The Britain of today shares some similarities with the country of the 1970s: then the country was debating its relationship with Europe, flares were in and frequent strikes disrupted everyday life. And then, as now, standards in policing in the capital were so dire that a new broom had to be brought in to clean up the Metropolitan police.
Sir Robert Mark, the legendary reforming commissioner of the Met from 1972, said this about the force he battled to reform: “I had served in provincial forces for 30 years, and though I had known wrongdoing, I had never experienced institutionalised wrongdoing, blindness, arrogance and prejudice on anything like the scale accepted as routine in the Met.”
More than 50 years on, Louise Casey’s excoriating report into the cataclysmic failings in the Met used that quote from Mark to highlight how bad the modern day force was, adding: “The Met is a very different organisation today. But we have found those cultures alive and well.”
The current commissioner says Britain’s largest force is back in that same scale of mess again, which he too is vowing to sort out. Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner since September 2022, like Mark five decades earlier, served largely in “provincial” forces – the West Midlands and Surrey where he was chief – before coming to the Met in 2011.
Rowley left in 2018, and came out of “comfortable retirement” perturbed by what former colleagues still in the Met were telling him about the force’s descent under Cressida Dick, who had beaten him to the commissionership.
The corruption Mark faced in the 1970s centred on backhanders and ties to criminals, as were purges in the mid 1990s under the commissionership of Paul Condon. Efforts then were spearheaded by the “ghost squad” of corruption hunters known as CIB3. That effort had mixed results.
In the modern day, the corruption admitted is less about bribes and cash in brown envelopes, and more about behaviour that threatens the force’s integrity. Rowley likened it to a “cancer” and while it is several hundred – by his estimate – out of 35,000 officers, the Met has let fester to the point it threatens its very existence.
Lady Casey raised the prospect of the dismemberment of the Met if it fails to reform and win back public confidence. She warns police cannot reform themselves – they need external pressure. Rowley worries if he cannot, the politicians of the day will devise some botched solution.
Rowley’s letter, released on Thursday and updating the home secretary and London mayor on progress, sets out one part of his reform plan – targeting the officers, staff and behaviours few will argue against excising.
He pledges a tougher system to hunt down wrongdoing and encouragement to officers that when they whistleblow they will not be punished. He has to overcome internal and public scepticism that other commissioners have said this before and little change lasted, if happened at all.
Rowley writes: “I recognise the scale of the damage to public trust that has taken place and the significant work we still have to do in order to restore it. I have been impressed by the determination and support of the tens of thousands of women and men who work in the Met … to deliver the change we need.”
For Rowley to stand a chance of succeeding, he will need the support of the vast majority, time for reforms to work and events to go his way. As well as rooting out the poor behaviour, he will try to improve the actual policing London sees. Attending every burglary, and another promise that the Met will have proper neighbourhood policing.
Because he knows that bleak news about the Met will continue, with “years” of two to three officers a week appearing in court on criminal charges to come.
This year alone has seen three stunning bombshells to the Met’s reputation, all self inflicted, with the worst price born by the public, and one more to come.
The first was the public finding out the scale of David Carrick’s prolific offending and how the Met’s blunders shielded him from discovery for so long, the second was again, the public finding out that chances to identify Wayne Couzens as a danger to women before he murdered Sarah Everard were missed. Casey’s review was the third, and late summer or autumn will come the fourth predictable bombshell, when a government ordered inquiry into the Couzens scandal is expected to report.
If Rowley wants to know how hard it can get turning the Met around, then his predecessor Mark summed up his ordeal in his autobiography by borrowing from Hamlet: “The time is out of joint/ O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.”
