David Spencer

Mark Rowley is right to tell Met officers not to take the knee

Mark Rowley (Credit: Getty images)

The Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has hinted that the capital’s police officers are to be banned from activities such as wearing political badges on their uniforms, flying colourful flags from police stations and ‘taking the knee’ at protests.

‘Once you start having environmental and other subjects there are lots of people in the organisation who will personally support those causes and that is OK, but the Metropolitan Police explicitly supporting them is quite tricky. I’m fairly narrow-minded on this. There are very few causes policing should be attached to,’ he said.

Some will dismiss this announcement as mere frippery, not worthy of the time of someone in as important a role as the commissioner. They are wrong. 

Sir Mark is right to ensure officers are focused on fighting crime rather than playing politics

The importance of impartiality in policing cannot be overstated. Police officers are given huge powers over their fellow citizens. In the course of their duties and without a court order, they have the power to take children away from their families, to enter our homes without permission and to deprive us of our liberty for many hours and days. 

The perception alone that an officer’s decision-making might be influenced by a partisan political view has the potential to be hugely damaging to the public’s confidence that policing is being done fairly. It would be forgivable if all we were looking at was a small number of naïve officers who, without proper guidance, had chosen to wear a particular badge or lanyard in a misguided effort to show their personal solidarity against discrimination. However, in recent years, far more than this has been going on in our police forces. 

The oath that every police officer takes on joining the force commits them to acting with ‘fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality’. When officers choose to take a public stance on a politically partisan issue it is difficult to see how they are abiding by the oath they have sworn. 

As Policy Exchange revealed earlier this year, the number of police ‘staff networks’ has ballooned in recent years. In some cases they have been pursuing blatantly political causes from inside forces. On at least one occasion, a chief constable ‘took the knee’ at a public event, apparently to demonstrate his ‘humility’. One police force took to social media last year to berate a member of the public for having the temerity to ‘misgender’ a convicted paedophile. 

The public’s confidence in policing has cratered in recent years. When the public see an officer dancing the macarena, they don’t just see an officer making a clumsy attempt to engage with a particular community. They see a police officer, dancing away, who could have been doing something about the crime and anti-social behaviour they face every single day in their local community. Meanwhile the unsolved burglary, the drug dealers who operate unimpeded, the drunks who continue to make their local park a no-go zone all go unresolved.

To regain the public’s trust police officers must focus on what really matters to the law-abiding public. That means every single officer using every legal and ethical means to hunt down the thugs, robbers and drug dealers that cause misery in our communities. It means officers not spending their duty time on what amounts to political activities. 

Sir Mark isn’t the first police chief to make clear his expectations. Stephen Watson, the chief constable now widely recognised as successfully turning round Greater Manchester Police, made his expectations clear in his first month in the job. He said, ‘I would probably kneel before the Queen, God, and Mrs Watson, that’s it.’

None of Watson’s officers could have been left in any doubt as to what was required. That is the way it should be. Sir Mark is right to ensure officers are focused on fighting crime rather than playing politics – hopefully he and Watson will not be the only police chiefs making this clear.

Written by
David Spencer

David Spencer is the Head of Crime and Justice for the think tank Policy Exchange. He is a former Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan Police

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