The Funny Firm

Adventures in Police Corruption

Vicky looks really, really pissed off. This is the default setting for most real-life detectives.

I see Line of Duty, the smash-hit BBC cop drama ™ might return. Apparently, the climax of the allegedly final series was disappointing, leaving fans clamouring for a new ending. It turned out LoD’s baddie, ‘H’, wasn’t a Blofeld-type archvillain, just a dick who spent most of the time loitering by the office photocopier.

That’s a shame, ‘cos the most realistic thing about Line of Duty was… the baddie was just a dick who spent most of the time loitering by the office photocopier.

The rest of the program was police cosplay punctuated by an overkill of Job jargon. Mind you, I feel the same way about most police TV series. Except for Vicky McClure. To be fair, she really does look like a police officer, in a fuck-this-for-a-laugh-I’ve-had-enough kinda way. Now, I’m not saying LoD was bad drama. To the contrary. It was well-plotted, with high production values and an amazing cast. It was, however, a poor police drama for a series that prided itself on realism (taking themes from famous police corruption cases doesn’t make it realistic). Now, time for some bitchiness (in which I have a PhD). The technical advisors were retired Very Senior Officers, which explains a lot; most Very Senior Officers know little of what actually occurs in the police. If Line of Duty was about PowerPoint, conferences-with-buffets, performance meetings, backstabbing and arse-covering I reckon they’d have nailed it.

So, note to Jed Mercurio – I’m free! Plus, I’m cheaper than a retired Chief Constable. I’m really cheap. Like steak and chips and a bottle of red. And, in the spirit of Substack, here’s 2000-odd words on the subject. Enjoy.

Why should Jed choose me? Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned; I spent five years at the coalface of the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards, specifically targeting officers suspected of corruption. Yes, ex-cops reading this can boo now; DPS are the pantomime villains of the Metropolitan Police. To most police officers, DPS are part-satanic HR and part-Spanish Inquisition (the Monty Python version).

This means I was in the real AC12, except of course it was nothing like AC12. For starters, we were known as ‘The Funny Firm’. There were no guns or car chases, although we did occasionally sneak around police buildings in the small hours. I never wore a stab vest because mine went missing from the office (ha ha!). We had no uniformed superintendents interviewing suspects. And I never heard ‘you have the right to be interviewed by an officer of at least one rank higher than you’ (utter bullshit).

This isn’t to say working in anti-corruption was boring. To the contrary; witnessing decision-making, often at high levels, was an eye-opener. The Police are acutely aware of optics and the idea organisational reputation doesn’t inform decision-making is for the birds. Hey, the CPS considers allegations of corruption a mitigating factor when considering the public interest test for prosecutions. This isn’t much help for officers stuck in the purgatory of suspension while waiting for investigations to be concluded. Police officers receive tactical complaints from criminals, yet when proven false they’ve no real recourse. It’s seen as part of the job, until it happens to you. Like they used to say when you were at your lowest ebb, “if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.”

This balance – ‘to prove or disprove’ – is eternally problematic. Can the Police really be even-handed when keeping their own in order? Although there’s an independent police watchdog (The IOPC), the majority of investigations are still carried out by police forces for reasons of economy and scale. The question remains, how effectively can police investigate their own?

Well, I can say many of ‘our own’ had little time for DPS. Once, in a police social club, I was introduced to a retired detective. When he asked what I did, and I replied DPS, he said, “I didn’t talk to you c**nts when I was in the Job, and I’m certainly not talking to you now,” before walking off in a huff. If he’d hung around I would have reminded him policing isn’t a popularity competition. Like doctors not making great patients, cops can make for tricky suspects.

Then again, some cops did help us. Those officers have my thanks. You’d be surprised, though, at the rank of some of those asked to assist DPS who refused. We weren’t the Stasi – we couldn’t compel people to help.

As for effectiveness, DPS (like every other part of the police) had a mixture of decent, mediocre and indifferent people. Some had spent too long in post, losing themselves in their own ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’ and seeing corruption everywhere. Others were coasting through to get the department on their CV (nothing like showing you’re prepared to eat your own young to impress a promotion board). Then there were people like me; I certainly never joined because I saw myself as a paladin of justice. I was in a career cul-de-sac (well, it was more of a flaming crevasse from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but that’s a story for another time) when a former colleague at DPS suggested the move. Having said that, some cops I worked against were a genuine disgrace. Of all the reasons I have not to sleep at night, working against bent cops isn’t one of them. I’m even a little bit proud of a couple of jobs I worked on.

Yes, there were operations that ended up in the too difficult tray. I have to remember my place in the pecking order – managers have the right to manage and I wasn’t one of them. But I saw jobs that, in my view, needed chasing which weren’t. Consistency and proportionality were seldom happy bedfellows. This is where, in my view, ongoing and intrusive external oversight is important. Who provides that oversight is above my paygrade, but I think it would help mitigate doubts about police pulling punches. Put it like this – I don’t think a tactical-level IOPC embed in the DPS would be the end of the world.

It's not as if the Met didn’t put the necessary resources in - DPS was like a police service within a police service. When I joined I was told anticorruption worked by what was called ‘The Rule of Ones’. Roughly speaking, this means one percent of the workforce will be of concern at one point or another. To deal with them, you need to deploy one percent of your people and spend one percent of your budget to fund it. True to form, at that time the Met had roughly 50,000 employees (officers and support staff), DPS was 500 people strong and spent about one percent of the budget. Of course, not all of that one percent were criminals – DPS’ remit included serious misconduct and public complaints too - not all of which actually happened or were capable of proof. In fact, by far the largest part of DPS dealt with serious misconduct rather than crime.

