Insightful and accurate as usual, Dom. I confess I haven't been able to bring myself to read Casey, as I don't need depressing just now. What boils my piss, however, is the fact that however accurate most of the report is, a part of it will be missing the point, and more damagingly, sections of the press will completely, wilfully or not, misinterpret it and paint all officers with the same brush. As well as being totally unfair, it will exacerbate the situation and make them ever more defensive and paranoid.
I agree thar so much of the blame can be laid at the door of la May and her cop hating cronies in the parliamentary Conservative party. I say that as a lifelong Conservative voter, who continues to do so because my values are Conservative, and even more because I detest the modern Labour Party with a passion, especially its hypocritical North London Socialist leadership. But yes, May completely cattled the police with cuts, with interference through misunderstanding of 'stop and search' the bête-noir of the left, and with ludicrous direct entry Superintendent ranks. "What, Sir? You've never seen a dead body/paddy pub fight /traffic accident/ resisted arrest? Oh, sorry, you've never seen any arrest, let alone made one. " Her, and her ilk's problem is that, like Agatha Christie' protagonists, they view police officers as "Trade", a necessity to be tolerated, "But please use the back door, cook will make you a cup of tea". A bit how BSS used to view SB, and how SB, if truth be told, used to view the rest of the Met. (And I say that as an alumnus of uniform, CID, Area Complaints, CIB2/3, and NTFIU, the last person to be transferred to SB before the night of the long knives. I've gone so far off piste now I have lost my thread, mixing more metaphors than Del Boy Malaprop, so I'll stop. Keep it up, Dom, you always give me hope!
Great discourse Dom, as ever, with well expressed insight. Just a few points if I may?
1) (Awaiting howls here). A lot of what went on in the past (I joined arse end of ‘86) was simple bullying and horrible. I knew two officers bullied out of the job by the Authorised Gobs of team, official supervisors too weak or frightened or under confident to lift a finger to stop it. I didn’t buy this ‘character-building’ BS then and I don’t now.
2) I do wonder about some of the evidence Casey assembled. I am still reading it (I actually have a day job to do also so it’s taking time!🤦🏻) I understand there are reports of units where a rite of passage was to be urinated on? If that isn’t there apologies. If it is, I am at a loss to know what theme park those dinosaurs participating were from, because -like ‘stamping-in ceremonies’ for female officers I would have thought that all long gone. The latter ‘ritual was seen as ‘old-hat’ in the mid-late 80s and always related to me as a thing of the past even then. Mind you, in ‘87 I’d have said homophobia was a thing almost of the past. Amongst the ‘younger’ officers of the day NOBODY really cared about what adults got up to IN PRIVATE with consenting adults. That said, cottaging and public sex (Hetero and homo) were crimes and I know I nicked individuals for both, and feel no regret. It’s a sign of societal change that now these are seen as acceptable behaviours and facilitated.
3) Like you, I have to check myself to see I am not defensive about the MPS because some of the evidence adduced that I have read is readable two ways. Bacon in a Muslim officer’s boots is appalling and agree with you, but a Sikh officers turban put in a box… could THAT be an attempt by a tidy officer to look after that officer’s head gear? I’d need to know more.
4) I totally recognise the Met that Casey excoriated and you sim it up above so well I shall move on. Suffice to say your reading is 100% on the money.
5) I personally do not like the word ‘institutional’ . It was used in MacPherson very specifically to mean that policies were in place that discriminated against persons from other ethnic backgrounds and that was bang on. It was unconscious and unintended. The term gets bandied about these days freely but incorrectly. To use it so, in my mind, diminishes the responsibility of the nasty bullies engaging in such behaviour and lessens their culpability. Semantics, maybe, but I feel that is important.
6) Finally, (do I hear cheers?) I believe that whilst there is little I disagree with in Casey from what I have read so far the report is ACTUALLY a Stalking horse for the Home Office and senior county officers on an agenda that’s been going to years to make the Met the ‘Londonshire Constabulary’ with all National functions removed and allocated elsewhere. Of course, that still leaves public order, but I believe the intention is the break the Met into a number of smaller units by ‘dark forces about which we know little’.
Thank you for penning this. Once again I wish I had your skill as a wordsmith
I started at Hendon at the same time as you and agree 100% with what you say. I joined a job that, even at that time, was bending over backwards to recruit ethnic minorities. I only got in at the age of 25 because they wanted Londoners with a little life experience. I never had the 5 O levels required to join the cadets. I’ve never witnessed the level of bullying/racism outlined in the report. I’m not saying it doesn’t/didn’t exist, i’ve just never witnessed or even heard about it
Cheers Mick, I can’t say I didn’t witness bullying, I did (and shamefully did nothing about it.)
