THE CHIEF Inspector of Constabulary, Tom Winsor, in his ninth and final annual review, has warned that Tory PM Johnson’s promise to hire 20,000 more police officers risks bringing in even more misogynist and racist officers into the force.
The report comes a month after Cressida Dick’s resignation as Met Commissioner which followed a damning inquiry by another police watchdog into a culture of violently misogynist, racist and homophobic messages at Charing Cross police station in central London.
In fact a Freedom of Information Request revealed that in the past three years the Met recruited people with records for actual bodily harm, multiple possession of the class A drug cocaine, drunkenness and assault. This is on top of the recent conviction of two officers for taking selfies with the dead bodies of two murdered women in north-west London.
A separate Freedom of Information (FOI) Request revealed that at least 750 accusations of sexual misconduct were made against serving police officers across 31 police forces between 2016 and 2020.
Winsor reiterated warnings that the ‘sheer magnitude and speed’ of the recruitment campaign to hire 20,000 police officers ‘inevitably carries risks’ adding that there is a ‘heightened danger that people unsuited to policing may get through and be recruited’.
He said in too many cases the system ‘fails’ when, on occasion, organised crime groups try to infiltrate the police which can have ‘catastrophic consequences’.
Cressida Dick when she was Met Commissioner had described these racists, criminals and thugs within the police as ‘bad uns’ … a few bad apples in the barrel. However in reality the entire barrel is rotten from top to bottom.
An independent report into the murder of 37-year-old private detective Daniel Morgan in south London in 1987 was finally published in June. It concluded that the force is ‘institutionally corrupt’.
As part of the findings on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Macpherson Report found the Met Police to be ‘institutionally racist.’
Back in April 2021, PC Benjamin Hannam from Edmonton in north London was jailed after acting as a recruiter for a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group, ‘National Action’, within the police force.
Then there is the case of Sarah Everard, abducted and murdered after she walked home from a friend’s house on March 3rd, her body burned. As we all know, the man accused of her murder was a serving Metropolitan Police officer.
The attack on the vigil for Sarah Everard, where the Met police force brutalised young women at the Clapham bandstand, has been met with furious anger by UK workers after young women were handcuffed and dragged away by the police.
Two judges ruled yesterday that the Met Police breached the rights of the organisers of a planned vigil for Sarah Everard. The group had to cancel the event after the Met said it would be illegal to stage it under lockdown restrictions.
And of course 1,811 people have died after contact with the police since 1990. Sarah Everard’s murderer, PC Wayne Couzens remains the only police officer who has ever been tried for murder!
This situation is not a case of good cops versus bad cops, and reforming the police by removing a few ‘bad apples’. The ‘institutionally corrupt’ and ‘institutionally racist’ force is, in fact part of the capitalist state, a body armed and dangerous from head to foot, existing solely to defend the ruling class by any means that become necessary to maintain the ruling class in power.
This situation has now become crystal clear to millions of people. They know the police cannot be reformed. The Met Police and the other forces must be disbanded!
They know what is being assembled is a brutal capitalist state machine ready to take on the working class in order to make it accept living in absolute poverty, which the ruling class is busily planning for it.
Millions of workers in the trade unions must rise up and insist that the Met police and the other forces are disbanded and replaced with a workers militia and a workers state. Only the WRP and the Young Socialists fight for this policy. Don’t delay, join us today!