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What is the point of the Metropolitan Police?

Victoria Jones - Pool/Getty Images

As the year draws to a close, it’s worth reflecting on which of our national institutions came out of 2021 in the worst shape. There’s the Foreign Office of course, whose failure to anticipate or prepare for the fall of Kabul was so brutally exposed by its top mandarin’s testimony earlier this month. There’s the Church of England, whose war on parishes came close to whipping up an Anglican insurrection. And then there’s the Conservative party, which seems to have embraced the dirigisme of Pompidou with none of the shiny infrastructure to match.

But in a crowded field, the Metropolitan Police surely take the gold medal for the most incompetent and inept institution. On every count, the force seems to have gone backwards this year. It managed the rare feat of a hat-trick of very public scandals this year without a single resignation. There was the disgrace of the Sarah Everard vigil, when policemen dragged women away in handcuffs for mourning a girl murdered by a serving officer. There was the shambles of the Euro 2020 final, when drunken hooligans marauded around Wembley with the Met nowhere to be seen. 

And, perhaps most disturbingly, there was the Daniel Morgan inquiry which branded the force ‘institutionally corrupt’ with chief Cressida Dick personally censured for obstruction and named as one of those responsible for delaying the panel access to the police database. All this, alongside the humiliation of the long-running Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protests at which officers seemed to get more annoyed at by-standers than those actually disrupting the public.

That’s not to mention other disturbing episodes which stain the Met’s recent history. Earlier this month an inquest jury delivered a damning verdict on what they called ‘fundamental failings’ in the force’s investigation of four murders in 2014 and 2015 by serial killer Stephen Port. Accusations

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