No bandwagon shall go unladen. In considering the many blaring campaigns to end ‘Violence against Women and Girls’ (VAWG), this could be the motto which unites them all. Apart from being divisive, political and completely unrealistic in their aims and actions, such initiatives are almost all the result of sharp media attention on a small number of disturbing events.
In March of this year, Baroness Louise Casey dropped a hefty 363-page review in Sir Mark Rowley’s in-tray. Rowley, a Common Purpose graduate, was appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) in September last year, vowing to clear up the almighty muddle left by his predecessor, fellow Common Purpose graduate, Dame Cressida Dick.
A large part of his commitment relates to the horrific and very well-publicised crimes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick. Couzens and Carrick were both serving in the Met when, respectively, they committed murder and multiple sexual offences. Of the many inferences drawn from the behaviour of these two men, those treated with the most significance have been that the Met—and police in general—have a problem with misconduct and misogyny and that VAWG must be prioritised inside and outside police forces, so that it can be reduced and ended.
According to the Met, which is the subject of the Casey Review, this enormous body of work (which took a year to complete) does but two things.
- It discusses whether the Met’s leadership, recruitment, vetting, training, culture and communications support the standards the public should expect.
- It recommends how high standards can be routinely met, and how high levels of public trust in the Met can be restored and maintained.
The second of the nine Peelian Principles states police must ‘recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.’ A mere glance at Casey’s findings shatters this principle. The Analytical Report, which supports the main document, deals with a total of 18,589 allegations, 10,252 cases and 12,856 personnel involved in some sort of misconduct proceedings between 2013 and 2022.
How grave a problem?
There is no doubt that the Met, comprising around 44,000 police and staff, is a very different beast from the other forces of the UK. As a frame of reference, Police Scotland, which is the second largest force, weighs in with just over 16,500 police and staff. Setting the misconduct numbers in context is difficult, but an average of around 3% of serving personnel can be assumed to have been undergoing some sort of disciplinary investigation during this ten-year period. It must also be assumed that many of those being investigated have had multiple allegations made against them.
On the face of it, this is shocking. How can it be the case that the very organisation that is supposed to prevent crime and disorder is host to so very much of it? Moreover—and more importantly—is it in any way realistic to imagine an institution so polluted may act with efficiency, impartiality and integrity in its dealings with the public?
In answer to the first question, keep reading; and in answer to the second question, almost certainly not.
In November 2022, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) produced a report prompted by these same events. It was entitled An inspection of vetting, misconduct, misogyny in the police service and I wrote an article about it for UK Column. Commentary around the report itself, and the concurrent news items about David Carrick, was based upon the ‘toxic’, ‘male-dominated’ ‘canteen culture’ prevalent within police forces. This commentary was unified, though it missed the point.
Bearing in mind the common basis of the HMICFRS inspection and the Baroness Casey Review, is it possible to judge how much of a problem VAWG is inside the police forces? Statistics, as always, must be treated with great caution. Casey’s figures suggest that of all the allegations during the decade she looked at, just ‘835 allegations have been made in the period where sexual assault, harassment, or other sexual or emotional misconduct is mentioned’, which is only 4.5% of all allegations, or an average of just over 80 per year, from a pool of 44,000 potential offenders. Given the complete uncertainty surrounding the data that is not available, such as the number of people that did not come forward to report misconduct, we need to make better use of what we do have.
Those that knew and worked with Wayne Couzens and David Carrick were well aware of their proclivities, even if they may not have realised the potential for their causing serious harm. One of the most significant conclusions drawn by Casey is that ‘The misconduct process does not find and discipline officers with repeated or patterns of unacceptable behaviour’. Of course, she is basing this judgement on an evaluation of statistical and, to an extent, anecdotal evidence.
For example, she found:
24 instances where the same officer had been investigated on two or more occasions for behaviour linked to sexual misconduct and domestic abuse—but found that these previous allegations had not been taken into account when considering if there was a case to answer for the alleged misconduct or its severity.
It stands to reason that there are many more such instances that were not uncovered during the trawl, and it is not too much of a stretch to believe that those with allegations made against them would have a high likelihood of involvement in similar but unreported incidents.
