Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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They range from Blue: Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces, a memoir by John Sutherland, to this year’s Tango Juliet Foxtrot (TJF): How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing?

In the 1990s, as Harper does cover, it was the Stephen Lawrence murder or rather the bungled investigation. A former Met borough commander, Tony Nash, thinks that many more officers with experience in the CID should be in senior positions. One senior officer says the Met should now be reviewing every missing persons case in the UK, and comparing it to Couzens’ movements. They include criminals working as officers, ranging from the corrupt to the psycho­pathic, to sweeping cuts that make the job virtually impossible, huge rises in “new” cyber crime that require new skills and resources, and the drug laws that give criminals easy access to huge incomes, which in turn fuels other criminal activity.Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. This means while we have heard the stories before, Harper offers an insiders’ angle, and it is revelatory in its findings. This exposé is linked to those that follow by a thread of corruption, incompetence, of internal politics and lack of resources. Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. The fact is that whether this book had come out the year before or next year, it would still have been timely, because the Met does seem to lurch from one crisis to the next.

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. He explores Operation Midland, the bizarre investigation into the claims made by the fantasist “Nick” – later jailed under his real name of Carl Beech – of a VIP paedophile ring which were deemed at the time by a detective superintendent to be “credible and true”. Are those quoted, and those speaking anonymously, by querying the institution having a dig at it, and the individuals who worked and still work for it?Met people are well able to identify shortcomings, and do so surely because they feel so passionately and proprietarily about the force, not because of any dislike. He notes the problems the Met now faces as a result of the enormous rise in cybercrime, unrecognised by the government until 2017, when the Office for National Statistics finally started logging online fraud and computer misuse, and then found that 5m offences had been reported in the previous 12 months. YEARS ago a detailed critique of the Metro­politan Police would have been shocking because the force – though in fact far from perfect – enjoyed a reputation of being effective and mostly incorruptible.