On 22 March, Baroness Louise Casey published an excoriating review of the Metropolitan Police. Gone is any pretence that the most recent examples of police criminality, corruption and abuse can be dismissed as the individual acts of a few ‘bad apples’. Rather, she concludes, the entire force is riddled with institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia on a scale that is ‘off the radar’. Trust in the police among Londoners, in particular young black Londoners, is at an all-time low. ‘Policing by consent’, that hallowed mantra of bourgeois democracy, is ‘fundamentally broken’. None of the findings will come as any surprise to those sections of the working class, and in particular black, Asian and Irish men and women, who have historically borne the brunt of police brutality, nor indeed to FRFI which has exposed the Met’s activities for decades. But what such a scathing and high-profile indictment of Britain’s largest police force does reveal is the huge disquiet building within the ruling class about how to manage the fallout from the most toxic revelations about the Met’s practices in recent years. CAT WIENER and SEAMUS O’ TUAIRISC report.
Institutionally sexist
The Casey Review was commissioned in the wake of the brutal police mishandling of the women-led protests that followed the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021. It subsequently emerged that numerous allegations of indecent exposure had been made against Couzens, whose colleagues apparently nicknamed him ‘the Rapist’. The review was, Casey says, ‘book-ended’ by a further catalogue of horrific sexual abuse by a serving officer: David Carrick was jailed in February after pleading guilty to 49 offences against women over a 20-year period. It was the Everard case that prompted one of Carrick’s victims to reveal that he had raped and tortured her and left her for dead. Left to their own devices, the police would have done nothing, despite Carrick being the subject of multiple allegations of rape, domestic violence and harassment between 2000 and 2021. Both he and Couzens worked in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection Unit – described as being, along with the Specialist Firearms Command (MO19), a ‘dark corner’ of the Met where vetting and transparency were weakest, corruption rampant and abusers could operate with impunity. One respondent described MO19 as ‘the most toxic, racist, sexist place I’ve ever worked.’
Casey’s report describes an all-pervading culture of misogyny, with many police officers themselves involved in perpetrating domestic violence and sexual abuse, including within the police force itself; those who complained faced renewed harassment. Domestic abuse cases frequently resulted in no action being taken. Samples in rape cases were kept in dilapidated fridges and freezers that were prone to breaking down, so that vital evidence was lost and cases dismissed.
The Met told researchers it did not have figures for alleged sexual abuse by its officers, but an analysis of public complaints showed an average of 60 allegations per year between 2013 and 2020 in which police were accused of serious sexual misconduct while on duty. The majority of these were dismissed as false or malicious. A ‘sample dip’ of 100 complaints over ten years showed that in 85% of them no further action was taken. Nor is it just within the Met: figures provided by the National Police Chiefs’ Council on 14 March 2023 showed that more than 1,500 serving police officers were accused of violent offences against women and girls in the six months from October 2021 and April 2022: of these, fewer than 1% had been sacked.
Institutionally racist
24 years after the MacPherson Report into the police handling of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence concluded the police were ‘institutionally racist’, Black Londoners are still ‘under-protected and over-policed’. They are far more likely to be victims of crime than White Londoners, being
- six times more likely to be murdered
- twice as likely to be a recorded rape victim
- 66% more likely to be a reported victim of domestic abuse
- over 2.5 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime
- 167% more likely to be reported missing
Yet they are also more likely to be criminalised by police. Between 2020-2022, ‘Black-appearing people in London aged 11-61 were over three times more likely to be handcuffed than White-appearing people of the same age and 4.5 times more likely to have a baton used against them. and nearly four times as likely to have a Taser fired on them by a Met officer’.
In every year since 2016, ‘those between 11 and 61 who appear to be Black have been at least 3.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met than their White counterparts’. The Met carries out more stop-and-searches than any other police force in England and Wales, with one in four Black boys and men aged 15-24 in London stopped and searched last year in a single three-month period. In 80% of these cases, no further action was taken. Casey describes stop-and-search as a ‘racialised weapon’.
At the same time, black people are disproportionately likely to experience violence at the hands of the Met, as well as being forced to undergo intimate or strip searches (including of black children). A survey published by the organisation Inquest found that of 119 recorded deaths involving police restraint between 2012 and 2021, Black people were, proportionally, seven times more likely to die after such contact than White people. Former Premier League footballer Dalian Atkinson was killed after an officer fired an electric stun gun into him for 33 seconds, kicked him twice in the head while he was on the ground – with such force that the imprint of his laces was left on Atkinson’s forehead – then rested his boot on the dying man’s head. Chris Kaba was shot, execution-style, by Met officers in 2022 as he sat in his car.