Louise Casey and her team found all of this information from a position of being outside the organisation in question. Just imagine what must have been known, and is known, by those on the inside. This would be the point at which to call into question the efficacy of the Met’s Professional Standards Units (PSU) and the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) itself.
Seek not, and ye shall not find
Much is made of the under-staffing and under-resourcing of these units, though the truth lies closer to the Government’s favoured position of not looking for something if you are not keen on finding it. However, from April of this year, the Met has jerked its knees accordingly and announced a great push towards improving the situation, with the Commissioner quoted as saying:
It is clear that the vast majority of our officers and staff are determined to confront those who have corrupted our integrity. I have seen and heard this repeatedly in discussions with those on our frontline. This is our collective fight.
In making such a statement, Rowley seems intent on insinuating and perpetuating at least two untruths.
Had it really been clear that officers and staff were so determined, then they would have done all of this confronting. After all, the ‘challenge’ is central to police use of its much-mentioned but little-practiced Code of Ethics. They would not have needed to wait for one colleague to murder a member of the public and another to commit rape at least twelve times. Furthermore, they would not have needed to wait for the completion of not just one, but two, comprehensive reviews into this issue. Yet Commissioner Mark Rowley is happy to suggest to the public that police are, in fact, itching to clean house. On top of this, he infers that the huge bandwidth of media coverage of the recent misdeeds of two serving constables is illustrative of this problem being a completely novel phenomenon.
The slide below this paragraph shows a selection of the national and worldwide organisations that appear to be completely aligned on the matter, despite there being no evident connections between many of them. The topic may as well have been the ‘climate emergency’ or Black Lives Matter (BLM) or the rank and idiotic selfishness of those declining experimental pharmaceuticals.
I make these comparisons because they share a common factor, and that is that they segment and divide society. Violence against Women and Girls is a perfect example of this; implicit in the very definition is the inherent danger that men present to the opposite sex. You may well have wondered why other dreadful and often criminal behaviour of serving police constables and staff is not treated with equal disdain, or why violence of all natures is not condemned.
A selection of the national and international agencies considering VAWG at exactly the same time
If the commissioning of the Casey Review in the first place may be seen as evidence that police and government will only ever confront an issue when staring down the barrel of intense media attention, then the findings may be considered evidence of a police command structure which consistently and deliberately looks the other way.
Management above the fray?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Casey’s Final Report is that it only devotes two out of 363 pages to what it calls ‘Management and supervision’ (pp. 81–83). The conclusion is that despite ‘many leaders recognising that “something needs to be done”, supervision and management are both woefully lacking in the Met.’ It is then explained that there is, in effect, no management or leadership training to support personnel that are promoted. It is scarcely possible to express the absurdity of this situation, and yet Casey does not make too much of it. Her background is in social care, so the exact command and control requirements for an organisation which must run according to hierarchy and specific disciplines are most likely to be unfamiliar to her.
It would appear that her career background has, in large part, determined the weighting of the findings, with a great deal of attention given to misconduct that may be attributed to distinctions in gender and ethnicity. However, she seems unable to get beyond the various statistical imbalances presented by the composition of the Met when compared with the make-up of London itself, as though public trust cannot be restored until such time as these figures match.
This is facile and deflects attention from the genuine crises of poor leadership and the loss of integrity amongst colleagues. It also serves as a measure of the susceptibility of police to external influences. Suggesting that failings in policing can, in the main, be the result of the wrong number of white people is as absurd as claiming an ‘epidemic’ in VAWG because of a couple of high-profile cases. However, such is the relationship between media and police—the Met in particular—that this sort of commentary really does have an effect on both strategic and operational decisions.
At this point, as we are considering the British police’s public relations, I insert a podcast that I have recorded for UK Column on the internationally-reported arrest by West Yorkshire Police of a minor for mentioning the word ‘lesbian’ in a way that offended a constable’s all too delicate sensibilities; an event which prompted one former policeman to describe the attending officers as a terrorist gang.
Podcast by the author: West Yorkshire Police's public-relations disaster of the decade—its mob-handed arrest of an autistic 16-year-old for a comment made in her home about a constable's resemblance to her grandmother.
