Now does not seem the time to broadcast a puff piece of a documentary about the Metropolitan police. On the other hand, it is exactly the time. What institution wouldn’t want to try to repair the extraordinary damage done by Sarah Everard’s kidnap, rape and murder by serving officer Wayne Couzens (nicknamed “The Rapist” at his previous job) and the excessive force used at a vigil held largely by women to commemorate her death? By the inquest in 2021 that found the force’s failings probably contributed to the deaths of three of the four men killed by “the Grindr killer” Stephen Port? By the officers dispatched to protect the scene of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman’s murders, who shared images via WhatsApp of the sisters (or, as one of the Met’s unfinest described them, “two dead birds”)? By the strip-searching of Child Q at school without another adult present (soon found to be a far from unique case) and while knowing that she had her period? By the jailing of officer David Carrick for a minimum of 30 years for “a catalogue of violent and brutal sexual offences” including 24 rapes – who was not investigated during his time with the Met, despite a litany of complaints and allegations against him? And much, much more soul-destroying headline news that we do not have space to detail here.
This, then, is the context in which the BBC’s The Met: Policing London appears. It begins with an acknowledgement of Couzens’ existence and of “a report” (by Baroness Casey after a year of investigation) that found the Met to be “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic” and a clip of the police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley vowing to restore public trust. It doesn’t mention that Louise Casey’s report found that the force might need to be dismantled to have a chance to purge it of all the rot therein. Instead, we are smoothly moved towards a view of the essential nobility and courage of the force because even when it is “facing an uncertain future, crime never stops”.
So begins a showreel for the good guys. We follow an investigation into the murder of 17-year-old Levi Ernest-Morrison, stabbed to death on a busy street in daylight by a gang of three teenagers who thought he was a member of a rival gang. They were driven there by the mother of one of the three. It is a terrible story.
We accompany patrol officers Wes and Martha as they attend an apparent domestic violence incident and Wes is attacked. We watch them search a man reported as carrying a knife while young people throw fireworks. They are filmed, scorned and harassed by bystanders every time.
And we follow the modern slavery team in Harrow as the final pieces in a long-running investigation into a human trafficking ring based in Romania are painstakingly compiled – enabling them to arrest the husband and wife team who have been effectively keeping young women captive and forcing them into prostitution behind the doors of an unassuming handful of houses in suburban north London.
So. Where does that leave us? With our trust fully restored? Convinced that Casey was wrong and that Couzens (and Carrick, and PCs Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer, the officers who shared photographs of the murdered sisters) were bad apples now extracted from the barrel? Or pathetically grateful that the force can still field a handful of decent (or decent-seeming) officers for an hour-long documentary? Faintly perturbed by what could be seen as the deployment of Levi’s mother’s raw and awful grief in the service of an advert? Or mostly wondering if it is really the BBC’s job to help rehabilitate what looks remarkably like a deeply corrupt organisation long before it has done anything like the amount of real, hard work it takes to cure itself of all its ills rather than paper over the cracks?
Should our national broadcaster be in the business of helping the police court public sympathy rather than genuinely earn back the public trust via, say, the capture and conviction of criminals regardless of the type of victim they favour? Or should it remain at a distance and keep its powder dry in case it ever needs to investigate further failures, or look at exactly what is being done to counter or cure the marrow-deep sickness we now know it carries? Have we just watched a valuable corrective to the headline horrors or a whitewash? Who is to say?
The Met: Policing London aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
