Cressida Dick was the Commissioner during many of the recent outrages that led to the report, so perhaps some women are as good or better.
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many fewer guns means many fewer deaths. so not exactly the same.
in 2020 for instance there were 3 fatal shootings by police in the uk, an estimated 999 in the us.
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Hard to believe an organization known as “the Filth” could draw criticism.
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I don’t have a lot of hopes of this sparking real reform, as this is what, the third report to say this (that the force is “institutionally racist,” etc.)? And the other two resulted in… well, this current state of things, so not a lot of change, obviously.
The irony here is that the principles of Peelian policing can help to avoid that, but despite coming up with them, the UK seems to have completely abandoned them in favor of US-style fuckery. One has to wonder just how much Hollywood, and its fantasy depictions of the police, is to blame, and how much occurred before that.
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They were likely forced to undertake this investigation, they did it in order to pretend like they’re going to address the problem, and then will ignore it, unless forced to do something - and what they do will be largely performative.
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Yeah, recent events really forced their hand, I suppose, into pretending like they give a damn about the problem. (I guess it turns out that “the first step is acknowledging you have a problem” isn’t always much of a first step…)
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He first tried it out full time in Ireland and it largely amounted to strike breaking and attacking other subversives (land reformers)! So I don’t have too much faith in him.
What the UK tried to do with the PSNI after the GFA is however a model I think. It involves starting a new body, led by people not insiders, not continuing with much of the membership, actively recruiting from groups victimised by bigoted violence from the coppers, and adversarial political oversight from groups including those discriminated against.
So the UK absolutely has the model, and they know one of the flaws in it (DUP won’t apply the law, agreements, form a government so oversight is missing) and they also know that a more comprehensive, with teeth, truth and reconciliation commission is needed than they set up in NI. And obviously, unlike NI, they have to recognise the centrality of security services in acts of violence.
Britain has the tools, knowledge, and experience. It can do this (Ireland has none of these things so please know that this post is a compliment), what it needs is Tories out for a start.
ETA
I’m basing most of this on Dr Vicky Conway the much missed prof of law, member of the policing authority and host of the Policed in Ireland podcast.
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"The British police are the best in the world.
I don’t believe one of those stories I’ve heard …"
– “Glad to be Gay”, Tom Robinson
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A thematically apt edit to the post:
Correction: Service, not Force.
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Not to be confused with:
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IIRC they did that in Camden, New Jersey, but I haven’t heard of any other examples 
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#ECAB
Who knew?
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If you look at the basic principles of Peelian policing, they’re hard to argue with. (They’re also pretty much the opposite of how US policing is set up, and bear little resemblance to what exists now in the UK.) I’m sure a modern implementation of Peelian policing would be shocking to Robert Peel himself if he could have seen it, though.
I’ve seen a number of people convincingly suggest that as a model for reforming policing (in the US and UK), but yeah, it obviously needs the (substantial) political will to actually do it.
The political/institutional inertia that you’d have to overcome to do this has got to be immense… it’s not surprising it doesn’t happen more often.
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The background to this is that a serving police officer kidnapped,raped and murdered a (white, middle-class) woman, Sarah Everard. To which The Met of course said the usual “few bad apples, deeply appalled etc.”, and that might have been that, except a few days later there was a vigil for Sarah, which the Met, in their infinite tact, decided to treat as if it was a bunch of football hooligans.
Being photographed kicking the shit out of a bunch of (mostly white, middle-class) women turned out to be a bad look for the Met and even the Tories had to call for this review.
This has also lead to some bad-apple-removal, which ended up with the head of the Met having to admit that “two or three Met Police officers per week are expected to appear in court on criminal charges in the coming weeks and months” [emph mine].
tl/dr They were so fucking bad the government had no choice but to make this very public.
Hopefully all of this has put all the other police forces in the UK (who by-and-large aren’t quite as awful as the Met) on notice.
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Other forces are already on notice, and tired of the Met’s failure to clean up its act.
Its repeated scandals, as Casey details, its bungled response or cover-up, is buffeting forces across the country, dragging down trust and confidence even hundreds of miles from the capital. “It’s always the Met,” is a refrain among other chief constables, and their tolerance of their fellow chiefs in London is thin to nonexistent, where once there was support. And they have made the Home Office aware of the drag effect of the better resourced London force’s inability to clean up its messes, and generate new ones.
For those wondering if anything will really change:
There is talk that if in a year to two years the Rowley plans are not showing results, the issue of whether the Met continues in its current form and size, starts to move to the foreground.
To reverse the fall of the Met, Rowley – a maths graduate – will need to reengineer the gravity of history.
Because past attempts to get the Met to accept it needs to radically reform, and then to get them to actually do it, have ended with today’s damning and depressing report by Casey.
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I’m not super well informed on her actual competence, but I’m pretty sure she endured a lot of misogny in many forms from the primarily male, homophobic racists who make up a good part of the Met. She could also be a poor leader, but no one person can change an organization.
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Sinead?
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Misogyny and homophobia. Cressida Dick came out as lesbian in 2017.
There is a lot of valid criticism about her, but there were also a lot of people (expecially Met cops) who just wanted to get rid of the lesbian. We are now finding out that her replacement is a worse bastard.
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One person, in her position, can prevent or hinder change by consistently trotting out the bad apple/baby with the bathwater arguments.
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