Podcast links:
Section 5, Public Order Act 1986
Crown Prosecution Service (England & Wales) guidance on public order offences
CPS guidance on homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crimes
To return to the issue of creating or reinforcing divisions in society, police certainly have form here, and what makes it worse is that they are so often seen to be picking a side. Consider the enormous disparity between the ways in which the ‘largely peaceful’ BLM protests (involving injuries to at least 27 police constables) and the anti-lockdown protests were policed and reported on. Unfortunately for police, the loss of impartiality is not met by a gain of supporters; they appear to have lost face on all sides. In microcosm, a couple of incidents which have been spread widely on social media this summer seem to encapsulate the basis of the belief that policing is conducted with an agenda. During a yellow-board protest outside the Covid Inquiry, the comedienne and activist Abi Roberts was arrested for swearing; said to be an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. UK Column News covered this on 28 June.
Conversely, at a Pride event in London, attended by police, a transgender woman (a biological man) called Sarah Jane Baker shouted to the crowd, referring to a the supposed concept of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (women who scandalously do not believe a biological man may assume the identity of a woman):
If you see a TERF, punch them in the f**king face.
Yet he received no police attention at the time and subsequently had charges against him dropped (oddly enough). Considering Baker’s known history of violence, there can be almost no doubt that he intended for the listeners to act on the advice, making it very likely he had fallen foul of Section 44 of the Serious Crime Act of 2007; intentionally to encourage an offence.
I have recorded a short podcast about this for UK Column (forthcoming, embedded in my next article). For Roberts’ offence to be complete, there must have been persons present likely to have been caused harassment, alarm or distress and, despite nobody reporting such harm to the police present, she was arrested anyway. Baker was subsequently arrested, but not before the Met had made some very questionable decisions and communications around the incident, as summarised by the Daily Sceptic.
Deliberate destabilisation?
These sorts of incidents, which present themselves time and again, cannot be purely attributed to the forces of media; either the conditioning of individuals through their exposure to the dominant narratives or the corporate unwillingness to commit to any activity which may have poor optics. At best, they suggest genuine conflicts of interest and, at worst, coordinated efforts to introduce instability. In digging around the TERF débâcle, it becomes apparent that very many of the 43 police forces and constabularies of the United Kingdom have a relationship with Stonewall, the charity which stands ‘for LGBTQ+ people everywhere’.
As written up by the Spectator, significant sums of money have been paid to Stonewall by various police forces. While, in and of itself, this may not amount to police actively pursuing the Stonewall agenda, it most certainly leaves their impartiality in tatters. The Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) drum is banged with such ferocity that it is small wonder individual constables are unable to make objective and lawful decisions at, for example, Pride events. The same would apply to the decision-making process of commanders in the operational planning for these events, much like the treatment of BLM protests at a time when Schedule 22 of the Coronavirus Act 2020 made provisions to prevent gatherings of all natures.
Other charities and organisations supported, sponsored and populated by police include the National Black Police Association (NBPA), the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP), the Christian Police Association (CPA), the British Association of Women in Policing (BAWP) and, of course, the National LGBT+ Police Network. Apart from the serious challenge that this pigeonholing presents to the very notion of diversity or inclusion, membership of such organisations threatens neutrality. This threat increases with the rank and influence or authority of the individual in question. At least membership of these sorts of bodies is not deliberately secretive, whereas that of the Masonic lodges is.
References to Freemasonry in policing are fewer than they were, but legitimate concern should still exist, especially since there are numerous reports of mixing between police and criminals at lodges, sometimes leading to criminal activity within the police. A piece in the Guardian from 2018 deals with this—though, remarkably, Baroness Casey does not find space for the subject. In fact, the Casey Review makes absolutely no reference to the effect that external influences may have on police conduct.
This would appear to be an extraordinary omission; as though all forms of bias and all failings of leadership are—somehow—entirely organic. On the state of the collective mind, the father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, said:
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.
