A TOP cop’s admission that the Metropolitan Police continues to harbour racists will surprise no-one.
After all, the exposure of appalling racist, misogynist and homophobic “banter” by officers at Charing Cross came after two years in which both racist and sexist oppression have provoked massive demonstrations.
Though the Black Lives Matter movement was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in the United States, its rapid spread across Europe, including in Britain, showed that police racism was just as resented on this side of the Atlantic.
The abduction and murder by a policeman of Sarah Everard, followed quickly by the Metropolitan Police’s assault on a peaceful vigil in her memory on Clapham Common, prompted enormous protests by women all too familiar with the lethal threat of male violence.
We soon learned more disturbing facts about the killer cop Wayne Couzens, including that colleagues had nicknamed him “the rapist.” Embarrassing for those who use the “bad apple” analogy to imply that rotten individuals don’t reflect on the institution as a whole.
So the current scrutiny of the Met’s toxic culture is more than justified, as was London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s lack of confidence in its chief constable Cressida Dick to carry out reforms, whatever the current backlash from an indignant Police Federation.
Labour, too, is correct to point out that the issues go beyond the Metropolitan Police and serious reform is required across the whole of policing.
The problem is that these demands for a changed culture within the police do not translate to a deeper questioning of police power or unity with campaigners who oppose the grotesquely authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (which, it should be noted, would have outlawed the women who flooded Westminster to demand justice for Sarah Everard since it bans protests outside Parliament).
Labour’s defenders will point out that it does, after all, oppose that Bill (though it was slow to do so). This is welcome but it is not enough.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper made no reference to it when demanding policing reform.
To the trained Westminster mind that is natural enough. She was talking about police culture, not police powers.
This compartmentalisation of issues is a staple of Westminster debate and mainstream media. It helps preserve the systemic equivalent to the “bad apple” analogy, the pretence that issues like the cost-of-living crisis, or Britain’s extraordinarily high Covid death toll, or the subversion of public services into a cash cow for private-sector parasites, can be considered in isolation rather than as related features of an economic system designed to fill rich men’s pockets rather than meet our needs.
But the left should do better and press the case that the poisonous culture we are seeing exposed in the police is a powerful argument against extending police powers to shut down protests or charge people they deem to be “a serious nuisance” with offences carrying 10-year prison sentences.
It’s an argument too against Labour’s authoritarian plans for a new “policing hub in every community” and the unthinking “law and order” pitch that Keir Starmer seeks to contrast with Tory sleaze.
If the police’s current difficulties aren’t used to block the massive extension of their powers planned by Priti Patel, Labour’s reform pitch can amount to nothing more than a rebrand after which the police will still batter protesters and break up picket lines while knowing exactly which boxes to tick to show their superiors they can parrot politically correct lines on equality and diversity if asked.
The entire raft of Tory legislation making police more powerful and less accountable must be thrown out. Doing so means uniting the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-authoritarian critiques of the police into a movement for human dignity and civil rights against an overbearing and oppressive state.
