Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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Spanning the three decades from the infamous Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard, Broken Yard charts the Met’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Protesters outside Scotland Yard, marking a year since Sarah Everard was murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. He quotes Lucy Panton, the former crime editor of the News of the World, whose police sources were exposed to the Yard by her bosses and who said that she felt she had been “completely hung out to dry” by a company she had loyally served. If Broken Yard is an unsettling read, is that because it’s unfair to the force or because it’s all too fair? So much, then, of the ‘fall of the Yard’ is not so much a Met-specific problem as a policing-wide one, and indeed common to the authorities in general: having to respond to and re-equip for the digital world, while enduring years of austerity and cuts to physical bases (pictured, the closed Met Police station at Streatham).

He notes the problems the Met now faces as a result of the enormous rise in cybercrime, unrecognised by the government until 2017, when the Office for National Statistics finally started logging online fraud and computer misuse, and then found that 5m offences had been reported in the previous 12 months.

Her testimony does not exonerate her fully but it does show the lengths to which the rich and powerful will go to conceal their behaviour. Harper explains how corruption in the CID was rife in the 1960s and 1970s – but how officers eventually got a handle on criminals in their ranks. Broken Yard does not suggest things were once all Dixon of Dock Green perfect, although it points out the success of the Labour government’s Safer Neighbourhood policies. Whereas the likes of the Krays in the 1960s robbed banks, risky and visible, their equivalents now are doing cyber, and profiting from the drugs trade and trafficking. A fish may rot from its head, as author wondered in a concluding chapter, but you could be more forensic and ask whether the problem in the hierarchy is rather of a lack of grip from the top down to stations (and why does one station have a better occupational culture than another?

He also speaks to detectives who are willing to question why Couzens got away with suspect behaviour for so long – and they ask why the investigation into Couzens’ crimes has been shelved now he is behind bars. The unsolved killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan – another high-profile case – is covered in lurid detail, and leads neatly into Harper’s consideration of the relationship between the police and his former employers, News International. View image in fullscreen Helen Nkama, the mother of Chris Kaba, who was killed by firearms officers in south London, leads a protest in front of New Scotland Yard, September 2022. And with this week’s news about David Carrick, a serving Met officer who has admitted sexual offences stretching back over a 20-year period, Scotland Yard face yet another crisis. It demolishes the few bad apples argument about News International – and, while he is about it, Harper demolishes the same excuses for serial failings of the Met.Former Met Police commander Roy Ramm notes how senior officers are managers who have done little real police work, have never gathered evidence or presented it in a witness box. He charts the failings of the Leveson inquiry, and finds a way to explain the conduct of News of the World reporters. The fact is that whether this book had come out the year before or next year, it would still have been timely, because the Met does seem to lurch from one crisis to the next. YEARS ago a detailed critique of the Metro­politan Police would have been shocking because the force – though in fact far from perfect – enjoyed a reputation of being effective and mostly incorruptible.