What comes after the Metropolitan Police?

It would be understating things to say that, with the publication of the Angiolini Report, the Metropolitan Police (Met) were now in ‘special measures’; that line had already been crossed in June 2022, when the force was put there by HM Inspectorate of the Constabulary.

Serious failings

With the successive revelations on everything from 70,000 unrecorded crimes in a year to glaring racial disparities in the use of stop and search powers, public trust in the Met would have been justifiably low even without the scandal on the strip searching of Child Q, or the festering culture of misogyny laid bare in a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, or later in the Casey Report.

The evidence that the Metropolitan Police is not serving the people of London, and is not placed to keep them safe, became overwhelming some time ago. The latest report from Lady Elish Angiolini setting out the grotesque catalogue of failures that allowed Wayne Couzens to abduct, rape and murder Sarah Everard in March 2021, while still a serving police officer, is only one more log on the fire – though it blazes especially fierce.

It is reaching the point where it makes less sense to talk about ‘rebuilding trust’ in an institution, when the passing weeks and months simply keep dragging that institution’s reputation further and further into the abyss. As Caroline Russell, Chair of the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee, put it in an interview with Sky News: “Hearing all those missed opportunities… for every single Londoner, it rocks us; it rocks our trust and confidence in the police, and it leaves us all seeing the rot that we’ve heard about… laid bare.”

If the Met is not keeping Londoners safe, what can we do about it?

Lady Angiolini’s report makes a number of welcome recommendations regarding a zero-tolerance policy towards misogyny, better training on indecent exposure offences and better sharing of information among forces. Certainly, there is much to be said about proper resource management, and not simply addressing the funding shortfalls that have blighted the police and other public services in the wake of years of under investment. Late attempts by various government ministers to encourage rapid recruitment have not mended the damage done here, and it is not hard to see why; with forces stretched thin already and institutional oversight becoming more myopic, pressure to expand on a shoestring inevitably leads to cutting corners.

More fundamentally, it might well be asked whether the police’s time and resources are well spent pursuing teenagers on the streets for relatively tiny quantities of cannabis, for example, or policing peaceful democratic protestors. There are good reasons to ask why the police, and not mental health or housing or other rehabilitative services, are required to address behavioural issues that arise from other social problems, funnelling more people into the criminal justice system in the process. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that investing in and mending these other tattered patches of our social fabric will be far more effective over the long term at reducing crime and anti-social behaviour. The aim should, ideally, be to make the presence of the police in a community redundant, rather than treating them as social workers of last resort.

Should the Met even survive as an institution?

In Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary eventually became so discredited as an organisation, so stained by the stigma of years of corruption, that a political decision was made following the ratification of the Belfast Agreement to replace it with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Similar remodelling projects have taken place in many communities, particularly those that are emerging from recent histories of conflict or political repression.

It is worth giving very serious consideration to whether or not the time has come for us to do away with the Metropolitan Police in its current form. Whatever replaces it has a fearsome task ahead, but it may be better placed to meet them shorn of this force’s recent, ignominious record. For the good of our communities, we need to begin discussing what comes after the Met.

Tim Kiely is a criminal barrister at Red Lion Chambers
redlionchambers.co.uk