In yet another contribution to the now desperately overcrowded category of “you couldn’t make this up”, it’s been reported in Britain that a senior Metropolitan Police officer who wrote the force’s anti-drugs strategy has been accused of taking cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms.
A misconduct hearing was told that Commander Julian Bennett took the drugs while on holiday. He is accused of discreditable conduct and undermining confidence in the police. But one wonders whether there’s any confidence in the police now left to undermine.
The Metropolitan Police, which covers London and is also responsible for national issues such as counter-terrorism, diplomatic protection and other sensitive duties, has been staggering from one scarcely believable scandal to another.
Last year, a woman was killed by a Met police officer, Wayne Couzens, who kidnapped her in a mock arrest before raping and murdering her. He had reportedly been accused of indecent exposure on two previous occasions. Moreover, the Independent Office for Police Misconduct said last July that 12 gross misconduct or misconduct notices had so far been served on police officers from several forces relating to the Couzens case.
In December, two Met officers were sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for taking and sharing “utterly distasteful” photographs of the bodies of two murdered sisters and using misogynistic language in WhatsApp messages.
Then there was the bungled VIP paedophile ring inquiry, in which a number of prominent, innocent men had their reputations trashed by police falsely insisting there was reliable evidence against them when in fact this was the invention of a fantasist.
Last year, an independent panel investigating the unsolved murder in 1987 of a private investigator, Daniel Morgan, accused the Met of institutional corruption which had caused it to conceal or deny failings in the case.
Last week, a report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct condemned misogyny, bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment among a dozen Met officers, most of them based in central London’s Charing Cross police station. This finally ended the controversial career of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, who had mysteriously survived successive scandals but was forced to resign after the Mayor of London accused her of failing to root out the Met's culture of racism and misogyny.
Although the Met has particular problems — not least its paralysing split in accountability between the Home Office and the Mayor of London — policing in Britain more generally has been imploding for decades. While there are still police officers of competence and integrity, gross incompetence and an apparent erosion of the very ethic of policing has become steadily more apparent over many years.
I’d identify two particular milestones: the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which imposed further regulations on police behaviour in response to a series of miscarriages of justice which created the impression that the police were institutionally unfit for purpose; and the Macpherson Report 1993, which held the police to be “institutionally racist” — a devastating denunciation which was shockingly arrived at without a shred of evidence, as anyone who has read that report can see.
These developments left the police severely demoralised. Told they were too thick to be trusted, they downgraded street coppering — invaluable to effective policing work by establishing community connections and gaining priceless street intelligence — in favour of fast-track recruits with degrees. Disdain for the police also encouraged successive governments to subject them to blizzards of instructions, thus politicising the service and further hollowing out its professional ethic.
In America, racial politics has played an even bigger role in undermining the police. Black Lives Matter effectively declared war on the police as systemically racist — a campaign of vilification that was shamefully endorsed by much of the Democratic party. As a result, a number of cities defunded the police leading to a wave of police retirements and resignations.
This led in turn — unsurprisingly — to a shortage of officers needed to keep communities safe. Crime rates surged, with cities that slashed their police budgets seeing horrifying spikes in violence and other crimes. In Los Angeles, there were depraved scenes of protesters shouting “death to police” outside a hospital where two two County Sheriff’s Department deputies were fighting for their lives after being ambushed and shot. Tragically, the Black Lives Matter/ Democratic party campaign left many black communities unpoliced —with the result that black-on-black killings increased. And so the most numerous victims of this supposedly anti-racist policy were black people themselves.
Black Lives Matter is an anti-west, racially bigoted, anti-white organisation. However, its prominence and the support it has received reflects something that’s gone rotten in western society itself. For years now, America has been tearing itself apart over the attempts to identify its foundations with the original sin of slavery and demonise white Americans as racist oppressors.
In both Britain and America, there has been a systematic attack on all dissent from the coercive conformity of identity politics. Bullying and intimidation are passed off as “progressive” and “enlightened”. Freedom of speech has been trampled underfoot as a secular inquisition has “cancelled” not just conservatives but even liberals who step out of line over issues such as transgender.
In Britain, while the police say they’re “too overstretched” to deal with burglaries, they’re busy feeling the collars of those suspected of hate crime — and recording in Orwellian fashion “non-crime hate incidents”. Rather than prioritising crime, the Police College at Bramshill (which closed in 2015) emphasised ethnic awareness, gender awareness and other tributaries of “intersectionality”.
On the streets, police officers display wholly inappropriate partisanship towards such political causes, with officers taking the knee or wearing rainbow shoelaces. Meanwhile, officers passively stood by when “anti-colonialist” vandals toppled statues, or when “climate change” campaigners regularly brought parts of central London to a halt by repeated demonstrations in which activists glued themselves to the road.
And having failed to understand that the trade in illegal narcotics is driven not by supply but by demand, so that they failed abysmally to get on top of the trade and eventually just gave up trying to control soft drugs at least, the police fell victim to the billion-dollar drug legalisation propaganda industry, with senior officers parroting its lethal message that it’s not the drugs that are a menace to society but the law against them.
Western society has lost its moral compass. It can no longer distinguish between truth and lies, victim and victimiser, aggression and defence. Intent upon dumping personal responsibility, it gives a free pass to those of whom it approves while conducting vicious witch-hunts against those of whom it disapproves.
In short, increasing numbers of people in Britain and America no longer recognise moral boundaries. If boundaries aren’t recognisable, they can’t be policed. That’s why policing in America is under attack, and why in Britain it has simply imploded.
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