… we promise to improve if you give us more money
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Are we? The new guy only got here in September, and has largely just admitted how bad the situation is, rather than continuing to cover it up.
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Again, how far can a captain take a boat if half the people rowing are actively rowing the opposite way, or pretending to row the right way, but not actually doing so (and the management are planning a mutiny)? While I agree it is her job to fall on her sword for this sort of thing, I’m still not sure you’re addressing the actual situation she was in, would Kahn have backed her if she started throwing people under the bus, would the Tories?
Spherical cows are nice, but they’re about as real as perfect people.
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Cressida Dick has fought tooth and nail against reform since even before she became commissioner. Her entire career in the upper echelons of the force has been based on reflexively denying any wrongdoing by the police and insisting that there was nothing “institutionally” wrong with the way that the Met functioned. It’s ironic (although also incredibly predictable) that the organisation that she was instinctively protecting was simultaneously trying to oust her for homophobic and misogynistic reasons, but given that the MacPherson Report came out in 1999, it’s not like she wasn’t warned.
Pretty much every Londoner I have spoken to about the Casey Report has said some variation of “wow, the Met is racist, homophobic, and sexist? Is Louise Casey the 7 millionth Londoner to work that out?” Perhaps now, with Dick finally gone and a replacement who is at least willing to admit there are problems, we as a city can finally have a police force that isn’t seen as a violent gang by large swathes of the population?
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What makes you think that she was trying to steer the boat in any direction – despite claiming to learn the lessons the direction was always straight towards the rocks?
I accept her job was not easy but that does not excuse the position of maintaining the status quo and applying sticking plasters even when it was clear to all that the Met and Londoners were well beyond that as a solution.
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Fair enough, my apologies to Timd then, I guess a career in the Met means only the people willing to ignore the problems are going anywhere (besides away from the force).
As to the question you raise… yeah right.
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It’s a cliche to say it, but the shift from “bobbies on the beat on bicycles” to “never seeing fewer than three officers together, always in body armour, usually in a riot wagon” has happened within my memory, and I’m not that old. I’ve seen how community-based policing by consent can work in Japan, for example, and it’s not impossible to imagine a series of reforms (together with proper funding for social services and treatment centres) that could bring the Met back to a position where they weren’t almost universally despised by the population they police.
Finding the political will to do so, however, is a completely different matter.
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That’s where my primary cynicism comes from, apart from the leader of Labour being another “more jail time will fix the societal issues that caused people to commit crimes” true believer, can you imagine the stink raised by the Daily Heil and co?
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For all the talk in the UK of “London bias” in politics and the media, I never cease to be amazed by how much London-focussed policy is formulated to appease Daily Heil reading, xenophobic pensioners in the shires, who hate the city and would never want to go there.
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Let it never be said the Tories don’t know their target audience.
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