World City Blues

Nobody said policing a World City was easy

Demonstrators at a pro-Palestine rally in central London, 2021

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I woke up yesterday to one of the biggest intelligence failures of the past fifty years - comparable to 9/11 and the Iraq WMD dossier. The well-regarded Israeli security apparatus, blind to preparations for thousands of rocket strikes, followed by a land incursion. Hamas’ operational security around this attack was deeply - and worryingly - impressive.

My thoughts are with the victims of Hamas, Hezbollah and the rest. The Israelis and the Palestinian civilians who’ll suffer when the IDF responds to this outrage. Which, in my view, the Israelis are perfectly entitled to do - obliged, even. No fence-sitting here.

And so, like ripples from a brick dropped in a pond, there will be consequences abroad. Israel might be over 2000 miles away, but distance matters little in a world city like London. The TV personality Rachel Riley (a victim of online hatred for daring to call out antisemitism) posted images of people in Acton waving Palestinian flags and celebrating a brutal terrorist attack as if it were a game of football. There will be the usual security consequences for Britain’s Jewish community; volunteers protecting synagogues and schools. Enhanced police patrols. Vandalism and criminal damage. Abuse and harassment.

After the IDF bombs Gaza, there will be demonstrations in London by pro-Palestinian groups. The vestigial remnants of the rentamob Left will shuffle from their crypts. Jeremy Corbyn will make a mealy-mouthed speech. The Mayor will make conciliatory noises then hide. Tensions will be raised. And, I suspect, the Met’s TSG will be busy.

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Was ever thus for London’s police. In 1994, after bombs exploded at the Israeli embassy and the offices of a Jewish charity, I remember crewing the divisional ‘bomb car’. Our job was to patrol Jewish-linked locations to check for suspicious activity. It wasn’t much of a ‘bomb’ car, to be honest; our only equipment for managing an IED was a roll of mine tape to create a cordon. Nonetheless, it was an early taste of how, in a world city, things that happen far, far away… aren’t really that far at all.

London is a place of embassies and consulates; a year later, for example, I found myself stood outside the French ambassador’s residence. Greenpeace demonstrators had invaded the grounds, angry at French nuclear trials in the Pacific. I was freezing cold after a long night of being a piece of street furniture on Kensington Palace Gardens. At 7am, a spectacularly scruffy young gendarme appeared from the ambassador’s residence carrying a large mug of coffee. It smelt delicious. He looked at me with barely-concealed disgust (les flic Anglaise!) as he stepped into his heated guard booth, lit a cigarette and snapped open a copy of Le Monde.

And so, today, I’m writing about how the Met responds (or doesn’t) to world problems washing up on its doorstep. I’ll also discuss how a security vacuum has developed in that murky area between extremism, public order, crime and community relations.

Volunteers from the Jewish safety and security group ‘Shomrim’ on patrol in London

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I’m not waxing lyrical when I describe London as a world city - it’s genuinely one of the most polyglot and cosmopolitan places on the planet. Yes, there’s a discussion to be had about London’s unhealthy economic and political pre-eminence in the UK, and indeed about how we manage immigration too. However, like most police officers, I live in the world as it is - not the one I’d like it to be. QED, my London was a seething cauldron of international intrigue, blood feuds, skulduggery and all-round naughtiness. London’s the terrestrial version of the cantina from Star Wars, but the music’s better. The Smoke is what it is. Take it or leave it. And, if you’re in the Met, you’re obliged to take it.

I can’t say I’m the most well-travelled person either, but so what? I’ve still broken bread with Persians, Vietnamese, Turks, Kurds, Lebanese, Somalis and Africans. I’ve argued about hummus with a Syrian (if peace ever comes to the Middle East, hummus will play a role). And that was before the influx of eastern European arrivals after 2004. I’ve met Serbian war criminals, Russian ‘businessmen’ and Slovakians trafficked into the UK for prostitution. I even met a bloke from Kazakhstan whose ambition was to build an Irish theme pub in Astana. He was looking for the perfect butcher’s bike as a prop, in that well-known Irish county of… Neasden.

Attending yet another finger-wagging diversity lecture, I’d sometimes wonder if part of the Met’s intractable problem with race was the sheer impossibility of wrapping your head around the mores and sensitivities of… absolutely everyone. You’d need a police force made up of cultural anthropologists.

