Author: Tom Harper
ISBN No: 9781785907685
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages: 480
Publisher: Biteback
Publisher URL:
https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/broken-yard
Year of publication: 03/02/2023
Brief:
Broken Yard The Fall of the Metropolitan Police
price
£20, hardback; £14.99 ebook
Broken Yard about the recent years of the Metropolitan Police is a timely book, writes Mark Rowe. The same week that I came upon it, a headline on The Economist’s cover was ‘London’s rotten police’.
The author Tom Harper is a journalist whose beat since the 2000s has been the Met Police. The fact is that whether this book had come out the year before or next year, it would still have been timely, because the Met does seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. When Harper began writing about the Met it was the shooting dead in the wake of the 7-7 terror attack an innocent man at Stockwell Tube (which now has a small monument to Jean Charles de Menezes, on the wall on the right as you exit the station). In the 1990s, as Harper does cover, it was the Stephen Lawrence murder or rather the bungled investigation.
While not taking anything away from the strength of the book – the ‘fall’ of the Yard – and how well the author tells the story, we can query the basic assumption that all was well until a recent ‘fall’. You can equally make the case that the Met has always stumbled dysfunctionally from one scandal to the next, and that morale among officers has always been at an all-time low.
As the author has identified, some Met branches are performing better than others. Consider the recent memoir by the first black Met Police man Norwell Roberts, and his experience of malice at some stations, and not others. A fish may rot from its head, as author wondered in a concluding chapter, but you could be more forensic and ask whether the problem in the hierarchy is rather of a lack of grip from the top down to stations (and why does one station have a better occupational culture than another?).
Until his death the former Met Police Commissioner Lord Imbert was a member of the editorial board of Professional Security Magazine and I recall that he – having risen from the rank of constable to the very top – was one for dropping in on stations, as a way (I guess) of raising morale, and of keeping an eye on things. You can contrast that with the former deputy commissioner Sir Craig Mackey who happened to be on the scene of the marauding terror attack at Westminster in March 2017. That Mackey stayed in his vehicle led to visceral anger from rank and file cops, as stoked up (or reported on, take your pick) in the mainstream media. While not wanting to reopen all that here, Harper does say that what Mackey did was sensible while resented by some as ‘us and them’. It’s reminiscent of the physical and emotional distance between the generals and the ‘poor bloody infantry’ in the First World War.
There is, then, more than one side to the ‘fall’; internal and external, the Met’s culture (which is being aired more thanks to social media, and the Met last year brought in Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour) and how it’s serving the public by preventing and investigating crime. To take internal first, the Met is like other (London-based) institutions such as the BBC and Parliament. Is it a hopeful sign that bad things are getting at least confronted in public, or bad in that it depresses public trust in those institutions, not easily regained? Or both?
As for the Met’s actual work, Harper points to successes in counter-terrorism such as the inquiry into the Salisbury-Skripals nerve gas poisoning, whereby Russian agents were identified. Has that meant, as Harper suggests, the best officers and most effort goes into CT and leaves less for economic crime, and the drugs trade? Harper quotes late on a story from an anonymous lord justice of appeal that a scammer at his door was impersonating police. The judge rang his local Holborn station who said, ‘nothing to do with us’. I would query whether the caller would have got much of a different answer had he been in Hull or Hereford. For that hands-off attitude of denial towards fraud is a national policy, set by …. the City of London Police. So much, then, of the ‘fall of the Yard’ is not so much a Met-specific problem as a policing-wide one, and indeed common to the authorities in general: having to respond to and re-equip for the digital world, while enduring years of austerity and cuts to physical bases (pictured, the closed Met Police station at Streatham).
Among those quoted for the book are the ‘frauditor’ Peter Tickner, and retired senior cops Roy Ramm, and Bob Quick, and QC and judge Sir Richard Henriques, author of the riveting memoir From Crime to Crime; men featured or quoted in Professional Security Magazine over the years. Are those quoted, and those speaking anonymously, by querying the institution having a dig at it, and the individuals who worked and still work for it? Met people are well able to identify shortcomings, and do so surely because they feel so passionately and proprietarily about the force, not because of any dislike.
If the Met has always been in trouble, can we shrug off the latest? Harper points out that the adversaries in organised crime are far stronger than in previous generations. Whereas the likes of the Krays in the 1960s robbed banks, risky and visible, their equivalents now are doing cyber, and profiting from the drugs trade and trafficking. The spoils are greater and so is the harm to the res publica. If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair?
A quibble is that it’s a pity there’s not an index, and that sadly though understandably the sources are often identified only as “confidential document seen by author”.
