THE newly installed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, yesterday stated that the Met faced its biggest corruption crisis since the 1970s.
The crisis, that Rowley has been drafted in to try and head off, exploded with the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by Wayne Couzens and the subsequent conviction of serial rapist and fellow serving police officer David Carrick.
Rowley was dragged from retirement, to run what is nothing more than a PR campaign to try and convince the public that the leadership of the Met and the Tories were seriously going to cleanse the police of all the corruption, racism, misogynistic hatred and violence against women that has been rampant throughout the force.
Rowley revealed that the review of all the past allegations against serving police officers involved examining 1,131 claims of sexual or domestic violence by officers and staff against women from the past 10 years.
This review found that in only 246 cases were the police chiefs satisfied that the decision to leave the accused in post as serving police officers had been correct.
In 78% of the allegations, the review found ‘concerns’ over decisions to allow continued employment as officers and in 61% of these cases there needed to be further work as there were ‘new or missed lines of inquiry’.
In 196 cases, these concerns were so serious that these police officers would have to be re-vetted and the danger they posed to the public re-assessed, raising the prospect they would have to be booted out eventually.
In Rowley’s view, there are several hundred officers in the Met who should be kicked out, as his review had shown that one in every 200 officers had criminal convictions, with the vast majority of offences being committed before they joined.
The crimes committed included sexual offences, drug possession, criminal damage and public order offences.
A criminal past is no bar to becoming a police officer – indeed criminals and violent sexual predators have been welcomed with open arms by the police where their behaviour is condoned, excused and deliberately ignored as part of the dominant ‘culture’.
This is a culture deliberately fostered and encouraged to meet the needs of a ruling class, to create a police force that is willing to carry out a brutal repression of workers, trade unions, youth, minority groups and anyone who dares protest and march against the super-austerity capitalism is preparing to impose on workers. The Tories are relying on the police to enforce all the anti-union laws that they have prepared to break strikes.
Last week, Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, launched a ‘crackdown’ on anti-social behaviour, granting the police new powers to harass youth and carry out ‘immediate justice’ on anyone the police designate as causing a nuisance.
These same police, damned in the official report by Baroness Casey as ‘institutionally racist, sexist and broken’, are being turned loose on workers and youth.
Casey’s report warned that public confidence in the police was being eroded and that this is the fear of the ruling class. It is a fear that workers and youth are not falling for – the old lie about a neutral police force protecting the security of the population.
Instead, they have an understanding that the Met and every police force in the country, has been filled with the type of officers that the ruling class can rely on to carry out the brutal class war, to impose the economic crisis of British capitalism onto the backs of workers and their families.
The working class is refusing to submit tamely to being driven into the ground but is taking action, action that can only lead to a confrontation between the forces of the capitalist state and the mass of workers and youth.
The working class is more powerful than the police or the capitalist state apparatus, and the time has come to use this strength by forcing the TUC to immediately organise a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will immediately disband the police, replacing the capitalist state with a workers’ state and socialism.