The Met isn’t fit for purpose – too often it shows how policing should not be done

If the police have lost the faith of people like me – mostly law-abiding, middle-class local residents – then they’ve really lost the plot, writes Mary Dejevsky

Even reporting an offence is a discouraging experience (Getty)

A few weeks ago, during the latest lockdown, I took my afternoon constitutional along the Thames Embankment, past – as it happened – the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard.

Carrying on towards Embankment station, through a broad underpass where all the “non-essential” shops were obviously closed, there was a large man, dressed in dark clothes, shouting, swearing and laying about him in what I felt was quite a threatening way. It was raining, and there were not many people around.

There were, however, three police officers, sheltering inside the station, talking among themselves. I approached them and asked whether there was anything they could do. They ignored me. When I asked again, they said that it was a mental health issue; they had talked to him, but there wasn’t anything they could (or would?) do. I asked whether they had called anyone who could help him. They said no and turned away. I had clearly exhausted my allotted quota of police time. Meanwhile, a private security guard from one of the closed premises had approached the man and asked him to stop threatening people and move on. I thanked him.

This was a tiny, tiny incident. I was probably not at any great risk. But for no fewer than three uniformed officers to stand by in a potentially dangerous situation, while a private security guard steps forward to do what I tend to think the police are paid to do, fitted, for me, into what UK officialdom, in other contexts, likes to call “a pattern of behaviour”.

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The police – and, as someone who lives in central London, I’m talking here chiefly about the Metropolitan Police – have increasingly seemed to have their priorities the wrong way. If they are not actually upside down, then they are hardly aligned with the priorities of local residents, either – which might be to address crime and do their best to keep citizens safe.

The controversial policing of the Clapham Common vigil-turned-protest last weekend is a massive case in point: where the first mistake (or so it seems to me) occurred was when the original organisers of what was always going to be a largely women’s occasion, in memory of Sarah Everard, did the right (rather female) thing of asking nicely for permission. The judge’s refusal to intervene opened the way for what happened to happen, and it was not a good look – to put it mildly – for the Metropolitan Police.

Now, it is true, that, as the dust settles, the police and their commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, seem to have emerged relatively unscathed. An instant YouGov poll found that a majority, albeit a narrow one – 53 per cent overall – thought the police were right to break up the gathering as a contravention of the lockdown. But there were important nuances.

The sample was small: fewer than 2,000 people. Women were evenly split on the police action, while men were 56 per cent in favour. Younger people (18-24) came out 46 to 30 per cent against the police action. They were also more likely than older people to say that protests should be allowed during the pandemic, which is perhaps no surprise.

Of course, the pandemic, or rather the government’s ever-changing response, has created dilemmas for the police, and especially for the Metropolitan Police, given that central London, as the seat of power, is the favoured venue for demonstrations of every hue. But even an inadequate poll that has only half of women and less than a third of young people supporting police action falls somewhat short of policing by consent. The rot, as I would see it, in terms of policing for everyone – women and men, younger and older – set in a lot earlier than the pandemic.

One potentially productive line of discussion that has emerged in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder is about what makes city streets feel safe(r) for women, and how can safety be more effectively “designed in”. It transpires – and I would absolutely concur – that some aspects are more important to women than to men. They include better street lighting, which, even in central London, is dire, compared with many capitals elsewhere in Europe.

And they include actually enforcing the law, as it applies, to what some (mainly men, I suspect) might dismiss as small infractions: antisocial behaviour of all varieties, street-drinking or drug-taking, and anything else that makes a neighbourhood look or feel down at heel.

Some of this is the responsibility of the local council – and Westminster stacks up pretty well on clearing graffiti and cleaning streets. In policing and law enforcement – the responsibility of the Met – it is another matter.

Two years ago, the then leader of Westminster Council, Nickie Aiken, now the Westminster MP, reported that she and a BBC camera crew had been threatened by a group of street drinkers near Charing Cross, and that a group of police officers had gone into the adjacent McDonald’s for a snack, rather than come to their aid.

Anyone familiar with the area will know that there are doorways and underpasses there that can make it intimidating by day, let alone after dark, and that the police largely leave it be. Alas, this instructive little episode seemed to be quietly banished from the airwaves, following a discussion with the Met. Nor has policing improved in that area, since.

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The government and the Met also seem to take quite a flattering view of their own performance – the lockdown drive to end rough sleeping being a case in point. Amid much mutual congratulation last week, it turned out that 30 per cent have been helped. Not bad, but not that good either – which will not come news to residents in those parts of central London where many of the rough sleepers decamped as the rest of the city closed down.

I was, though, gratified to hear Louise Casey, the former homelessness “tsar” who led last year’s “Everyone In” operation, tell a parliamentary committee that if the majority of rough sleepers could be helped, she would then want a serious crackdown on begging.

So would I. It is intimidating – especially, but surely not only, if you are small, female and of a certain age – to find someone encamped and demanding money beside practically every London cashpoint and supermarket entrance. At a time when police were stopping cyclists resting beside their steeds in St James’s Park – socially distanced, harming no one – the very same officers were turning a blind eye to people sitting begging outside supermarkets as they went in for their snacks.

And don’t get me started on the happy fraternisation that went on between police and protesters as Extinction Rebellion were putting up their tents on a key London crossroads, helping to bring the capital to a grinding halt. Policing by consent? In the interests of the working residents who help pay their salaries? Perhaps not.

Even reporting an offence is a discouraging experience, if the incident is not life-threatening or happening right now. With police stations mostly closed or not open to the public, you have to call a non-urgent number or report on the internet, for which you receive an impersonal acknowledgment, a reference – and not much else, least of all any reassurance that anything will be done.

Approach a rare “bobby on the beat”, and it’s invariably someone else’s job. Socially-conscious people stop bothering, and the degradation goes on. Which poses the question: if the police have lost people like me – mostly law-abiding, middle-class local residents – then haven’t they really lost the plot?

And there is so much that could be done, in the small things, that could improve safety; not just for women, but for everyone. Whether it can be done without radical reform, however, I wonder. Clapham Common showed once again how unclear both the responsibilities of the Met, and its line of accountability, really are. Does the buck stop with the commissioner, the mayor or the home secretary? And how reasonable is it to expect the Met to be both the flagship national force – and responsible for order on my local streets?

Amid all the institutional rethinking that may follow the pandemic, should restructuring the police not be part of the picture? And let’s start with the division of the police into a national and a local force. In its current confused state, the Met is showing all too often how policing should not be done.