As a young journalist, I remember looking across the news desk one night at a row of brown envelopes awaiting a messenger. Each was addressed to a central London police station. It was, apparently, for the “police benevolent fund” and was for “tip-offs”. But tip-offs of what? I was shocked.
I am shocked no more. The climax of this week’s television bonanza of police corruption was not “Who was H?” in Line of Duty. It was the three-part documentary on BBC2 called Bent Coppers. It was the more gripping because it was not fiction, it was a documentary. But the message was the same as Line of Duty’s: no one in charge of the police really cared about corruption.
Bent Coppers told the story of London’s Metropolitan and City of London police in the 1960s and 70s. They took money from crooks almost from bottom to top. The source of payments was initially vice, pornography and bank robberies. Then, after the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, the growth of the illicit drugs market led to corruption exploding.
The police was host to “a firm within a firm”. Police were secretly recorded boasting to criminals, “We’ve got more villains than you … The biggest gangsters in Soho are the police … Everybody deserves ‘a drink’”. The firm had “people” in every borough. Money was handed to junior constables in lifts to keep them quiet. The City police seemed the worst, with regular bank robberies, and even a murder, never leading to arrest or imprisonment. Political oversight was zero.
When Robert Mark was brought in to clean up the Met, in 1972, he decided he should wind up the “routinely corrupt” CID. Yet the force was being eulogised nightly by the BBC in Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars. When an appalled public challenged Mark, he simply said: “It will stop bank robberies.” It largely did. He later described the Met as having “long been involved in more routine wrongdoing than the other police forces in England and Wales together” [Mark’s memoirs]. Attacks on him – including from CID-friendly journalists – were so fierce he needed public backing from home secretaries Jim Callaghan and Roy Jenkins.
Anyone familiar with law enforcement knows that bad laws make for rotten policing. Vice laws simply meant massive payouts to police. Drugs laws meant that to increase arrests, the police simply planted drugs, especially on black people. They spawned an increasingly lethal gangland. I recall two obvious dealers at a drugs liaison meeting in Stepney Green, east London, shouting at me: “We love our police. You just keep out of our place.” This was long after the reformers claimed to have sacked or “retired” 500 corrupt London police.
Now we have the continuing revelations of the “spy cops” saga. A reputed 139 policemen were deputed to infiltrate hundreds of political groups through the Special Demonstration Squad. Its “undercover” methods were so outrageous that a senior source admitted it had lost its “moral compass”. Yet it reflected a sense of a police culture operating way beyond the bounds of public accountability.
The London police were – and, I understand, in large part still are – like an ancient Italian city state, awash with private armies each loyal to itself alone. There is the VIP protection squad, the firearms squad, the fraud squad, the drug squad, the paramilitary territorial support group and mysterious undercover operations galore. Last week, I saw two policemen sauntering nonchalantly through Mayfair’s Shepherd Market proudly sporting submachine guns. Could this be London?
The result is inevitable. Crime dramas used to end with the forces of law and order winning as the good guys. Not any more. In Line of Duty even the good guys have to be just a little corrupt. In Bent Coppers, the bosses all survived or left to live in Spain. Those who tried to call them to account had their careers ruined. The documentary was a terrible advertisement for whistleblowing.
We are told that policing in a democracy is a unique vocation. Since the days of Robert Peel, the right to deprive one’s fellow citizens of their freedom relies not just on law but on a clear moral code. That in turn demands a fierce loyalty from its members. But what was staggering both in Bent Coppers and Line of Duty was the complete absence of political accountability. No one was in charge. Not a politician put in an appearance.
The police seemed sufficient unto themselves, making money out of crime. The City of London police’s third-in-command in the 1980s, Hugh Moore, was described on air as “the greatest villain unhung”. He was never brought to justice. Worse, his wholly corrupt force, which should at once have been disbanded and merged with the Met, remained in operation – and still does.
I am sure we shall be told that everything is different now. But the message of these programmes is serious. They risk a collapse in public confidence in the police. That can be restored only when the various forces are brought under transparent democratic control. They should never be firms within firms or armies within armies. They need standing oversight commissions under elected leadership. At present, their only accountability is to the television screen.