Racism, well, we had one officer on my first team. Ex army. Everybody he arrested -only ever RTA offences and S25 or Drink-drive, with some spurious immigration act stuff thrown in - was black, particularly West African. He was clearly on a mission, but here is the rub: everybody he arrested HAD actually done what he said they had. He didn’t have the brain power to fabricate.
I don’t know what happened to him in the end but heard he was sacked for assaulting a prisoner after he got promoted a few years later.
Hand on heart, in 32 years service that was the ONLY overtly racist officer I met. I suppose there MAY have been closet racists I worked with, but they kept very quiet, even in the late 80s and 90s.
Having taken the time to read the Casey review, I am both appalled but not surprised by the findings. I think that the Met is also guilty of institutional amnesia. For example, it forgot why rape & child abuse investigation became a specialism in its own right with dedicated resources in a single command. Thanks to cost cutting, the command was disbanded & Boroughs left to pick up the pieces with the all too familiar consequences. So many senior Officers, including those who left the Met & have now returned were guilty of institutional deafness. Every Met project was deemed a success, even if it wasn’t. If those who knew better commented negatively upon any project or initiative, they were told that there were being resistant to change. Austerity & budget cuts have hugely contributed to where the Met is today. For me, the Commissioner & Management Board need to be both brave & bold in their response. They should set up an oversight board led by Baroness Casey to ensure that the require changes are made. One thing to consider is disbanding the Parliamentary & Diplomatic Patrol Group. Use private unarmed security for low risk locations/individuals. Use HM Forces for the high risk ones. That’s a 1000 Officers & Staff available to be deployed to Borough. For MO19, implement a limit on the length of time every individual is able to serve within the Unit. Just a couple of ideas to start with in my humble opinion.
In the case of specialist units, there's a serious cost implication - the training 'pipeline' for a fully qualified SFO (for example) is about two or three years from joining an ARV crew. On the other hand I agree with much of what else you say; I think the MoD Police can manage armed security in Whitehall quite nicely, for example. Sadly, knowing a little of how the funding streams work, that money won't immediately transfer back to the MPS - it's ringfenced for security policing. BHH discovered this - by losing (for example) PaDP, he'd also lose the money to train and rotate several hundred AFOs around the rest of the organisation.
I completely understand the training cost implication together with the loss of skill when an SFO or any other firearms Officer leaves the command. However, it strikes me that there needs to be a complete reset of the power balance in firearms training. It should be the leadership that’s in charge, not the instructors. Sgts & Inspectors should be doing their jobs, supervising & leading in order to prevent inappropriate behaviour from occurring. If they aren’t doing this then the framework is in place to address this. Perhaps when a few examples have been set, the wrongdoing will stop & there will be a cultural change. As you so rightly pointed out, if the Met hierarchy do their usual thing of “lessons will be learnt etc” then the Met is truly done for. The men & women serving deserve a much better standard of leadership & leader.
Being from the ground level Firearms teams. I would argue that the demise of the Firearms world came about when Senior Officers with no experience of ever carrying a Firearm took over.
They then began to bring in policies which created a toxic working environment.
Poor equipment for colleagues in PaDP, RaSP when they could see the brand new TSG CT AFO’s (only put in to wind up my CT SFO colleagues) all issued with state of the art kit. Imagine turning up at Milditz and seeing them running around in good kit, whilst your stood there with your Kwik Fit fitters set of coveralls and MP5 held together with hope and masking tape!
Add to that the cancelled rest days, shocking welfare support if you dared to state you were feeling stressed.
Having run a training cycle around stress awareness, half way through the 3 month cycle I had already identified over 20 Operational Officers in need of professional counselling/therapy. In addition, I lost count of the Officers who approached me for advice and signposting for a variety of reasons.
When I approached the Chief Firearms Instructor and made him aware of my concerns, his response was not to ensure resources were in place or to bring it to the attention of the various Firearms OCU Commanders! No, his cunning plan was to stop doing the stress awareness input which was helping to identify those struggling.
Instead the stress awareness input went from a 90 minute presentation to a 15 minute chat with a PS, who told everyone to go for a run if you were feeling stressed!
The PS’s, Inspectors and even Instructors were not allowed to maintain high standards and run the various OCU’s.
Thank you for providing a perfect example of Senior Officers building empires, paying lip service to looking after their staff and being incompetent. Certain individuals shouldn’t be allowed to have a sharpened pencil without supervision, let alone be in a leadership role. Sadly these type of buffoons are always moved sideways or promoted as opposed to being held to account for their awful performance.
