Has The First Step In The Defunding of Britain’s Biggest Police Force Taken Place?
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Read for yourselves and decide…
Policing as we know it in the United Kingdom is dead.
For those of us on the sidelines, who have watched a number of attempts to reform that which cannot be reformed, the events of the last week has not come as a surprise in the slightest; it was expected.
It was announced a few days ago that the metropolitan police had been put into special measures.
For all non-British readers, what this means is that the running of the biggest police force in the United Kingdom has been put into the hands of an independent body.
An American equivalent would be the NYPD being taken off the hands of the mayor to be run by a special task force appointed by the federal government.
This decision was made off the back of the revelation that 69,000 crimes had gone unreported last year and the fall out from the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer.
But anyone with a fair knowledge of the history of policing in England knows that the rot goes far back than we care to admit. The Macpherson enquiry in 1999, into the Lawrence murder did show significant police failings and corruption.
As a man of colour barely out of my teens in the late 90s, the Macpherson enquiry was heavenly sent; It meant that the humiliating random stop and search by the police and the overt racial profiling became a thing of the past.
And what’s extraordinary in all of this is that the behaviour of the Metropolitan police has got worse in the intervening years; young men of colour have been killed by those sworn to protect them. Countless revelations have emerged on the scale of corruption and violence of Britain’s finest.
And this is precisely why anyone who has read the myriad articles I have written on the state of policing in my country will appreciate how much of a big deal this latest development is.
It is as though the police watchdog has finally caught up with the wider public in tacitly acknowledging that our current police force isn’t fit for purpose and a radical reconstruction is urgently required.
