The current farce with that ill-led rabble, the Metropolitan Plod (affectionately referred to as ‘The Met’), takes me back to my student days when—under the impression that I was being very witty—I wore a badge saying: “Help police- beat yourself up’”. This badge referred to the death of a teacher called Blair Peach during Anti-Nazi League protests in London. Peach was separated from the remaining protesters, pushed into a shop doorway and summary justice was administered, leading to his death, by the now long-disbanded SPG (Special Patrol Group). We are not quite being requested to beat ourselves up—other than over our collective White privilege—these days. But the analogy between administering your own justice rings bells when we consider the disgraceful revelations regarding Metropolitan policing in the wake of the terrible abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. Once again, I find myself in ‘you simply couldn’t make it up’ territory.
The legacy of oversights and ‘blind eyes’ that led to the abduction of Sarah Everard by armed Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens, notwithstanding the fact that he exploited the COVID-19 lockdown measures to make her ‘arrest’, is pitiful. Couzens was referred to as ‘the rapist’ by his colleagues. Did they know something we did not? This certainly turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy with fatal consequences for one young lady whom an officer like Couzens should have been protecting. He was a pornography addict, and not the common or garden pornography that can be found with one click on Google (some folk must check things so that others may learn), he was into violent pornography. He even boasted about it. He enjoyed displaying his wares and was known to have exposed himself to a female worker at a drive through McDonalds. CCTV footage of this was provided to the Metropolitan Police to no avail. It then transpired that he was a serial offender having flashed himself at McDonalds several times. To make things worse, Couzens had been accused of flashing prior to joining the Metropolitan Police but this was missed and, unbelievably and apparently, this would not have prevented him joining. His most recently reported flashing incident—known to the police—was a mere three days prior to his abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Sarah Everard’s murder was being politicised soon after her murder was conformed with a vigil, given the Royal Seal of Approval, on Clapham Common. Strangely, despite their indolence over an accused flasher in their midst, the Metropolitan Police were quick off the mark with their action at Clapham Common using all necessary brutality—in the name of COVID-19 measures—to disperse this mainly female protest. The politicisation continues. Was it representative of misogyny in the Metropolitan Police or amongst men in society generally? Should women be blamed (correct answer: “no”) for being women, dressing nicely and going out alone? The Metropolitan Police seem to be veering that way.
But it gets worse. The Metropolitan Police say, effectively, that we should not trust them. Don’t worry, boys and girls in blue, we don’t. This is so much the case that the advice issued to women by the Metropolitan Police, if approached by a lone policeman (I use ‘man’ here advisedly), is to…well…call a policeman. What world are these people living in? First, if the approach by the officer is legitimate and he reasonably suspects you of having committed a crime, he is within his rights to stop you. Failing that you could be accused of resisting arrest and find yourself in more trouble. And if a policeman with evil intent has stopped you, he is certainly not going to allow you to make a call to the very people who are likely to come and stop him. If all else fails, women are advised to hail a passing bus. When was the last time you saw one of those when you needed one?
There has been a call from a previous Met Chief Superintendent to that all police officers in the UK should be re-vetted. Is he implying that they have not been properly vetted already? Notwithstanding the tragedy of Sarah Everard’s death, this seems like a gross and typical overreaction, a sledgehammer approach, to tackling the issue. I would advise the police, Metropolitan and otherwise, to stop talking nonsense and to start dealing with the known perverts, wierdos and misfits in their midst. By that, I mean the ones like Wayne Couzens that you actually know about. If you had done that then Sarah Everard would, most likely, still be alive. It is simply not good enough to use the ‘bad apple’ excuse, especially when they knew who the bad apple was. Owen Jones is probably right when he asserts that the ‘whole barrel’ of the Metropolitan Police is rotten and it should scrapped. Since 2010, an unbelievable 771 ‘bad apples’ in the Metropolitan Police have been “accused of rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and abusing their position for intercourse”. For the sexually deviant in our midst, this must seem like the wording from a recruiting poster. It is astonishing that Cressida Dick, as woke a Metropolitan Police Commissioner as there could possibly be, remains in post. Rather than fix the problems under her considerable nose, she has spent time on futile ventures such as Operation Midland which diverted precious policing resources to ruining the lives of several innocent men as well as the final days of one of our most distinguished military officers, Field Marshall Lord Bramall, on spurious charges of sexual assault.
I am not far removed from the view, long expressed, by Peter Hitchens, that with the police we need to ‘start again’. Hichens has repeatedly pointed out that the police have more resources and far more personnel than they ever had. The problem is that the resources are spent on the wrong things, such as helicopters, and the personnel are largely not police officers. If resources were used appropriately and there were fewer backroom pen-pushers, then we may see more police back on the beat doing what they were originally intended to do; to stop crime.
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