THE report by Baroness Louise Casey into the Metropolitan Police yesterday damned the force as ‘institutionally racist, sexist and broken’.
The report was commissioned by the Met in the wake of the massive tide of anger from the public over the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 by a serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, and the subsequent conviction of serial rapist David Carrick – another officer serving in the elite Armed Protection Unit.
The 363 page report details how Couzens and Carrick passed all the vetting to become armed officers assigned to parliamentary and diplomatic protection despite a mass of evidence that they were sexual predators whose predilection for violence against women was well known to their superiors and fellow officers.
Since the murder of Sarah Everard, the scale of violence against women by police officers has been revealed with over 600 serving police officers facing accusations of sexual misconduct since 2008.
The recruitment of known criminals was revealed last year by a Freedom of Information Request that showed that in three years the Met recruited people with records for actual bodily harm, possession of Class A drugs, drunkenness, and assault.
Casey detailed all the reports of sexual assaults covered up or downplayed in a force dominated by a culture of misogyny and racism that flourished despite repeated official inquiries over decades that labelled them institutionally racist, sexist and corrupt.
The Met Police was declared to be institutionally racist by the Macpherson inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993.
A report by an independent panel set up in 2013 to inquire into the unsolved murder of private detective Daniel Morgan concluded that the force was ‘institutionally corrupt’.
Casey said in her report that the Met has lost the trust and confidence of the people it is supposed to keep safe, that the ‘lifeblood’ of British policing is haemorrhaging away and warning that ‘public consent is broken’.
Casey writes: ‘The Met has yet to free itself of institutional racism. Public consent is broken. The Met has become unanchored from the Peelian principle of policing by consent set out when it was established.’
She concludes that the Met is facing an existential crisis that if not fixed could end up with it being dismembered. Although Casey doesn’t spell it out, she is obviously worried that the entire myth of a police force dedicated to even-handedly applying the law and to ‘protect and serve’ the entire community without prejudice has been shattered.
Now the majority of workers, women and youth are understanding that the Met, along with every police force in the country, has been deliberately recruiting the type of police that the Tories and the ruling class need to deal with the masses.
Far from disbanding the Met or ‘fixing’ it, as Casey demands, the Tories are preparing to arm the police with more powers to crush trade unions and make strikes and protests illegal.
The Tory Public Order Bill, shortly to become law, gives unprecedented, draconian powers to the police.
The Bill gives the police absolute powers to shut down protests – and protests even before they start – while the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, brought in last year, gives the police sweeping powers to ‘tackle non-violent protests that have a significant disruptive effect on the public.’
The Tories are amassing all the laws to declare strikes and protests illegal, and they have got in the police exactly the force they require to use against the working class – a brutal, institutionally racist, corrupt force where violence against women is commonplace, accepted as normal and covered-up.
The Met and the police across the country cannot be reformed or fixed; they are an absolute necessity for the ruling class to wage war on a powerful working class that is refusing to be driven into the ground for the profit of the bankers and bosses.
Now is the time for the working class to force the TUC to immediately organise a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers government will disband the police and smash the capitalist state replacing it with a workers’ state and socialism.
