Casey’s Hand Grenade

The Baroness who took no prisoners

Fire in the Hole!

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I was going to refrain from commenting on Baroness Casey’s Review until the dust had settled. Instead, I began writing about police awards and commendations, prompted by a story by ex-BBC crime correspondent Danny Shaw. The Met planned on spending about 450K on framing certificates. Given how much it costs MPS procurement to replace a geriatric computer running Windows XP (about 5K per workstation in my day), I’m surprised it wasn’t much, much more.

Then, on the 21^st March 2023, Baroness Casey of Blackstock published the most excoriating takedown of a UK police force ever written – the ultimate paper hand grenade. More damning, even, than Scarman or Macpherson. After all, neither of those explicitly threatened to dismantle the UK’s biggest police service.

This made Shaw’s dig at the Met’s certificate-framing profligacy small beer. Now I’ve started this Substack journey, I thought ignoring Casey’s findings would be obtuse. Besides, I don’t know if the dust from this grenade will settle anytime soon.

Dear reader, grab a cup of coffee. And a biscuit. This is a long post; how could it be otherwise?

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I take little satisfaction knowing Casey echoes stuff I’ve discussed elsewhere on Substack. Most rank-and-file police officers on social media have been broadly supportive of her findings too, with hand-wringing senior officers promising to do better (which I suspect, for many, will be sackcloth-and-ashes cosplay). It’s a grim read.

Policing, even when you’ve left, is like family – or possibly a cult. Members are free to slag each other off, but when an outsider has a go? The hackles go up. Which is why Baroness Casey’s argument is quite brilliant – one of the Met’s cardinal sins, she says, is over-defensiveness. It’s the font of institutional dysfunction. QED, offering any mitigation of her criticisms simply proves the point.

Then, a bit later, I saw this Tweet by a serving Met sergeant:

I seldom find much wisdom on Twitter, but this comment caused me to think; indeed, parts of the Casey Review don’t reflect my experience – but for many they do. And that’s not good enough.

Perhaps this is one of those occasions where I should ‘check my privilege.’

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Please bear this in mind when I express surprise at some of the behaviour Casey describes. The sexist, racist, homophobic hellscape Casey describes shocks me. I’m also acutely aware, as a straight white bloke, I’m less likely to have been a victim. I get that. Even though I was subjected to some awful treatment during my service, it wasn’t due to my gender, sexuality or ethnicity.

I can only relay what I saw in good faith - I only left the MPS five years ago, within scope of the period Casey examines in her report. For example, as an anticorruption investigator, I’ve listened to hours of covert recordings of suspect police officers speaking candidly amongst themselves. I’ve heard stuff that would genuinely make your hair stand on end, but never heard of cops boasting about leaving bacon in a Muslim colleague’s locker. Whoever did that should be looking at immediate sacking and criminal charges.

It also, possibly, illustrates how DPS targeting processes were off-kilter. Were we looking at the wrong people? Chasing elusive ‘AC12’-style organised criminal infiltrators, when we should have been operating elsewhere? We did some good work on DPS but I can’t help but feel, ultimately, we let some officers down.

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Reading the Review, I found myself returning to police defensiveness as I experienced another ‘are we the baddies?’ moment a la Mitchell and Webb. Casey is correct; excessive defensiveness is a perennial Met problem. However, she seems insufficiently curious as to why. Is it always only about protecting corporate reputation? Or is the toll policing takes on individuals a factor too?

Police officers spend their careers being constantly criticized and second-guessed both internally and externally. It’s like water torture, and one of the reasons police mental health is such an issue. Defensiveness gets under the skin, poisoning the organisational bloodstream. It’s a shame Casey doesn’t explore this further, as she astutely identifies how police officers experience desensitization through overexposure to trauma. Is it any surprise an organisation made up of embittered, poorly-treated people might in turn become defensive bullies when criticised, immediately assuming bad faith? I’m not seeking to give miscreants the benefit of the doubt. I’m simply trying to understand what happened and why.

