The Metropolitan police cannot be reformed: it must be given its final rites and buried for good. I made this argument in the first column I ever wrote for this newspaper, nearly a decade ago: the case is surely even more compelling now.
By finding “institutional racism, sexism and homophobia” within the force, Louise Casey and her review have underlined a basic fact: most of the capital’s population cannot trust the Met with their safety. It is, as Doreen Lawrence puts it, “rotten to the core”. It took the murder of her son for London’s police force to be first damned for “institutional racism” by the Macpherson report nearly quarter of a century ago. And yet nothing changed, aided by a culture of denial among politicians, such as the then-Labour justice secretary, Jack Straw, who said, a decade later, the judgment no longer applied.
This time, the politicians coo, things will change. But are they right? The home secretary, Suella Braverman, is committed to crudely cultivating a reputation as a cartoon villain, not to reform; and given both she and the Met’s commissioner, Mark Rowley, have dismissed Casey’s judgment of institutional bigotry, the requisite measures to overcome it will not be taken. While Keir Starmer promises his government “will lead police reform”, his repeated defence of former commissioner Cressida Dick showed that his instincts are to genuflect before powerful institutions, not to fight for justice.
But scrapping the Met – that is, accepting the current institution is irredeemable and finding other institutions to carry out its functions – isn’t enough. This is a moment to reconsider the entire system of policing.
Police officers like to style themselves as a “thin blue line” that prevents society from collapsing into violent anarchy. But this is undermined by an inconvenient fact: only a tiny proportion of crime is actually solved by police officers. In 2021, for example, 19 out of every 20 burglaries and violent offences went unsolved in England and Wales, as did 98.7% of rapes. In four out of 10 cases closed, a suspect hadn’t even been identified. In the vast majority of cases, crime is simply not something dealt with by the police.
Neither can all too many police officers credibly claim to form a thin blue line between safety and violence. Eight out of 10 officers across the UK accused of domestic violence between 2018 and 2021 kept their jobs, as did more than half of Met officers found guilty of sexual conduct between 2016 and 2020. Include Casey’s disturbing findings of widespread homophobic, racist and misogynistic attitudes among police officers, and it is delusional to conclude the Met are the great protectors of the civilian population.
In practice, much of what the police do across the country is deal with social harms committed by people who are disproportionately poor and/or in need of mental health services. Misdemeanours perpetrated by people on lower incomes are far more policed than those of the rich, which is why you are 23 times more likely to be prosecuted for benefit fraud than tax fraud, even though tax crimes cost us all nine times more. Neither is it surprising that an institutionally racist police force is far more likely to stop and search Black citizens than their white counterparts.
And yet our political elite cling to a myth – that the starting point for solving social harms committed by mostly poor people should always be the police. Those challenging this mantra are dismissed as completely divorced from reality. But there is nothing naive about acknowledging that one model has manifestly failed, and looking for other answers – such as rolling back the very frontiers of policing.
In some examples, this is straightforward. If you have a mobile phone or a bike stolen, the police will almost certainly not bother to investigate: you are contacting them for a crime reference for insurance purposes. Why are the police, rather than a specific agency, charged with this task?
Moreover, crime itself flourishes in contexts of economic insecurity like bacteria in a petri dish. So a war on poverty and insecure housing would be a far more effective answer to our problems than expanding police numbers. So too is a massive expansion in mental health services: nearly half of prisoners suffer from anxiety or depression, while an astonishing 60% have suffered a traumatic brain injury.
But there’s a counter-argument: addressing root causes of social harm is all well and good, but what about crimes in the here and now? For inspiration, it’s worth looking across the Atlantic. In Denver, for instance, a team of health workers deal with incidents involving non-violent, vulnerable people, such as trespassing and mental health crises. These are cases previously dealt with by police, but which is more appropriate? Or take the city of Eugene, Oregon, where an agency of young medical workers and mental health counsellors called Cahoots – Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets – have been dealing with incidents previously responded to by armed cops. In 2019, Cahoots dealt with 20% of all calls to the city’s public safety communication centre; of those 24,000 calls, just 311 needed police backup.
So let’s make the Casey Review an opportunity to consider profoundly different – but workable – alternatives to the broken status quo. London’s disgraced Metropolitan police force must go – but only as a first step, before we abandon our illusions in policing for good.
