The Decline And Fall Of The Metropolitan Police
A force for racism and misogyny
I have written an article or two on the British police both as a historical insight into its changing political role in industrial disputes during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 and at its inability to change and reform itself internally before, during, and after the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence on the evening of 22 April 1993, when he was just 18 years old.
Then we had the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer which confirmed that this British Institution was riddled with not just white supremacism from the top to the bottom but with an accepted culture of misogyny.
The outcry was so serious that the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) could not ignore the grave levels of public concern following the kidnap, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer and “other deeply troubling incidents” (euphemisms abound in the Met), the Met appointed Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour.
Déjà vu? Absolutely. About a quarter of a century ago, in a cake box pink building in south London where he held hearings, the evidence he heard led Sir William Macpherson to conclude that the Met then was institutionally racist.