For me, one of the most impactive parts of the Review is Chapter Four, dealing with frontline policing. Working in DPS, I investigated borough-based officers, seeing first-hand the pressures Casey describes. And yes, the killing blows came from the austerity measures announced in 2010. I remember, during Theresa May’s reign of terror as Home Secretary, an oft-heard refrain in the Met was: “After the Olympics…”

After the Olympics they’ll merge departments ‘a’ and ‘b’

After the Olympics they’ll offer people with 20 years’ service redundancy

After the Olympics they’ll close Scotland Yard, Hendon and the Piccadilly Line

After the Olympics radioactive badgers will invade Westminster…

No gold medals for the Met; the 2012 Olympics marked the beginning of the end

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Ironically, from 2010-2012, the MPS was awash with cash to pay for a smooth Olympic games – money which might have been better spent on recruit training, frontline infrastructure and leadership development. Mountains of moolah, utterly wasted on operations tenuously linked to the games. Naturally, senior officers jetted off to every corner of the globe on jollies, ostensibly to learn how other host countries policed the event. Why such largesse? Because they knew, afterwards, the hammer would fall. The Met were like medieval peasants, feasting on the last fatted calf before sewing themselves into their clothes for a long, dark winter.

The cuts, when they came, were savage. Casey paints a grim picture; how the Met made a decision it always denied – to protect prestigious national units by sacrificing the Poor Bloody Infantry. The frontline was left to fend for itself. For this, the blame lies predominantly at the riding-booted feet of Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe and his management style, which one Chief Superintendent I knew described as ‘growly.’ On BHH’s watch, bored counterterrorist officers twiddled their thumbs while borough detectives worked forty-plus cases, eviscerating local CID, while others pursued high-profile witch-hunts – the Met repeatedly failing to properly flex its resources. The Review forensically identifies systemic failures in workforce planning in a balkanised culture of competing empires.

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Then there’s the Racism, Misogyny and Homophobia. I’m not going to argue the toss about whether this stuff is ‘institutional’ or not (I think the argument generates more heat than light), but neither will I dispute Casey’s findings. On DPS, I remember reporting an incident on a female officer’s behalf, one of bang-to-rights sexual harassment by a supervisor. The (gutsy) female officer was perfectly capable of rebuffing the offender, but (a) worried about her career if she formally reported him, but (b) didn’t want the same thing to happen to others. We agreed I’d submit a report with her name redacted, but signed by me. Difficult from a purely investigative point of view, but enough to maybe prompt his management to wonder if they had a problem. The offending officer was eventually moved to another department, although I doubt it had much to do with the allegation – and in any case didn’t solve the wider problem. Too much wrongdoing was dealt with by a nudge, a wink and a quiet word, especially on tight-knit specialist units.

I suspect this sort of behaviour was woefully underreported; once Casey arrived, it looks like the pressure valves burst open. After all, as I wrote here, experience teaches coppers not to trust anyone. That includes the police. Casey was the honest broker. Which leaves the question – what about those who saw this sort of behaviour, yet did nothing? Social media is awash with slurs suggesting all officers are tainted by misfeasance. I don’t want to be thought of as part of a generation of officers knowingly complicit in something terrible.

Casey doesn’t address this, despite being otherwise even-handed about good police officers. I think it might have been useful if she had - after all officers could report wrongdoing upwards. What should they have done when nothing happened?

Here are some other thoughts I had reading the Review:

Generational differences

Casey’s report reveals how the Met’s workforce – especially at borough level – is startlingly young and inexperienced, even more so in the five years since I retired. It’s also more diverse in terms of race, gender and sexuality. I’m genuinely not making allegations of snow-flakery here; it’s simply a fact the Millennial and Generation ‘Z’ cohorts are more likely to view language as potentially assaultive in and of itself in a way my generation (Gen ‘X’) do not. I was brought up with a ‘sticks and stones’ attitude to language, teasing and what is now labelled ‘banter’. Put simply, a conversation I might see as someone else simply being a bit of a dick (dealt with by discussion) might now be perceived as being actively harmful (dealt with formally).

As a teenager I remember finding older peoples’ views on, say, race or sexuality cringeworthy too, although we tended to agree to disagree; not view them as harbingers of the apocalypse and Quite Literally Fascists. Therefore, it’s entirely possible during my service I heard language which would never offend me but might upset someone else. Put it like this – my tolerance / incomprehension around and of ‘microaggressions’ is certainly higher than a 25-year-olds. My protective / defensive / desensitized carapace (see below) is almost certainly thicker, too.

