Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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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. And with this week’s news about David Carrick, a serving Met officer who has admitted sexual offences stretching back over a 20-year period, Scotland Yard face yet another crisis. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence.

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? Has that meant, as Harper suggests, the best officers and most effort goes into CT and leaves less for economic crime, and the drugs trade? What Tom Harper, a former Sunday Times journalist, has managed to do is pull together the major events that have culminated in the latest and perhaps heaviest fall. The same week that I came upon it, a headline on The Economist’s cover was ‘London’s rotten police’. The backlash from public opinion was the final nudge needed for the Tories to sack their leader, yet the police’s investigation is shown to be seriously lacking.

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”. Today, our everyday experiences leave us with no difficulty in believing that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the ranks.

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. His central message is this: the Metropolitan Police has morphed into an organization whose main purpose is to defend the Metropolitan Police.The book charts Scotland Yard’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. 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. Harper points out that the adversaries in organised crime are far stronger than in previous generations. To take internal first, the Met is like other (London-based) institutions such as the BBC and Parliament.

Harper reveals an institution that is riddled with corruption, racism, sexism, officers scuppering each other’s work as they compete for promotions, and basic incompetence. The result is a devastating picture of a police force riven with corruption, misogyny and incompetence. They include the cuts in the number police of officers – 20,000 in 10 years, and hundreds of detective posts currently unfilled. Former Met Police commander Roy Ramm notes how senior officers are managers who have done little real police work, have never gathered evidence or presented it in a witness box.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. But someone has to look closely at the police – and Tom Harper has done just that in this comprehensive overview.