Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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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. 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. 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. Until this changes – and until a caveman canteen culture is addressed – the crisis within our police force looks never ending.

Broken Yard does not suggest things were once all Dixon of Dock Green perfect, although it points out the success of the Labour government’s Safer Neighbourhood policies. 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. 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.

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. 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. The shock in reading journalist Tom Harper’s Broken Yard, a new critique of 30 years of Met policing, is in realising just how wide­spread and rotten it is. 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. 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.

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. While not taking anything away from the strength of the book – the ‘fall’ of the Yard – and how well the author tells the story, we can query the basic assumption that all was well until a recent ‘fall’.

His central message is this: the Metropolitan Police has morphed into an organization whose main purpose is to defend the Metropolitan 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.

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

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. A former Met borough commander, Tony Nash, thinks that many more officers with experience in the CID should be in senior positions. 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. 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.