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The Desensitisation Effect?

My generation of cops had Roger Graef’s famous book Talking Blues (1990) to read before we joined. Graef made a comparison between British inner-city policing in the 80s and the experience of Vietnam veterans; morally compromised and shell-shocked combatants, distanced by experience from the people they served. Policing – especially frontline policing – really is tough. If you can’t hack someone screaming ‘I hope your fucking kids die of cancer’ in your face virtually every day, then it isn’t the job for you. You WILL be insulted, mocked and probably punched on the nose. How younger officers square this with contemporary mores concerning ‘assaultive language’ is a mystery.

To her credit, Casey references these pressures albeit in a welfare context. Does she also unknowingly answer one of her own questions? What is the organisational impact of desensitisation as officers rise through the ranks? Officers develop a carapace to deflect exposure to cruelty, violence and abuse. They adopt their own language, discourse and mannerisms as coping and defence mechanisms. You’ll often see me reference the classic Job line, usually deployed when you’ve been especially fucked-over: ‘if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.’ It means roll with the punches. You can’t take some banter? You fucking melt. How you gonna deal with the street?

I’m not making excuses. I’m simply explaining the way it was / is. We don’t have to like it, but if we want to change we need to invest in training, vetting, recruitment, welfare and (yes) redundancies of old warhorses who’ve had enough. We can’t just sack, sanction, lecture or prosecute our way out of the problem.

Policing is unique. Don’t let them tell you anything different, especially when it comes to pay and conditions

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Eventually, I found the grinding nihilism of 24/7 policing too gloomy. It’s one of the reasons I specialised, subsequently discovering exciting new ways to fuck with my head. Now, imagine spending your entire career in response policing. You’re a veteran, a 50-year-old inspector with 25-plus years in. Suddenly you’re dealing with young sergeants complaining about behaviours you never even noticed at their age? Then add direct-entry senior officers to the mix, people who’ll never understand the culture because they’ve never faced an Angry Man. It's a recipe for misunderstanding, bullying and grievance.

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Race

Casey notes a glaring structural issue; over 50% of London’s population aren’t white, but over 70% of its police are. Furthermore, police officers can’t afford to live in London, primarily for reasons of cost, distancing themselves even further from the communities they’re meant to serve. I’m a big believer in proximity breaking down barriers between people. Back when a large number of Met coppers were recruited outside the M25, a black colleague once joked the real minority in the Job were native Londoners.

I also wonder if there’s another fundamental attitudinal disconnect at play; white officers who consider themselves non-racist most likely grew up with the ‘Martin Luther-King’ tradition of antiracism, along with the commonplace but unfashionable view racism isn’t a uniquely white construct. This is the ‘colourblind’ approach, now outdated, allegedly papering over the cracks of racial inequality. I think that’s current doctrine, but then again the diversity training I received in the MPS, either in person or via distance learning, was patronising and inconsistent. Now I’ve retired, I’ve fallen back on the outrageously old-fashioned tactic of trying to treat everyone I meet the way I’d like to be treated.

I mention this because my ‘lived experience’ teaches me anyone is capable of prejudice, either directly or unintentionally. To partially misquote Peel, the police are society and society are the police. On the other hand, of course some peoples’ prejudice is more impactive than others. In the context of a majority-white society, this is a part of Critical Race Theory with which I might be able to find common ground.

Nothing’s simple. Nothing’s straightforward. So let’s talk about lived experience; as a young white man, Policing London (even as a native Londoner) was an eye-opener. There were 70s-era dinosaurs - every police canteen had its own Alf Garnett who’d troll younger officers. Dealing with gangs composed predominantly of young black men led to stereotyping and insensitive policing. It created a doom-loop of antipathy, one which seemed impossible to break. Drugs, guns and knives continued to plague black working-class communities in London, which the Met tried to address via initiatives like Operation Trident (1998-2012) itself a victim of the post-Olympic purge. These were, and remain, perennial problems exacerbated by politics, injustice, poverty and (now) the 24/7 babel of social media. Black Londoners had a raw deal - of which the police played a part. I was aware of that legacy when I policed, trying to be as fair as possible to everyone I dealt with.