This quotation, uttered a century before MINDSPACE (2010), was reproduced in an excellent article for UK Column by Malcolm Massey in 2015. Malcolm’s article deals with the practice of social engineering. I would urge you to read it, for it is far too large a topic to explore in detail here. The reason for referencing the article is that it deals with the origins of what is now known as the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Benefiting from disorder?
Describing itself, the Tavistock Institute explains that ‘we pour ourselves into organisations needing change, individuals needing change, systems needing change.’ Although close links between the Tavistock Institute and the police are not in abundance, there is enough cross-pollination to justify the reference. Policing has been left in little doubt of the need for it to change, though not in the ways that many would have anticipated.
To see serving constables, on duty, joining in at events in the name of Pride or BLM, strikes a discordant note, not least because of the flagrantly politicised nature of both campaigns. The Tavistock Institute has played a part in the Government’s initiative to stop the radicalising of would-be terrorists, under the name of Prevent. Interestingly, Sir Mark Rowley was running the Met’s anti-terror unit in 2015, the year in which the new Counter-Terrorism and Security Act was put on the statute book. Shortly before this, the Chief Executive at Tavistock was listed as an ‘interested party’ on Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s (HMIC) State of Policing annual report for 2012/13, when both Rowley and Cressida Dick were Assistant Commissioners.
The Tavistock Institute does not provide detail when it considers none is necessary, and its website paints only an impressionistic picture of what it does. Certainly, it ‘helped a police service to design an audit process as part of a wider quality assurance programme for the organisation’s Occupational Health service.’ None of these links is of any particular significance, but what is of significance is the links within the Tavistock Institute itself.
The Tavistock Institute has worked with many government departments and local authorities, as well as the NHS, international banks, the European Commission and a number of mental health charities. Of greater significance still is that the Tavistock Institute is sister to the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the highly controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). GIDS ‘is for children and young people, and their families, who experience difficulties in the development of their gender identity.’
It is time for the second interstitial podcast in this article, in which I revert to the issue, which I have earlier covered for UK Column, of police enforcement against Adam Smith-Connor of local councils’ no-pray zones around abortion clinics; another gash in the fabric of the King’s peace.
Podcast by the author: A military veteran faces charges for silent prayer on the street. As in the previous case of no-pray zones that I covered, the police had to ask him first in some detail what was going on in his head before deciding whether he was a criminal.
Podcast links:
Ophir Road and surrounding area Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO)
Ophir Road and surrounding areas Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) consultation—Full Report
Silent prayer should have no place outside abortion clinics—Drs Tania Penovic and Ronli Sifris (Capstan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University)
Anti-Abortion Clinic Activism, Civil Inattention and the Problem of Gendered Harassment—Pam Lowe (British Sociological Association)
Written evidence submitted by Right To Life UK (POB06)—10 June 2022 Public Order Bill
Public Order Bill debate, Volume 729: Tuesday 7 March 2023
To recall what was said by Bernays, it may not even be possible for senior police constables to articulate why their forces exhibit such great bias in the heavily-mined areas of, for example, gender reassignment, climate change or racial prejudice. By now, this might seem several steps removed from the core issues of misconduct and the dearth of able leaders, but that is not the case.
This article began by suggesting that, like most other large organisations, police will jump on a bandwagon should one pass by. One of the results of this is that the process of constantly realigning police business to fit any of these narratives will be to the detriment of operational effectiveness. It should also be seen as a sign of weak leadership: that police forces must have their minds made up for them by others when deciding what should, and should not, be considered force priorities. The result of this that those choosing to abuse their positions are pushing at an open door.
Bad faith?
By way of example, the quality of supervision during the process of conducting investigations has dipped with the introduction of the Victims’ Code. This is because so-called supervisors are so intent on ensuring that the victims’ rights are being adhered to that the investigation itself is often neglected by comparison. Such neglect combines very badly with a loss of objectivity in those areas with complex ethical dimensions.
No pot of gold at the end of this rainbow: Pride police car reported on by the Daily Mail
Mention of ethical complexity should be followed by reference to the little-known yet highly influential charity, Common Purpose. Those that have occupied the orbit of UK Column for any length of time are more than likely to be aware of Common Purpose, which refers to its people as ‘change agents’ and holds a ‘mission to develop people who can cross cultural, institutional and social boundaries’.