Your penultimate sentence has already been tried several times, and on every occasion stopped after a few years, because specialisms are learnt over several years of hard won experience. For example, in 1992, the then Commissioner, Condon, decided that the CID needed to be returned to uniform as their experience was not needed, and they could easily be replaced by uniformed sergeants. In 1993 Stephen Lawrence was attacked and murdered in south east London by a racist gang. The DI and DSs, who were responsible for the initial investigation were recent transfers from uniform, and asked the station officer, who had been transferred from CID to uniform for his assistance. His response was short and pithy, but basically said that powers that be had returned him to uniform, and that investigation of serious crime was not a uniformed matter. The resulting clusterfu** of an investigation was totally down to the lack of active work during the golden hour.
CID & Detectives have been underfunded & under resourced in the Met for a very long time. Successive Commissioners were warned of the consequences of the loss of Detectives & did nothing. BHH even said, “if you don’t like it, you can leave. I’ll hold the door open for you”. With ’leadership’ such as that, is it any wonder that the Met is in the state that it’s in. Even more recently, under Cress’s leadership, an attempt was made to rebalance the numbers of Detectives across the Met. This resulted in a certain number of DCs who were working South of the river being told that they were posted North of the river as that is where the need was. When they protested about the upheaval they were told “tough”. Unfortunately for the Met, this coincided with a recruitment drive by Kent & Surrey Police targeted at Detectives. Guess what? More than a few of them transferred out. Another own goal. When you combine an inept, remote leadership with a contracted out, clueless HR support function, is it any wonder that these sort of debacles occur?
Great article. Having read the report, the only bit i disagree with, surprise, surprise, is the allegation of institutional racism. I think it suits the SLT to allow the msm to harp on about this. While they are, the damning, accurate message in the report about the poor and lack of leadership, is washed over.
Insightful and accurate as usual, Dom. I confess I haven't been able to bring myself to read Casey, as I don't need depressing just now. What boils my piss, however, is the fact that however accurate most of the report is, a part of it will be missing the point, and more damagingly, sections of the press will completely, wilfully or not, misinterpret it and paint all officers with the same brush. As well as being totally unfair, it will exacerbate the situation and make them ever more defensive and paranoid.
I agree thar so much of the blame can be laid at the door of la May and her cop hating cronies in the parliamentary Conservative party. I say that as a lifelong Conservative voter, who continues to do so because my values are Conservative, and even more because I detest the modern Labour Party with a passion, especially its hypocritical North London Socialist leadership. But yes, May completely cattled the police with cuts, with interference through misunderstanding of 'stop and search' the bête-noir of the left, and with ludicrous direct entry Superintendent ranks. "What, Sir? You've never seen a dead body/paddy pub fight /traffic accident/ resisted arrest? Oh, sorry, you've never seen any arrest, let alone made one. " Her, and her ilk's problem is that, like Agatha Christie' protagonists, they view police officers as "Trade", a necessity to be tolerated, "But please use the back door, cook will make you a cup of tea". A bit how BSS used to view SB, and how SB, if truth be told, used to view the rest of the Met. (And I say that as an alumnus of uniform, CID, Area Complaints, CIB2/3, and NTFIU, the last person to be transferred to SB before the night of the long knives. I've gone so far off piste now I have lost my thread, mixing more metaphors than Del Boy Malaprop, so I'll stop. Keep it up, Dom, you always give me hope!
Good post but would like to ask (sorry if I am being political) what is conservative about the modern Tory Party? Not much to me!
Great discourse Dom, as ever, with well expressed insight. Just a few points if I may?
1) (Awaiting howls here). A lot of what went on in the past (I joined arse end of ‘86) was simple bullying and horrible. I knew two officers bullied out of the job by the Authorised Gobs of team, official supervisors too weak or frightened or under confident to lift a finger to stop it. I didn’t buy this ‘character-building’ BS then and I don’t now.
2) I do wonder about some of the evidence Casey assembled. I am still reading it (I actually have a day job to do also so it’s taking time!🤦🏻) I understand there are reports of units where a rite of passage was to be urinated on? If that isn’t there apologies. If it is, I am at a loss to know what theme park those dinosaurs participating were from, because -like ‘stamping-in ceremonies’ for female officers I would have thought that all long gone. The latter ‘ritual was seen as ‘old-hat’ in the mid-late 80s and always related to me as a thing of the past even then. Mind you, in ‘87 I’d have said homophobia was a thing almost of the past. Amongst the ‘younger’ officers of the day NOBODY really cared about what adults got up to IN PRIVATE with consenting adults. That said, cottaging and public sex (Hetero and homo) were crimes and I know I nicked individuals for both, and feel no regret. It’s a sign of societal change that now these are seen as acceptable behaviours and facilitated.
