Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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He also speaks to detectives who are willing to question why Couzens got away with suspect behaviour for so long – and they ask why the investigation into Couzens’ crimes has been shelved now he is behind bars. And with this week’s news about David Carrick, a serving Met officer who has admitted sexual offences stretching back over a 20-year period, Scotland Yard face yet another crisis.

While not taking anything away from the strength of the book – the ‘fall’ of the Yard – and how well the author tells the story, we can query the basic assumption that all was well until a recent ‘fall’. 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. 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.There is, then, more than one side to the ‘fall’; internal and external, the Met’s culture (which is being aired more thanks to social media, and the Met last year brought in Baroness Louise Casey to lead an independent review of its culture and standards of behaviour) and how it’s serving the public by preventing and investigating crime. 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. This means while we have heard the stories before, Harper offers an insiders’ angle, and it is revelatory in its findings.

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. In his coverage of phone hacking and the Met’s initial failure to investigate the Guardian’s revelations about it, he is unrestrained in his criticism of his former employer, noting that the “outrageous behaviour by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers was being exposed on an almost weekly basis.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.

From the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard, Tom Harper examines the most notorious cases involving the Met over the past thirty years. This was the time when corruption among detectives was so endemic that the commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, famously declared that the measure of a good force was that it “catches more crooks than it employs”.

This exposé is linked to those that follow by a thread of corruption, incompetence, of internal politics and lack of resources. A fish may rot from its head, as author wondered in a concluding chapter, but you could be more forensic and ask whether the problem in the hierarchy is rather of a lack of grip from the top down to stations (and why does one station have a better occupational culture than another? Her testimony does not exonerate her fully but it does show the lengths to which the rich and powerful will go to conceal their behaviour. The shock in reading journalist Tom Harper’s Broken Yard, a new critique of 30 years of Met policing, is in realising just how wide­spread and rotten it is.

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. A lot of decision-makers have not had an investigative background… They are very ambitious, very good public speakers, but not necessarily investigators and therefore they don’t really understand what it actually entails. The same week that I came upon it, a headline on The Economist’s cover was ‘London’s rotten police’.Throughout this fully updated edition, which includes an assessment of Mark Rowley’s first year as commissioner and the Met’s failure to adequately vet the likes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, Tom Harper makes use of intelligence files, witness statements and first-hand accounts to explain how London’s world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess – and how it might get itself out of it.