottom, of sub-optimal, politicised, ideologically driven driven individuals who don’t think for themselves but only carry out orders from senior officers who might not even be able to recite the dictionary definition of a woman. When that happens, everything in London will be policed, except of course the crimes that the police were initially set up to control, prevent and investigate.

At present the Metropolitan Police are merely failing. Sadly it would not take much from what I can see to convert it into being a failed force. The Met is on the brink of failure and the failure is going to be of little benefit to law abiding Londoners.