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.