Unsurprisingly, this viciously racist culture is replicated in the workplace. 46% of Black and 33% of Asian officers and staff said they personally experienced racism at work. The Review highlights individual cases, such as officers shaving off a Sikh colleague’s beard, or putting bacon in a Muslim officer’s boots; Black officers speak of persistent low-grade harassment, humiliation and being regularly passed over for promotion. It makes it truly baffling why any black or minority ethnic person would join such a bigoted organisation in the first place, but goes a long way towards explaining why these groups are ‘substantially under-represented in all police forces across the country’ and ‘only a third of Black Londoners are confident in the Met’s ability to treat people fairly and equally’.
Institutionally homophobic
It’s no surprise that within the brutal and macho culture that pervades the police force at every level Casey should also have found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally homophobic. Police mishandling of the murders of four young gay men in 2014 led to plummeting levels of trust in the police amongst London’s LGBT community. The families and friends of the four men have repeatedly stated that they believe homophobia and assumptions about lifestyles played a part in the failings in the initial investigations. Within the Met itself, LGBT staff describe an atmosphere of ‘over-sexualisation and prejudice’.
Rotten to the core
The Review follows hard on the heels of a slew of reports and revelations about police corruption and abuse. In February 2022, a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into officers at Charing Cross Police Station revealed systematic ‘bullying and discrimination…racism, misogyny, harassment and the exchange of offensive social media messages’ which included racist and homophobic language, rape threats and jokes about domestic violence. The previous year, it was revealed that two Met police officers had taken selfies with the bodies of murdered black sisters Nicole Smallman and Biba Henry in June 2020 and WhatsApped them to friends and colleagues. Nor is the rot confined to the Met. One in 100 police officers across the country have faced criminal charges in the past year alone.
There is a real fear on the part of the ruling class that such police excesses could again provoke the resistance seen on the streets of St Pauls in 1980, Brixton in 1981, the 1985 Broadwater Farm uprising or the widespread response across British cities to the police murder of Mark Duggan in 2011. More recently the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the merging of fury over the murder of Sarah Everard with the anti-police Kill the Bill protests in 2021 revealed the potential for the emergence of a new movement with the police squarely in its sights.
So while the Casey Review is unsparing in its criticisms of the Met, even arguing that the organisation should be broken up if it cannot shape up, it is at the same time an impassioned plea for its rehabilitation. Implicit throughout is an attempt to lay all the blame on former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, whose four years in office saw the prejudice and corruption of the force repeatedly exposed, and an appeal for the new Commissioner, Mark Rowley, to be seen as a fresh start. Rowley himself in January lamented his powerlessness to sack ‘toxic officers’ and promised that ‘two or three a week’ would appear in court on criminal charges over the coming weeks and months. Despite remaining stubbornly off-message in refusing to accept the adjective ‘institutional’ to describe the racism, misogyny and homophobia so obviously endemic in his force, he has the backing of both Home Secretary Suella Braverman and London Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, and has promised ‘radical reforms’, so his job is probably safe.
Casey calls for a return to what she considers the Met’s ‘original values’ as laid down by its founder, Robert Peel, nearly 200 years ago: specifically, ‘policing by consent’ and the minimal use of force, liberal tropes that have never had any basis in reality.
The myth of ‘policing by consent’
When Robert Peel – a former British Chief Secretary for Ireland – set up the Metropolitan Police in 1829, its main purpose was to centralise the forces of public order and bring them directly under government control. Britain, as a rapidly industrialising capitalist state, needed a professional ‘body of armed men’ to control the emerging urban working class, particularly in London. The ‘consent’ of the poorest sections of the working class has never been of concern to the ruling class. Such liberal ideals serve only to cover up the class nature of the police: they are racist, sexist and brutal because those are the characteristics of the state they defend. In the 1970s and 1980s, as Britain waged war in Ireland, Irish people as well as black youth fighting state racism became targets for police attack. The 1981 uprisings terrified the ruling class. The following year, the former head of the RUC in the north of Ireland, Kenneth Newman, was brought in to transform the Met into an organisation capable of effectively dealing with dissent by force. He was clear that, in times of severe economic crisis, opposition to the police constituted ‘a threat to public order’. He reorganised the Met along the paramilitary lines in force not just in Ireland but historically throughout Britain’s colonial empire. The modern-day police force is today far from any imagined Peelian ideal: it comes kitted out in Kevlar, stab vests and high-tech gear and is equipped with tasers, batons and increasingly guns. Its technology includes phone extraction tools, live facial recognition technology and mobile fingerprint scanners.
As the crisis of British capitalism intensifies, the ruling class knows social unrest is inevitable. That is why the police are being handed even more repressive powers such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022; the amendments to the Public Order Bill currently going through Parliament, and fully supported by the Labour Party, will extend stop-and-search and further limit the right to protest. For the majority of the working class, black and white, forced into struggle as their standard of living plummets, there can be no possibility of ‘trust’ in the police who can only be a brutal, bigoted instrument of class rule, the first line of defence of the capitalist state.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 293 April/May 2023
