The Economist February 12th 2022 47
BritainLawandorderWhat’s going on here, then?
B
ritain’s largestpolice force is stag
gering from crisis to crisis. Over the
past few months much awful behaviour by
Metropolitan Police officers has been un
covered, with more almost certain to come
out. The force has enraged mps by wading
clumsily into politics. Its attempts to clean
house seem desperate. In early February
Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Po
lice commissioner, wrote to every officer,
telling racists, homophobes and sexists to
“leave now”.
The Met is failing on three fronts. It has
been unable to root out prejudice and mis
behaviour; it has lost the confidence of ma
ny Londoners; and it has offended politi
cians. Each failing compounds the others
and makes them harder to fix. The Met’s
size and complex role as a city police force
with national responsibilities make re
form both urgent and almost impossible.
The cultural crisis at the Met centres on
what criminologists call a “signal crime”—
an enormity that suggests something has
gone badly wrong. In March 2021 an officerabducted, raped and murdered Sarah Eve
rard, a woman he had never met. It tran
spired that he had previously been accused
of indecent exposure and that colleagues
had nicknamed him “the rapist”. Two in
quiries have been launched, into how the
Met hired him and how deep misogyny
runs in the force.
Other examples of bad behaviour have
piled up. Last December two former offi
cers were imprisoned for sharing pictures
that they had taken of murdered sisters (as
they put it, “two birds”). A police watchdog
said it might reopen an investigation into
why officers failed to realise that four gay
men found dead in 2014 and 2015 had all
been killed by the same man, and whether
homophobia clouded their judgment. In
January the Met apologised to a female aca
demic who had been abused by officers
during a stripsearch nine years earlier.
The most alarming episode, for what it
suggests about the extent and resilience of
a dire culture in the Metropolitan Police,
was revealed on February 1st. After a longinvestigation, the Independent Office for
Police Conduct reported that officers in
Westminster had joked for years about rap
ing women and turning Africans into dog
food. Others had complained, only to be ig
nored or humiliated. Women officers were
treated as the “weary female” and told to
“play the game or stay quiet”.
“All organisations have cultures, but
none are so strong as policing cultures,”
says Sarah Charman, who studies coppers
at the University of Portsmouth. Officers
are pushed to band together and conform
because their safety on the street depends
on knowing that other officers have their
backs. If a police force or station has a rac
ist, misogynistic culture, officers are under
huge pressure to take part or shut up.
The Met has hired more women and
ethnic minorities over the years. That may
have diluted the old canteen culture, but
clearly not enough. Nor do cultural train
ing or highminded missives from senior
officers seem to have achieved much. Man
agers sometimes go through the motions
of investigating misconduct while making
clear that they do not believe in the pro
cess, says a former Met officer: “Police offi
cers and schoolchildren are two groups
who know whether people are being seri
ous or not.”
Londoners’ faith that the police treat
everyone fairly has diminished in the past
two years, possibly due to the murders of
George Floyd in America and of Sarah EveLondon’s main police force is failing on several fronts. But it seems
impervious to pressure→Alsointhissection
48 NorthernIrishdevolution
49 Bagehot:Politicalunpopulists
— Read more at: Economist.com/Britain