Again: all stories above are from the last seven days. But we can go further back. The week before, a Met police officer received a two-year prison sentence for using his position to make sexual advances on two vulnerable teenagers.
There were also scandals in February. A report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct found that Charing Cross-based officers had made jokes about rape, killing black children and beating their wives. Also last month, at a serious misconduct hearing, a Met police commander who wrote the force's drug strategy, which set out to "raise awareness of the dangers of drug abuse," was charged with using cannabis. , LSD and magic mushrooms. And we haven't even touched on the Met's handling of the Downing Street party queue, which drew a lot of criticism: first for the Met's initial reluctance to act at all, and then for its decision to allow Downing Street staff to fill out questionnaires. about the parties in his spare time, rather than face interrogation in person.
Any organization would be, to say the least, embarrassed to be the subject of so much bad publicity in such a short amount of time. But it turns out that this organization is a police force: an organization that we hope will protect us. To uphold the law, not break it.
Of course we have thousands of great police officers in this country: brave, honest, and hard-working. But, albeit unfairly, the Met's scandals also undermine its reputation. A recent report, the Strategic Review of Policing, found that public trust in the police is falling. In part, this is due to the perception that low-level crimes such as theft have not been addressed (in England and Wales last year, only five per cent of theft cases were solved). But it's also because of the horror stories coming out of the Met. They have also helped tarnish the reputation of good cops. This is the point about bad apples: they spoil the whole barrel.
Given the circumstances, I suppose it's no surprise that last year's most-watched TV series was Line of Duty: a drama about police corruption. The BBC has yet to confirm if there will be a seventh season. But maybe there shouldn't be. It would be hard for the show to top the endless police scandals we're currently reading about in real life.
The way things are going, it will have to turn out that DI Fleming is a Colombian coke baron, DI Arnott is Lord Lucan, and Superintendent Hastings is the mob boss.
