Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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An investigation later found that he regularly cavorted with prostitutes, took dangerous bodybuilding steroids and earned the nickname ‘the Rapist’ at his previous force, Kent police, for reasons that have never been explained. In fact, one of the most revealing contributions is that of Andrew Mitchell, the former minister involved in the former fandango, which crucially exacerbated the rift between the Conservative government and the police. A lot of decision-makers have not had an investigative background… They are very ambitious, very good public speakers, but not necessarily investigators and therefore they don’t really understand what it actually entails.

The new commissioner has already announced that there will now be major changes at the Met, with an increase in the number of officers in the directorate of professional standards (DPS), the squad responsible for rooting out corruption and dodgy behaviour. He also quotes at length Jonathan Rees, the strange former partner of the murdered private eye Daniel Morgan, and shines a light on his extraordinary relationship with the Murdoch papers. 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”.But in general the government is treated pretty gently for its major role in the current crisis and in the demoralisation of the Met. Boris Johnson’s reckless, illegal parties at Downing Street during the pandemic prompts Harper to wonder how the police, busy nicking people for small infractions of lockdown rules, managed to be in attendance yet not see a thing. Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. Harper points out that the adversaries in organised crime are far stronger than in previous generations.

Using thousands of intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts provided by police sources, as well as first-hand testimony, Harper explains how London's world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess - and how it might get itself out of it. One theory is advanced by Roy Ramm, who joined the Met in 1970 and rose to the rank of commander, and is quoted for his criticism of senior officers at Scotland Yard: “They are professional police managers who have risen through the ranks without trace, without ever standing in the witness box and giving evidence. The result is a devastating picture of a police force riven with corruption, misogyny and incompetence. Sir Richard Henriques, the retired high court judge who witheringly reviewed the failures of Operation Midland, is quoted as suggesting that there are “far too many ranks” in the Met, no fewer than five above the rank of chief superintendent.He has held senior roles at a number of national newspapers, including The Independent and the Sunday Times. 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. 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. There is, then, more than one side to the ‘fall’; internal and external, the Met’s culture (which is being aired more thanks to social media, and the Met last year brought in Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour) and how it’s serving the public by preventing and investigating crime.

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. Couzens has the hall­marks of a person who has killed before – his pre-planning suggests as much, while his criminal history shows that his behaviour wasn’t a strange aberration. 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. The Met police has had an annus horribilis, from the jailing of its officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard, to scandals involving sexist and racist “banter”, to the conviction of two officers for posting photographs of the murdered sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and culminating in the controversial departure of Cressida Dick and the arrival last month of her replacement, Mark Rowley.Tom has also been nominated as Specialist Journalist of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Crime and Legal Affairs Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards. Of Wayne Couzens, Harper recounts the Met’s embarrassment when it emerged that “an armed officer tasked with protecting politicians, dignitaries and VIPs should never have passed the Met’s supposedly tough vetting procedures. In his coverage of phone hacking and the Met’s initial failure to investigate the Guardian’s revelations about it, he is unrestrained in his criticism of his former employer, noting that the “outrageous behaviour by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers was being exposed on an almost weekly basis. This was the time when corruption among detectives was so endemic that the commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, famously declared that the measure of a good force was that it “catches more crooks than it employs”. While most of the tales are, at a basic level, fairly familiar, what Harper has managed to do is to put them lucidly in context and then add the inside knowledge from the protagonists, whether detectives, witnesses, victim or suspects, many of whom have spoken remarkably frankly to him.

Harper explains how corruption in the CID was rife in the 1960s and 1970s – but how officers eventually got a handle on criminals in their ranks. Broken Yard is a riveting, eye-opening account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside Britain’s most famous police force. Spanning the three decades from the infamous Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard, Broken Yard charts the Met's fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public.

However, it never really went away: using the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent hopeless half-hearted investigation as a starting point, Harper takes us through 30 years of scandals that have seen the Met discredited, at war with its Whitehall paymasters (interestingly, the force that is described as once being full of Conservative voters now has a police officer saying none will ever vote Tory again) and not able to do its job.