Conversely, I saw universal, human, prejudices the folk of a World City harboured; Afro-Caribbean suspects refusing to be searched by a Sikh officer due to their ethnicity (they were searched anyway, ironically generating a complaint of… racism). I met a copper of West African heritage who confessed to a lifelong suspicion of Afro-Caribbeans (and vice versa). There were Ulstermen who brought the tribal prejudices of County Down and Antrim to London – and Irish Catholics who, in drink, would sing rebel songs to wind them up.

Then there was the Muslim officer, who knowing I was half-Jewish, commented ‘you lot really need to get over the Holocaust’, which led to an interesting exchange of views involving a fair bit of Anglo-Saxon language. Yet it never occurred to me to report him; I told him he was wrong, and why. He apologised. When I hear such comments I often think to myself, ‘what would Primo Levi do?’ I think Primo would have forgiven him. Such wisdom versus a police complaints procedure? No competition.

The End.

After that we got on well. He’d later confide in me how, as a Shia, he was convinced Sunni Muslim officers had it in for him.

I know this is uncomfortable stuff, but seeing as Baroness Casey has kicked the door open I’ll ask these questions anyway; do people (from any background) bring their prejudices into the police with them? How do we manage prejudices officers might develop due to their experiences at work? Is this part of a desensitization process too? Again, I acknowledge I’m writing as a white person who served in a predominantly white police service; It’s axiomatic the majority of racism will come from… the majority.

One day white officers won’t be, which I suspect will present brand new challenges around policing and race. I’d be interested in the views of officers from ethnic minorities on this one. Comments are open, as are private messages. For now, we have to keep on working on the present challenge. And how do we persuade young people from ethnic minorities to join the police post-Casey?

Having read the Review, I hope white officers accept Casey’s conclusions in good faith and play their part. Yes, there are bad actors who’ll try to make trouble - from across the political spectrum. The way forward is to prove them wrong by your actions.

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Toxic Leadership

Casey not only lobs a grenade at the Met’s senior leadership, she storms their bunker with a flamethrower. I’ve written before about how promotion works, and how senior leaders conduct themselves here and here. So I won’t dwell on the subject, but will say this – if the Met’s seniors deploy their usual tactics to deal with Casey’s criticisms then the Met’s toast. And, watching sheepish bosses on social media being matey and faux-contrite this week, I’m worried the MPS is heading for the great Dualit in the sky.  

This isn’t a problem the Met’s management board can solve by pulling the usual levers; NCALT packages, College of Policing bullshit, intranet propaganda, buttering-up Staff Associations or wellness posters in changing rooms. Passive-aggressive bollockings via PowerPoint for middle-managers won’t cut it either. Nor will candid, self-flagellating interviews with usually hostile newspapers like The Guardian. They might even be tempted to search and destroy a tranche of naughty coppers at Pc and Sergeant rank – necessary, but like spraying poison ivy with weedkiller rather than digging up the roots. That still won’t solve the problem – there needs to be reform from top to bottom, with NPCC ranks included in any purge. Oh, to some loitering in the superintending ranks – this old chestnut won’t work either:

Met Management Doctrine 101

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And here’s the rub; the Commissioner needs to achieve this challenge of Hercules while wedged between the rock of the Home Office and the Hard Place of the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime (MOPAC). The Home Office is skint and inadequate. The Mayor is slippery and grandstanding. There’s no money and no top-cover. Police pay is a joke. And one thing this problem genuinely needs throwing at it is money. Meanwhile, the NCA are like that old French lady knitting by the guillotine, ready to pluck the jewels from the Met’s decapitated body. Call me jaded, but I think the decision’s already been made.

Did I also mention how Baroness Casey says reforming a police force is like changing the wheels on a speeding train? You can’t just shut it down while you fix it. If I were Commissioner, I’d be praying law and order becomes an election issue, one which will cause the Conservatives to turn on the funding taps. Oh well, Sir Mark. Good luck. I really mean it.

Besides, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.

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