One drizzly evening this summer, I was standing – surrounded by police officers – on the street outside a hotel housing asylum seekers. Protestors outside, from grandmothers with wilting M&S bags-for-life to hoodied boys taking the piss out of my questions, repeated the same thing about the soggy officers around them: they weren’t on their side.
Old Bill was guilty of all sorts of ills, according to them. Bussing counter-protestors with anti-racism placards to the hotel to stir up trouble (an unevidenced claim spread online by Nigel Farage), shutting protestors behind a cage of crowd-control barriers, wasting resources by sending so many officers to the site, ignoring reports by local girls harassed by asylum seekers (denied by the force in question, when I chased this up).
The common accusation behind all these complaints was of “two-tier policing”: this idea, popularised by the former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman, that police in Britain are tough on actions associated with the right (anti-lockdown rallies, asylum hotel protests, “statue protection”) and soft on the left (pro-Palestine, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and Stand Up to Racism demos). Ahead of a pro-Palestinian march on the same weekend as Armistice Day in 2023, Braverman wrote of senior police officers perceived to “play favourites”.
“Two-tier Keir” is now a common nickname for the Prime Minister on the radical right, which sees the police as just another institution captured by the lanyard-wearing liberal blob – shaped by a distant establishment obsessed with diversity, political correctness and atoning for Britain’s sins. Police officers spend more time taking the knee than nicking wronguns, goes the cliché.
That’s the theory. In practice, time and again, we see bigoted thugs in uniform speaking and behaving in ways that betray a very different culture. The latest is a BBC Panorama exposé, in which a reporter working undercover at Charing Cross police station heard Metropolitan Police officers dismissing rape claims, saying immigrants should be shot and glorifying the use of force against suspects.
A sergeant of near 20 years’ service dismissed a pregnant woman’s allegations of rape and being kicked in the stomach – “that’s what she says” – when concerns were raised about releasing her alleged attacker on bail. A constable revelled in seeing a colleague stomp on a suspect’s leg and said he had offered to say in a witness statement that the man had tried to kick the officer first. Another said an immigrant overstaying his visa should have “a bullet through his head”, and called Algerians “scum” and “cunts” and Somalis “fucking ugly”.
In response, the Met has suspended nine officers and one staffer, and two further officers have been removed from frontline duties.
“It undermines this whole idea of ‘woke’ policing, doesn’t it?” an ex-Met officer, with recent close knowledge of Charing Cross’s custody suite, told me. “I mean, they’re hardly going into pubs and talking about misgendering people, are they?”
We know this, of course. From the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer to the treatment of Mina Smallman’s daughters, stabbed to death in a London park, the Met has repeatedly shown its dark heart – an institution deemed “institutionally racist, homophobic and misogynistic” in Louise Casey’s major review two years ago. Still this characterisation is denied by the Met Commissioner Mark Rowley. His predecessor Cressida Dick also rejected such claims.
The Charing Cross scandal comes just nine months after the Met was moved out of special measures by the police watchdog, undermining Rowley’s attempts to clean up the force. But this is not a case of one bad branch of the Met, or even one police force – over the last three years, eight police forces (excluding the Met) have been in special measures, for reasons including “profound inappropriate behaviour”, not recording domestic abuse, and failing to protect vulnerable people.
But it does seem the bigger and more powerful the police force, the deeper the rot. In fact, I’m told that the Westminster borough unit, which covers Charing Cross police station, sees itself as the “Praetorian guard of the Met” because it has so many more officers – they see themselves as superior to the rest of the Met, while the Met sees itself as superior to what it dismisses as the “county forces” around the country. If there is “something rotten at the heart of Westminster borough”, according to the ex-Met officer I spoke to, then there is something rotten at the heart of British policing.
It’s wrong to say the Met never changes though. It has been dragged over the decades into a proximate state of modernity, particularly by the New Labour-era commissioner Ian Blair, who set out to eradicate the force’s macho “canteen culture”. Recruitment drives have opened it up to more women and ethnic minorities, and there is more protocol for officers to follow on, say, stop-and-search. Cameras, too, whether body-worn or in custody suites, have forced staff to take more care over what they say and do.
Yet I am told a stubborn tier of “pre-reform era” officers – particularly the archetypal older, complacent custody sergeant as exposed by Panorama – can still do what they like without impunity. The culture is one of putting up with bad behaviour, and reluctance to report it for fear of being labelled a “grass”, and the accused only facing “a slap on the wrist”.
And the younger generation of newer recruits won’t automatically clean things up. When I reported on the problems inside British policing two years ago, I was told by a trusted insider in police training that constant headlines about police misogyny were attracting like-minded young men: “A short-man syndrome type of person, people who were bullied and want power to take revenge.”
The BBC’s latest revelations come in a new political context. Two-tier policing is now a mainstream talking point. While Reform UK may wring one hand about violence against women and girls, they wring the other about PC PCs. Attempts to install more enlightened police chiefs or new initiatives to root out prejudice will now be seen through a harder-edged lens. “The problem now is that police reform is going to run into far-right people who believe it’s wrong to reform stuff like that, or who think senior people should be white British,” said the former officer I spoke to. “Even the marginal success we’ve had so far might just be reversed.”
[Further reading: As the Taliban erases Afghan women, the world looks away]
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