The long arm of police corruption

Are all institutions basically corrupt? If company directors snaffle pencils from the stationery cupboard for their own use, are they corrupt? Is there a sliding scale of corruption, from ‘whatever’, through to ‘well I wouldn’t do it myself’, all the way to ‘summon the rozzers’? And does it matter what the organisation is? Is it worse to steal from your employer if you work for Nestlé or for Oxfam? Are some small corruptions are basically all right?

Of course if we accept the small corruptions, the bigger ones creep in at the edges. And once they’ve entered an organisation’s culture, it is well nigh impossible to root them out. In essence, Tom Harper’s book is a thoroughly depressing account of the Metropolitan Police’s corruptibility. It’s an organisation that matters, whether you like it or not, and one whose employees have at various stages passed beyond pilfering the store cupboard to turning a blind eye to murder, actively assisting violent criminals and stealing many thousands of pounds of public money.

There’s a peculiarly British sort of corruption that explains all kinds of odd things: the Libor exchange rate, hedge funds and of course the extraordinary number of old Etonians in public life. A current of money runs through and underpins this, and it’s tacitly acknowledged in much of our public discourse (or the absence of it). Less well known to the wokerati is the equivalent flow of money that creates a (literally) blue-collar version of the same, with organised criminals paying police officers to leave them alone, then hiring those same officers to join front companies to corrupt their erstwhile colleagues in turn. Soon the whole thing is tainted, and it becomes impossible to turn around without finding a DCI with a direct line to some mob boss who needs a favour.

So the corruption begins with unmonitored credit cards issued to undercover officers, used for drinkies and meals out. Then armed robberies are mysteriously not investigated, criminal cases peter out for lack of evidence and disappear into thin air, and the whole edifice begins to look shady. Various commissioners come and go, some heroic, some not.

Harper tells the tawdry story clearly and calmly – until he reaches Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence, when real anger comes out. Both were murdered, and both investigations were shambolic, with more than a hint that they were deliberately so, since some of the perpetrators might have been calling in favours from dishonest coppers. The victims’ shades call down judgment on an organisation whose corruptness has meant that they and their families are still being failed today. Harper is excellent on how wrong the Met has got some of this, and on the weakness of its leaders’ responses. His epigraph is Edmund Burke’s (admittedly rather worn) point about evil triumphing when good men do nothing – and there is a lot of doing nothing here.

In particular, Harper really understands the creep of corruption, and he notes the way in which the press, organised crime and the Met’s own ineptitude have created a situation where it has begun to seem the norm for some units. He’s less solid on how to improve the situation. He has some propositions which don’t really add up – the idea that sacking a few important officers will make enough of a saving to pay constables better doesn’t bear analysis – and he’s listened to some retired coppers too closely. For example, in terms of investigations, he recommends a return to the 1980s, when detectives knew their patch, had informants who told them what was going on, and therefore got results. But he must know it was precisely this environment that fostered corruption. After all, if you’re meeting an informant for a few swift pints to get some useful information on the other side’s plans, that person is also meeting you with the exact same purpose. Some of the more notorious bent coppers in the book began their careers that way.

Of course, most police officers aren’t like that. For the majority, it’s a good, reliable and interesting job that’s worthwhile and occasionally great. That said, contact with the public at its worst can be an extremely corrosive thing. It doesn’t take too many miserable, violent domestic assaults attended on your own at 3 a.m. to make you really, really want to give up on people. That is a very dangerous thing for young men (and it mostly is men), who are then at risk of thinking hatred is an option; because once you give up on the people you might as well do a half-hearted, rubbish job, take the dodgy money on offer and do whatever the hell you like. The task of remaining compassionate and continuing to care for other people – and yourself – is the real challenge for police officers. Otherwise the situations Harper describes recur, and evil triumphs.