3) Like you, I have to check myself to see I am not defensive about the MPS because some of the evidence adduced that I have read is readable two ways. Bacon in a Muslim officer’s boots is appalling and agree with you, but a Sikh officers turban put in a box… could THAT be an attempt by a tidy officer to look after that officer’s head gear? I’d need to know more.
4) I totally recognise the Met that Casey excoriated and you sim it up above so well I shall move on. Suffice to say your reading is 100% on the money.
5) I personally do not like the word ‘institutional’ . It was used in MacPherson very specifically to mean that policies were in place that discriminated against persons from other ethnic backgrounds and that was bang on. It was unconscious and unintended. The term gets bandied about these days freely but incorrectly. To use it so, in my mind, diminishes the responsibility of the nasty bullies engaging in such behaviour and lessens their culpability. Semantics, maybe, but I feel that is important.
6) Finally, (do I hear cheers?) I believe that whilst there is little I disagree with in Casey from what I have read so far the report is ACTUALLY a Stalking horse for the Home Office and senior county officers on an agenda that’s been going to years to make the Met the ‘Londonshire Constabulary’ with all National functions removed and allocated elsewhere. Of course, that still leaves public order, but I believe the intention is the break the Met into a number of smaller units by ‘dark forces about which we know little’.
Thank you for penning this. Once again I wish I had your skill as a wordsmith
Thanks for commenting, it's read, taken in and appreciated.
I started at Hendon at the same time as you and agree 100% with what you say. I joined a job that, even at that time, was bending over backwards to recruit ethnic minorities. I only got in at the age of 25 because they wanted Londoners with a little life experience. I never had the 5 O levels required to join the cadets. I’ve never witnessed the level of bullying/racism outlined in the report. I’m not saying it doesn’t/didn’t exist, i’ve just never witnessed or even heard about it
Cheers Mick, I can’t say I didn’t witness bullying, I did (and shamefully did nothing about it.)
Racism, well, we had one officer on my first team. Ex army. Everybody he arrested -only ever RTA offences and S25 or Drink-drive, with some spurious immigration act stuff thrown in - was black, particularly West African. He was clearly on a mission, but here is the rub: everybody he arrested HAD actually done what he said they had. He didn’t have the brain power to fabricate.
I don’t know what happened to him in the end but heard he was sacked for assaulting a prisoner after he got promoted a few years later.
Hand on heart, in 32 years service that was the ONLY overtly racist officer I met. I suppose there MAY have been closet racists I worked with, but they kept very quiet, even in the late 80s and 90s.
Part B, I should have added this officer was UNIVERSALLY detested and derided by ALL the team old sweats for the prick he truly was…
Having taken the time to read the Casey review, I am both appalled but not surprised by the findings. I think that the Met is also guilty of institutional amnesia. For example, it forgot why rape & child abuse investigation became a specialism in its own right with dedicated resources in a single command. Thanks to cost cutting, the command was disbanded & Boroughs left to pick up the pieces with the all too familiar consequences. So many senior Officers, including those who left the Met & have now returned were guilty of institutional deafness. Every Met project was deemed a success, even if it wasn’t. If those who knew better commented negatively upon any project or initiative, they were told that there were being resistant to change. Austerity & budget cuts have hugely contributed to where the Met is today. For me, the Commissioner & Management Board need to be both brave & bold in their response. They should set up an oversight board led by Baroness Casey to ensure that the require changes are made. One thing to consider is disbanding the Parliamentary & Diplomatic Patrol Group. Use private unarmed security for low risk locations/individuals. Use HM Forces for the high risk ones. That’s a 1000 Officers & Staff available to be deployed to Borough. For MO19, implement a limit on the length of time every individual is able to serve within the Unit. Just a couple of ideas to start with in my humble opinion.
In the case of specialist units, there's a serious cost implication - the training 'pipeline' for a fully qualified SFO (for example) is about two or three years from joining an ARV crew. On the other hand I agree with much of what else you say; I think the MoD Police can manage armed security in Whitehall quite nicely, for example. Sadly, knowing a little of how the funding streams work, that money won't immediately transfer back to the MPS - it's ringfenced for security policing. BHH discovered this - by losing (for example) PaDP, he'd also lose the money to train and rotate several hundred AFOs around the rest of the organisation.