As far back as 2009, Brian Gerrish’s persistence pressed even the BBC into questioning whether it was right that publicly-funded ‘institutions like the police, local authorities and the BBC pay money to a charity to host training courses which are essentially networking opportunities for staff?’. As with Freemasonry, there is a distinct lack of transparency surrounding the activities and course content of Common Purpose, but what is certain is that their graduates go away destined for leadership positions and with a network that includes people from across all sectors.
Often compared with an octopus, because of its many and far-reaching tentacles, Common Purpose has found itself in the spotlight, and not for the right reasons, on occasion. One such, drawing very heavily on UK Column research and reporting, was thoroughly documented by the Daily Mail in 2012, and concerned improper influence in the area of free speech during the closing stages of the Leveson Inquiry.
It was mentioned earlier that both Dame Cressida Dick and Sir Mark Rowley are Common Purpose graduates, and the recent brouhaha over Nigel Farage’s Coutts bank account has given the Sun cause to speculate about Common Purpose involvement.
Remarkably, Sanjeev Gupta, the steel tycoon embroiled—with David Cameron—in the rotten Greensill Capital affair, remains a trustee at Common Purpose. Of course, the vast majority of Common Purpose graduates will never hold high enough office to be instrumental in change-making at scale. However, as Martin Edwards proposed in 2010 in an article for UK Column, the objectives of Common Purpose would seem to be aligned with the concept of one-world governance.
The centre of gravity required to deliver such a system of worldwide government is the age-old method of divide and rule, and this is exactly how policing slots back into the narrative. What are the chances of there really existing an ‘epidemic’ of Violence against Women and Girls of such magnitude and acuteness that organisations including the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum would declare the need for action at exactly the same time as our own British institutions?
A neat divide is opened up between men and women, just as the battle-lines have been drawn over Pride, or emissions of carbon dioxide, or abortion, or immigration, or public health. These distractions are absolutely enabled by police failings; either via a disproportionate focus on internal misconduct or through an inability to police communities with any sense of integrity. It seems that Louise Casey and the Metropolitan Police have their eyes closed to this.
The dangers of finding ourselves on this track are many, with some being more immediate and obvious than others. The absurd zeal with which police enforced novel legislation and policy from 2020 (which prompted my resignation from the police), despite the absence of evidence that there was any point in any of it, has—unfortunately—sounded the death knell for the use of discretion. This point of view is confirmed by the way in which public order legislation is used and it does not bode well for the likely enactment of the Online Safety Bill or the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill.
Conclusion
With these considerations in mind, is it really likely that the Met will be transformed by the recommendations of the Baroness Casey Review or by the efforts of Sir Mark Rowley? No, it is not at all likely; but the basis of police legitimacy should be remembered.
Policing should be by consent, and those that take part in the activity are simply civilian members of the community. How has this activity become so discordant with the will of the same community? Police have become, quite wrongly, both the extension of a thoughtless and autocratic state and the enforcers of policy drawn up well outside of the democratic process. That supposedly impartial public servants are supping from the same cup as the draughtsmen and drivers of one-world government is an aberration.
A considerable part of the problem is that not very many people are aware of the true extent of the damage. Of those that are aware, only a fraction are determined to do something about it and most of those lack a stick of sufficient heft with which to beat police and their controllers. However, if hands are sat on then a change of direction is out of the question.
Engagement with the police, and the agencies they hold improper relations with, is critical. Even if reports such as those produced by Louise Casey may be more likely to wrap fish and chips than restore integrity, a resounding demonstration of the fragility of police legitimacy cannot be ignored forever. At least the wealth of data presented by Casey may be cited when liaising with police, Police and Crime Commissioners, local and national politicians and other community collectives and, where wrongdoing is seen, it must be challenged and reported. This is an increasingly troublesome process in the age of internet obfuscation and the thigh-deep treacle of customer services engagements.
Without documentary evidence and records of complaints about policing, or of liaison between police and communities, then it is all too easy to say there is nothing wrong. The comprehensive rejection of a one-world government, in all its manifestations, is something we each bear responsibility for.
