From detective to front-of-house reception to interviewer to victim liaison officer, when it comes to policing in its widest sense, they are usually all coppers from the same mould.It is also hierarchical and militaristic. I remember the surprise of discovering, when following the Stephen Lawrence case, that the incident room was not a free-for-all of information and ideas like, say, a newspaper newsroom. It’s not just that they tend to join young, stay for 30 years and retire on full pension often before the age of 50, which is strange enough, but it’s also that this is pretty well the only career pattern in the police. Every officer begins in uniform, with a spell on the beat, and works his or her way up.More than that, this one body of people does a great variety of jobs; indeed almost every job that doesn’t require some rarified qualification (pathologist, accountant) or that isn’t entirely backroom (IT manager, librarian, nurse). It is hardly ideal, and the Met Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had problems of this kind in mind when he called recently for more public debate about what sort of policing the public wants.For me, one of the underlying causes is that the police are too different and too distant from the rest of society, and that is something that could be fixed.They have a unique career structure.
Besides the big set-pieces and its own internal reviews, the Met is keeping the Independent Police Complaints Commission pretty busy: the IPCC is currently investigating no fewer than 76 complaints against it.Sometimes, in fact, it must seem to the Met that it is the target of almost as many investigations as it itself is conducting, and you could probably say something similar about other forces around the country. This time it is an investigation, to be chaired by a QC, designed to find out why it took six years, two investigations and three trials to convict the killers of Damilola Taylor.
It will be the second time outsiders have scrutinised the handling of that case. The first was chaired by John Sentamu, now the Archbishop of York, and concluded that the initial investigation was broadly well-run but that the key witness – a girl identified as “Bromley” – was not handled well.Behind the scenes, both Damilola investigations were also subjected to routine internal police reviews – formidable procedures involving teams of specialist officers running elaborate checks to make sure everything has been done by the book.And that’s just one murder case. Like a weary patient whose condition the doctors are having trouble diagnosing, the Metropolitan Police Service is bracing itself this weekend to begin another round of unpleasant poking, prodding and general intrusion.
The report says that “a sense of helplessness” about this situation is exacerbated by the “lack of any tangible ‘pressure valves’, in order to vent frustrations, anger or dissent”.. How could such seemingly normal people, many with jobs, families and an education, become radicalised to the extent that they were prepared to die in order to kill thousands of innocent civilians?
An open letter to the Prime Minister from three of the four Muslim MPs, three of the four Muslim peers, and 38 Muslim organisations including the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain blames government foreign policy. Although Downing Street is dismayed by the letter, the thrust of its argument was acknowledged by a Home Office report last year, several days after the 7 July atrocities, which admitted that young British Muslims were particularly disillusioned by “a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of Western governments”. The arrests of 24 suspects, mostly British Muslims, allegedly planning to launch a spectacular suicide attack even more lethal than 9/11, has sent shock waves around the world. The supposed plotters are British-born men and women, between the ages of 17 and 35. Instead of celebrating the undoubted skill and dedication of MI5 and the police, the Government should also admit that the affair has revealed that we have been conned for years over our airport security..