Did you know, for example, how many Colombians live in Elephant and Castle? (not very scientific answer - lots). That Vauxhall is a hub for Portuguese people? That North Kensington has a big Spanish and Moroccan community? That many Somalis made the epic schlep from Ealing in the early 90s to Woolwich? When I was younger, Aussies were famously denizens of Earls Court. By the early 90s they’d been priced out to Acton. Then white South Africans began congregating in Southfields, having forsaken the exotic delights of Shepherds Bush. Thousands of micro-diasporas, people trekking London’s 32 boroughs and six-hundred odd square miles, searching for somewhere to circle their wagons. To be safe. Make a home. Do business. And yes, sometimes that business is crime, dodgy politics, or settling scores from the old country. Or even all three.

Members of the ‘Hellbanianz’, an urban street gang of Albanian origin. Crime, in this case, appears to be paying

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Given London’s world city status, you might think the Met’s intelligence apparatus reflected the demands of policing a place where three hundred different languages are spoken.

It doesn’t.

Writing as someone who worked in intelligence across the Met, I’d suggest there are four main reasons for this glaring omission, three of which are largely to do with our old friend austerity. The fourth was down to hubris, circumstances and revenge.

They are;

(1) Decimating community policing teams

There’s no substitute for the oft-neglected skill of talking to people, which is the meat and drink of a community police officer’s job. However, they need time to develop relationships without answering calls to babysit mental health patients or police demonstrations against Israel (etc). Sure, its important to have a diverse workforce, but I’d argue it isn’t a golden bullet either - as I’ve written elsewhere, people from every culture have their own set of prejudices. What you really need are grown-ups with common sense who are good communicators. They come in all shapes and sizes.

When a local officer enters a report on the intelligence system about group ‘a’ from, say, Senegal are conflicting with group ‘b’ who are Congolese, they’re adding value. These reports should be picked up by analysts to inform wider decision-making - are reassurance patrols necessary? Do we need a liaison officer? Are there source recruitment possibilities around crime or even radicalisation?

This doesn’t happen much now.

Partly, this is due to officers being too busy, and secondly because intelligence-gathering orthodoxies owe more to performance management than thematic value. Which is to say, the superintendent wants stats on volume and priority crime (that’s how he or she is being judged), not whispers about how one community are considering vigilante action due to an ongoing beef with another. Where’s the win in that? The ‘actionable product’? Then there’s a corollary - given the lack of an overall intelligence picture - one that adds context - when a cultural issue does ping the superintendent’s radar… they overreact.

(2) Cutting intelligence capability

The Met went intelligence-crazy in the 2000s, with the advent of the National Intelligence Model and introduction of Borough Intelligence Units. I remember walking into a packed-to-the-rafters local BIU circa 2008 and saying, “what do all these people do all day?” The answer, sadly, was too many were being used as statisticians, feeding the performance management monster for the bosses.

Yes, there were thematic ‘focus desks’ which did good work. They were focussed on volume crime like robberies and burglaries. Then, after the night of the long cuts, Met Intelligence reduced the hordes of intelligence staff to about three or four officers per borough. From too much, overnight, to virtually nothing. Specialist units were expected to take up the slack when it came to crime in international communities, until they got rid of those too. Which brings me to…

(3) Scrapping specialist CID teams

The two I’ll mention are Operation Trident and the Specialist Intelligence Section. Trident - which dealt predominantly with serious assaults and murders in London’s Black community, was generally considered a success. It built trust with people who had little time for police. It generated intelligence. And, most importantly, it locked up bad people and gave families of murder victims justice. In doing so, it also saved lives. Trident was scrapped predominantly for budgetary reasons in 2013.

The Specialist Intelligence Section (SIS, not to be confused with MI6’s official title), was a secretive unit based at Jubilee House in Putney. It’s remit was organised crime within specific cultural groups - for example drug importation from Turkey and the near-East. Units like SIS hoovered up intelligence and developed long-term operations against key criminal targets. It also found itself occasionally dipping its toe into the grey area between politics and crime. SIS was also a classic example of Met CID squad duplication, whereby units strayed outside of their remit looking for work - so they all ended up doing more or less the same thing (hunting drugs and guns). Had it stayed in its lane and been nurtured, it might well have been the seed for a dedicated successor unit - one fit for a world city police service. I think SIS was quietly disbanded in the late 2010s, during yet another bout of restructuring.

(4) Disbanding Special Branch

An obvious disclaimer here is I served in the Branch for ten years. I think parts of it were good and parts of it weren’t. I, personally, enjoyed it (until I didn’t). Make of that what you will. Therefore I am, of coursed, biased.