I completely understand the training cost implication together with the loss of skill when an SFO or any other firearms Officer leaves the command. However, it strikes me that there needs to be a complete reset of the power balance in firearms training. It should be the leadership that’s in charge, not the instructors. Sgts & Inspectors should be doing their jobs, supervising & leading in order to prevent inappropriate behaviour from occurring. If they aren’t doing this then the framework is in place to address this. Perhaps when a few examples have been set, the wrongdoing will stop & there will be a cultural change. As you so rightly pointed out, if the Met hierarchy do their usual thing of “lessons will be learnt etc” then the Met is truly done for. The men & women serving deserve a much better standard of leadership & leader.
Being from the ground level Firearms teams. I would argue that the demise of the Firearms world came about when Senior Officers with no experience of ever carrying a Firearm took over.
They then began to bring in policies which created a toxic working environment.
Poor equipment for colleagues in PaDP, RaSP when they could see the brand new TSG CT AFO’s (only put in to wind up my CT SFO colleagues) all issued with state of the art kit. Imagine turning up at Milditz and seeing them running around in good kit, whilst your stood there with your Kwik Fit fitters set of coveralls and MP5 held together with hope and masking tape!
Add to that the cancelled rest days, shocking welfare support if you dared to state you were feeling stressed.
Having run a training cycle around stress awareness, half way through the 3 month cycle I had already identified over 20 Operational Officers in need of professional counselling/therapy. In addition, I lost count of the Officers who approached me for advice and signposting for a variety of reasons.
When I approached the Chief Firearms Instructor and made him aware of my concerns, his response was not to ensure resources were in place or to bring it to the attention of the various Firearms OCU Commanders! No, his cunning plan was to stop doing the stress awareness input which was helping to identify those struggling.
Instead the stress awareness input went from a 90 minute presentation to a 15 minute chat with a PS, who told everyone to go for a run if you were feeling stressed!
The PS’s, Inspectors and even Instructors were not allowed to maintain high standards and run the various OCU’s.
It's all about empires. More wolf grey Arc'teryx and camo vehicle wraps ahoy!
Don’t get me started on that topic, still bitter after failing to get on the underwater knife fighting course!
Thank you for providing a perfect example of Senior Officers building empires, paying lip service to looking after their staff and being incompetent. Certain individuals shouldn’t be allowed to have a sharpened pencil without supervision, let alone be in a leadership role. Sadly these type of buffoons are always moved sideways or promoted as opposed to being held to account for their awful performance.
Your penultimate sentence has already been tried several times, and on every occasion stopped after a few years, because specialisms are learnt over several years of hard won experience. For example, in 1992, the then Commissioner, Condon, decided that the CID needed to be returned to uniform as their experience was not needed, and they could easily be replaced by uniformed sergeants. In 1993 Stephen Lawrence was attacked and murdered in south east London by a racist gang. The DI and DSs, who were responsible for the initial investigation were recent transfers from uniform, and asked the station officer, who had been transferred from CID to uniform for his assistance. His response was short and pithy, but basically said that powers that be had returned him to uniform, and that investigation of serious crime was not a uniformed matter. The resulting clusterfu** of an investigation was totally down to the lack of active work during the golden hour.
CID & Detectives have been underfunded & under resourced in the Met for a very long time. Successive Commissioners were warned of the consequences of the loss of Detectives & did nothing. BHH even said, “if you don’t like it, you can leave. I’ll hold the door open for you”. With ’leadership’ such as that, is it any wonder that the Met is in the state that it’s in. Even more recently, under Cress’s leadership, an attempt was made to rebalance the numbers of Detectives across the Met. This resulted in a certain number of DCs who were working South of the river being told that they were posted North of the river as that is where the need was. When they protested about the upheaval they were told “tough”. Unfortunately for the Met, this coincided with a recruitment drive by Kent & Surrey Police targeted at Detectives. Guess what? More than a few of them transferred out. Another own goal. When you combine an inept, remote leadership with a contracted out, clueless HR support function, is it any wonder that these sort of debacles occur?
If you get the time, this is a thoughtful piece by another crime & Management Board scarred retired police officer.
https://policinglivesmatter.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-casey-review-which-shook-met.html
I know Hobbsie of old, it's a great read.
To paraphrase some Stormtroopers in a galaxy far far away would say to Casey ‘These are not the truths we’re looking for’
A well written, informed and humorous article.
Thanks!
Great article. Having read the report, the only bit i disagree with, surprise, surprise, is the allegation of institutional racism. I think it suits the SLT to allow the msm to harp on about this. While they are, the damning, accurate message in the report about the poor and lack of leadership, is washed over.