Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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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. Harper has concentrated on 17 specific episodes, from the shameful bungling of investigations into the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan, to the symbiotic relationship between Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Scotland Yard, which emerged through the hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry. In the 1990s, as Harper does cover, it was the Stephen Lawrence murder or rather the bungled investigation. The Met police has had an annus horribilis, from the jailing of its officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard, to scandals involving sexist and racist “banter”, to the conviction of two officers for posting photographs of the murdered sisters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and culminating in the controversial departure of Cressida Dick and the arrival last month of her replacement, Mark Rowley.

Angry demonstrators outside Scotland Yard carrying “Abolish the Met” signs in protest against the fatal shooting by an officer of an unarmed young black man, Chris Kaba, in south London.They include the cuts in the number police of officers – 20,000 in 10 years, and hundreds of detective posts currently unfilled. We know many of these stories already, but having them laid out end to end joins the dots and creates an overall picture of despair. Harper quotes late on a story from an anonymous lord justice of appeal that a scammer at his door was impersonating police.

Boris Johnson’s reckless, illegal parties at Downing Street during the pandemic prompts Harper to wonder how the police, busy nicking people for small infractions of lockdown rules, managed to be in attendance yet not see a thing. If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair? 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. He notes the problems the Met now faces as a result of the enormous rise in cybercrime, unrecognised by the government until 2017, when the Office for National Statistics finally started logging online fraud and computer misuse, and then found that 5m offences had been reported in the previous 12 months.

The unsolved killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan – another high-profile case – is covered in lurid detail, and leads neatly into Harper’s consideration of the relationship between the police and his former employers, News International. Today, our everyday experiences leave us with no difficulty in believing that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the ranks. 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. The fact is that whether this book had come out the year before or next year, it would still have been timely, because the Met does seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. 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.

Is it a hopeful sign that bad things are getting at least confronted in public, or bad in that it depresses public trust in those institutions, not easily regained? 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.He quotes Lucy Panton, the former crime editor of the News of the World, whose police sources were exposed to the Yard by her bosses and who said that she felt she had been “completely hung out to dry” by a company she had loyally served. The book charts Scotland Yard’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public. View image in fullscreen Helen Nkama, the mother of Chris Kaba, who was killed by firearms officers in south London, leads a protest in front of New Scotland Yard, September 2022.

So much, then, of the ‘fall of the Yard’ is not so much a Met-specific problem as a policing-wide one, and indeed common to the authorities in general: having to respond to and re-equip for the digital world, while enduring years of austerity and cuts to physical bases (pictured, the closed Met Police station at Streatham). Harper reveals an institution that is riddled with corruption, racism, sexism, officers scuppering each other’s work as they compete for promotions, and basic incompetence. While not wanting to reopen all that here, Harper does say that what Mackey did was sensible while resented by some as ‘us and them’. You can equally make the case that the Met has always stumbled dysfunctionally from one scandal to the next, and that morale among officers has always been at an all-time low. Tom has also been nominated as Specialist Journalist of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Crime and Legal Affairs Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.With morale rock bottom, 12 years of swingeing cuts meaning they simply can’t do the job required – ask anyone who has been the victim of a burglary – the Met, once admired the world over, is shown to be both institutionally rotten from the top down, and lacking the basic tools to solve crimes. 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. 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.