The Met disbanded its Special Branch (SO12) in October 2006, amalgamating it with the Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) to create SO15 Counterterrorism Command (CTC). The politics behind this are wearisome, but suffice it to say many senior Met detectives loathed SB. They didn’t care how many babies were thrown out with the bathwater, as long as they had a turn hammering the stake through the heart of ‘The Branch’. You can get a flavour of it here.

The architects of SO15 examined Special Branch and ripped out functions that didn’t specifically service counterterrorism operations (fair enough, the clue is in the name). Their interest was in sexy, big-ticket work that shone in the fevered mid-late 2000s, when the War on Terror was at its height. What was discarded, though, was an intelligence-gathering apparatus with decades of experience in developing discreet and productive relationships in London’s international communities.

This was known as ‘E’ Squad, which consisted of a series of focus desks dedicated to faraway places deemed of most interest to the Met in an intelligence and security context. My favourite was the grandly titled ‘Rest of the World’ desk. Each desk’s office space on the 17th floor at New Scotland Yard was decorated with the flags and banners of their nominated country and its varying political groups, giving the place the appearance of an Olympic parade.

‘E’ Squad officers were allowed to develop specialist, and occasionally esoteric, skills relevant to their desk. Some were linguists. Some were regional enthusiasts, hobbyists and occasionally even experts. And, yes, some were indifferent. Most had a strange love / hate relationship with MI5 (unlike MI6 who are generally cannier - and therefore more charming - when it comes to dealing with old Bill). Some became legends, like the DS who knew west London’s Sikh and Hindu communities like the back of his hand. Any panic at Scotland Yard about potential problems were mitigated by his wandering off to Southall for a chat (where everyone knew him as ‘our secret policeman’). Such expertise comes with a price, as senior officers couldn’t really tell him what to do (they hadn’t a fraction of his knowledge). When one finally did, he retired. I remember our Russian specialist, who in 1999 predicted with stunning accuracy how eastern European crime patterns would map out over the following twenty years. He was quietly ignored.

By 2006, the squad was reduced to an ops team, run ragged servicing surveillance monitoring and control room duties. The ‘old ways’ of genteel specialists being given the time to read Hürriyet before taking a long lunch with their Kurdish contacts in Stoke Newington were long gone. I met SO15 detectives who were happy being told who to investigate by MI5 - they’d just run with the ball. I was more circumspect, thinking it healthier for the police in a democracy to have their own capacity to look at issues beyond cases handed down from the State security service.

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And so many SB functions were re-badged by initiatives like the contentious Prevent program. Ex-SB officers were despatched to boroughs as liaison officers (many of whom did as best they could, until the Prevent ‘interventions’ performance monster drained any joy from the role). National units for domestic extremism were established, over-reliant on monitoring Twitter feeds. And, as a gaping black hole in the Met’s wider intelligence capability appeared, everyone else was sucked into it.

The discrete nexus between crime, disorder, radicalisation and (yes) terrorism became neglected. That nexus, in a world city like London, will often involve people from overseas. The people with the technical, cultural, language and communication skills to police them (as customers too, not just as suspects) appears to be beyond the ken of the new model Met.

Remember this as more and more displaced people head for the UK. The world, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is changing. Our foreign-born communities will grow bigger. Social cohesion will begin to fray. The newcomers problems will follow them to our shores - becoming our problems too. Are we ready for these new law enforcement and security challenges? Of course, that’s a rhetorical question; our police services can’t recruit and seem to have questionable priorities. Tricky, politically contentious stuff like engaging with - and occasionally snooping on - new arrivals is probably icky for many senior officers and politicians.

Which is a shame. As a woman trafficked into Britain from Slovakia - someone forced to have sex with a dozen strangers a day - once said, “the men who did this should never have been allowed into Britain. They were criminals when they arrived - they’d all been in prison at home. How were they allowed to commit crimes for so long?”

It was a good question. I couldn’t answer it. I don’t suppose the European Convention on Human Rights did much for her, did it? It certainly helped her tormentors, though.

And so tonight, as Jewish cemeteries are patrolled to prevent desecration, and another CCTV camera is bolted to a synagogue wall, the Met will do what it knows best. Performance matrices will be checked, ‘stakeholders will be engaged’ and reassurances offered. Someone will write a paper, or attend a meeting. Boxes will be ticked on spreadsheets.

And, still, gravestones will be smashed and holy places daubed with swastikas. The people doing it might, one day, graduate to building bombs. But we won’t know, because we aren’t looking. Not really. Not properly.

And so another day passes in our world city.

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