What, then, does ‘Corruption’ look like? Was it beer-bellied detectives, sitting in pub carparks taking cash-stuffed envelopes from dodgy geezers?

Not really. Maybe in the 70s, 80s and 90s. But not now. Maybe it will return, all the right ingredients are in place.

By the first decade of the 21st Century the old model of corruption was disrupted when rules governing informants changed. Old DPS hands told me about 85% of serious corruption back in the day involved criminal relationships between detectives and informants. Then the police created specialist teams, tightly supervised and regulated, who were dedicated to managing ‘Human Sources’. Before then, police officers in corrupt relationships with criminals exploited the informant handling system to camouflage their activities. Those were the murky days of the Ghost Squad and CIB3, secret anticorruption teams who themselves were accused of stepping over the line.

The fact was corruption simply changed – it’s a manifestation of human weakness and human fallibility is a constant. In fact, I think information technology ‘democratized’ corruption. Back in the 80s and 90s, only a select few had access to confidential information beyond the Police National Computer (PNC). With the advent of computerised intelligence databases at a local level, along with a culture of information-sharing and a more tech-savvy generation, it was increasingly easy to access intelligence. In particular, more support staff began crossing the DPS radar. Police staff, paid less than sworn officers and often living in the communities where they worked, were employed in roles with excellent systems access. Unsurprisingly, criminals, dodgy private security companies and journalists would seek to prey on them.

Furthermore, corruption is challenging to investigate and prosecute. For example, the CPS sets a dizzyingly high evidential bar for the (much-maligned) offence of ‘Misconduct in a Public Office’. This is partly because of the nature of corruption offences. You see, most crime involves a commodity; guns or drugs or cars or stolen property. Or, nowadays, most likely a hard drive. Something tangible. Something you can put in an exhibit bag and take to court.

Most corruption offences don’t have physical commodities. The commodity is information, a whisper in someone’s ear. Leaking sensitive information usually involves what are known as inchoate offences where investigators need to obtain compelling evidence of person ‘A’ passing information to person ‘B’, usually verbally. The investigative techniques used to capture that evidence will invariably be covert, relatively sophisticated and expensive. It’s a bit like espionage, really, but with evidence and courtrooms and absolutely no vodka martinis.

And it’s actually far more interesting than a SWAT team kicking down doors a la Line of Duty. Of course, there are cases involving epic stupidity (committed by officers we called ‘Darwin Awards’), the sort of person who prints out police information that identifies them, only for it to be found at a criminal’s house after a drugs raid. Or take a screen grab of intelligence reports on a computer screen using their phone (doh!). Or using social media to give away their dodgy lifestyles (gyms and nightclubs were petri dishes of potential corruption between cops and criminals). Oh, and of course the criminal fraternity see no issues, whatsoever, in informing on cops. It’s not viewed as grassing, especially if you’ve been arrested and need some bargaining power.

The Darwin Awards walked amongst us, but they were low-hanging fruit. The real targets were embittered but highly-trained and experienced officers on specialist squads. There weren’t many. I know sceptics won’t want to hear how rare truly bent coppers are - and by bent I mean those involved in network corruption - but from my experience it’s true. The problem is the disproportionate amount of damage they can cause.

As for the suspects themselves, many of the corrupt officers I encountered were lonely or in chaotic relationships, had drug and alcohol issues or were deeply in debt. Some were bullies and braggarts. Some simply enjoyed the champagne and limos party lifestyle criminality offers (OCGs target female officers and staff this way). Some, especially with families from countries where police corruption is more or less baked in, came under pressure to do relatives ‘a favour’.

And a few corrupt officers, I think, genuinely just didn’t give a fuck.

Policing can be a deeply shitty occupation. The toll it takes on physical and mental health is considerable. Increasingly, the personal commitment it demands dwarfs the rewards. Sometimes, seeing the lifestyles of uniformed officers working punishing shifts and being treated like trash (by both the public and management), I’d occasionally wonder why there weren’t more corrupt cops.

I was occasionally asked about the most common red flags for suspects by colleagues who’d been promoted and wanted to know what to look for. I would tell them;

·         Debt

·         Poor performance at work / attendance

·         Poor supervision / management

These issues came up time and time again. The response? After 2010 We cut police pay, outsourced HR and created an environment where there was little choice but to promote people without experience or character. DPS made me firmly of the opinion that Sergeant is the most important rank in the police. Weak or bad sergeants were a persistent factor in most cases I worked on. When I joined, your sergeant wasn’t your friend, nor pretended to be. By the time I arrived on DPS, I saw a culture of young sergeants trying to be popular. Be ‘one of the guys.’

And, given this ditch UK policing finds itself in, I think corruption will get worse. In fact, I can see the day coming – soon – when a Commissioner has to take the decision to create a new Ghost Squad. A CIB4. It won’t look too much like CIB3, in fact it will probably be a small army of computer geeks.

Of course, you could improve police numbers, pay and conditions but armchair experts assure me this isn’t a problem.

After five years on the Funny Firm, doing some genuinely strange work, I was ready to move on. Despite it’s reputation, some of the nicest people I worked with were on DPS. Maybe it was being part of an out-group that binds people together, I’m not sure. Maybe I was just lucky. They know who they are, so hello and I hope you’re all well.

So, Jed, consider this my application for technical consultant. I also do weddings, funerals and Bar Mitzvahs. Come and get me.