Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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The unsolved killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan – another high-profile case – is covered in lurid detail, and leads neatly into Harper’s consideration of the relationship between the police and his former employers, News International. 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. In fact, one of the most revealing contributions is that of Andrew Mitchell, the former minister involved in the former fandango, which crucially exacerbated the rift between the Conservative government and the police. 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’.

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.Angry demonstrators outside Scotland Yard carrying “Abolish the Met” signs in protest against the fatal shooting by an officer of an unarmed young black man, Chris Kaba, in south London. However, it never really went away: using the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent hopeless half-hearted investigation as a starting point, Harper takes us through 30 years of scandals that have seen the Met discredited, at war with its Whitehall paymasters (interestingly, the force that is described as once being full of Conservative voters now has a police officer saying none will ever vote Tory again) and not able to do its job. Her testimony does not exonerate her fully but it does show the lengths to which the rich and powerful will go to conceal their behaviour. Harper points out that the adversaries in organised crime are far stronger than in previous generations.

One theory is advanced by Roy Ramm, who joined the Met in 1970 and rose to the rank of commander, and is quoted for his criticism of senior officers at Scotland Yard: “They are professional police managers who have risen through the ranks without trace, without ever standing in the witness box and giving evidence. But the book is also constructive and never loses sight of the importance of the role the police have in any well-functioning democracy. 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. He shows how some reporters were thrown under the bus to save the executives and keep Rupert Murdoch from being too heavily censured. The acronym ACAB – all coppers are bastards – once a taunt among a small minority, is looking more like a reasonable analysis of how things are.He charts the failings of the Leveson inquiry, and finds a way to explain the conduct of News of the World reporters. If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair? The backlash from public opinion was the final nudge needed for the Tories to sack their leader, yet the police’s investigation is shown to be seriously lacking. From the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard, Tom Harper examines the most notorious cases involving the Met over the past thirty years. The shock in reading journalist Tom Harper’s Broken Yard, a new critique of 30 years of Met policing, is in realising just how wide­spread and rotten it is.

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.

The book charts Scotland Yard’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public.

He quotes Lucy Panton, the former crime editor of the News of the World, whose police sources were exposed to the Yard by her bosses and who said that she felt she had been “completely hung out to dry” by a company she had loyally served.

In his coverage of phone hacking and the Met’s initial failure to investigate the Guardian’s revelations about it, he is unrestrained in his criticism of his former employer, noting that the “outrageous behaviour by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers was being exposed on an almost weekly basis. An investigation later found that he regularly cavorted with prostitutes, took dangerous bodybuilding steroids and earned the nickname ‘the Rapist’ at his previous force, Kent police, for reasons that have never been explained.