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Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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He has held senior roles at a number of national newspapers, including The Independent and the Sunday Times. 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).

Former Met Police commander Roy Ramm notes how senior officers are managers who have done little real police work, have never gathered evidence or presented it in a witness box.This exposé is linked to those that follow by a thread of corruption, incompetence, of internal politics and lack of resources. She was made to reveal her sources in the Met as Murdoch tried to shift blame from the managerial strata to the workers in newsrooms. 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. His central message is this: the Metropolitan Police has morphed into an organization whose main purpose is to defend the Metropolitan Police.

With morale rock bottom, 12 years of swingeing cuts meaning they simply can’t do the job required – ask anyone who has been the victim of a burglary – the Met, once admired the world over, is shown to be both institutionally rotten from the top down, and lacking the basic tools to solve crimes. And with this week’s news about David Carrick, a serving Met officer who has admitted sexual offences stretching back over a 20-year period, Scotland Yard face yet another crisis. This means while we have heard the stories before, Harper offers an insiders’ angle, and it is revelatory in its findings. 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? 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’.Using thousands of intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts provided by police sources, as well as first-hand testimony, Harper explains how London's world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess - and how it might get itself out of it.

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