THE CONVICTION and life sentence of Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard was most certainly not the case of one ‘bad apple’ as Met Commissioner Cressida Dick claimed when he was first convicted.
It was revealed this weekend that, in the week Couzens was sentenced, 27 allegations against serving police officers were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) by almost a third of police forces in England and Wales.
According to the IPOC, these 27 detailed referrals involved 14 forces and was a ‘significant increase’ from previous weeks.
Last Friday, a police officer from the Nottingham force was sacked after an investigation into the sending of sexually explicit messages to a vulnerable woman he had stopped for an alleged driving offence.
Just days before, another officer was sacked from the Dorset police after he had entered into an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with a woman considered to be vulnerable that he had met through his duties.
It has emerged that hundreds of police officers in the past have escaped any penalties arising from allegations of sexual misconduct.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) Request by the PA news agency revealed that at least 750 accusations of sexual misconduct were made against serving police officers across 31 police forces between 2016 and 2020.
Only 34 of these investigations resulted in dismissals with a further seven others listed as resulting in resignations – at least six of these resignations were to avoid dismissal.
None of this should come as a surprise.
In 2014, the police announced that they were ‘relaxing’ their rules on recruitment to allow convicted criminals to join.
A FOI request by The Daily Telegraph in May this year revealed that within the past three years the Metropolitan Police had recruited people with records for actual bodily harm, multiple possession of cocaine, convictions for drunk and disorderly, and assault.
They had also recruited a convicted sex offender.
The same police force that actively recruits violent criminals and convicted sex offenders, and that clearly turns a ‘blind eye’ when it comes to investigating complaints, is the same force that has been granted sweeping powers by the Tories to stamp on any protest or demonstration that threatens the security of the capitalist state.
The massive tide of anger and revulsion over the murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a man widely known throughout the police to be a sexual predator of the worst kind – but whose crimes were conveniently overlooked – has provoked a huge crisis for the Tories and their Labour Party supporters.
At the centre of public anger is Dame Cressida Dick who presides over the Metropolitan Police.
When Dick’s resignation was demanded following the police attack on women at the Sarah Everard vigil in March, Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel immediately sprang to her defence.
Just last month, Patel and Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan showed their full support for Dick when they agreed the extension of her contract as Met Commissioner for another two years.
As mayor Khan can veto any appointment to the post of Commissioner.
Now however, it appears that Patel is wildly backtracking on her support for Dick and the Met.
According to reports in the Sunday papers, Patel now believes that the ‘Met is rotten from top to bottom’ and is now claiming that she has ‘clashed’ repeatedly with Dick over the handling of the Sarah Everard case.
This new-found recognition that the Met is rotten from top to bottom is a desperate attempt by the Tories to distance themselves from the massive anger and revulsion at Dick, the Met and the entire police force, and keep alive the fiction of a neutral, fundamentally decent organisation.
The police are not neutral. They are a major part of the capitalist state whose members have been granted immunity from prosecution by the state to carry out their role in dealing with a working class rising up against destitution as inflation rips and British capitalism crashes into recession.
The only way to put an end to the violence and criminality of the police is to smash the capitalist state, disband its police and army, and replace it with a workers’ state and socialism.
