‘The Met breaks my heart’: The dramatic decline of Britain’s biggest police force, and how it could recover

As former Metropolitan Police officers, Bethany and Paul Eaton are well aware of the disaster that has enveloped Scotland Yard: violent crime is soaring across London and thousands of officers have left the force.

Yet even they were shocked by the way police responded when their home in Chislehurst, south-east London, was burgled in 2019. The couple were on their way back from a family holiday in Dubai when their childminder called to say the back door had been smashed in.

The Eatons, who now run a vegan yoghurt business, asked a neighbour – a Met civilian employee – for help and she immediately called the police. It was at this point that the first signs of institutional inertia emerged, when the operator who answered the call replied: “I’m sorry but you don’t have an appointment, so officers will not be attending the scene today.”

To this day, Paul, who worked as a Met response officer for almost 20 years, does not understand how he was supposed to book an appointment for a burglary that had not yet taken place. His friend was also confused. “My neighbour was flabbergasted and somewhat scared, not knowing if anyone was still in the house,” Paul says. “She was told police would attend within 24 hours.” The neighbour tried to persuade the operator that the Met should come, not least as she had seen three police cars dawdling outside the local café around the corner. The person on the end of the line replied that was “just not police procedure these days.”

In the end, the only person willing to help the neighbour secure the crime scene was a passing Ocado delivery driver, who checked to see whether the burglars had fled. When Londoners’ emergency service of last resort is an online grocer, we can probably agree there is a problem.

The Eatons’ experience is sadly all too familiar for London’s eight million residents, and millions of others across the country. They have seen the capabilities of local forces undermined by a combination of budget cuts and a dangerous passivity that has been allowed to evolve among the people in blue.

Before the unprecedented Covid lockdowns skewed crime rates, a national rise in murders and manslaughters in 2020 was mainly driven by a 28 per cent rise in offences in London (67 to 86).

The number of knife crimes in England and Wales also rose to a record high, partly driven by a 7 per cent rise in London. This was 51 per cent higher than when data of this kind was first collected in 2011 and was the highest number on record. By contrast, the proportion of crimes in England and Wales that are solved has fallen to a record low.

These damning statistics are partly fuelled by a decision taken by the Met in 2017 – a decision that would have been laughed out of the police canteen thirty years ago. The “crime assessment policy”, drawn up by senior officers, ordered police to shelve investigations into hundreds of thousands of crimes each year, including burglaries, thefts and some assaults. The move has amazed former leaders of the force. “The violence and the knife crime and the death rate is deeply concerning,” Sir Paul Stephenson, a former Met commissioner, tells me. “The downscaling of the seriousness of household burglary means it’s almost seen as some sort of social misdemeanour. I think invading people’s homes should be treated as a heinous crime.”

The measures were a response to historic government curbs on police spending that have been implemented since 2010. Scotland Yard was attempting to save £400m by 2020, in addition to the £600m the force had already lost from its £3.7bn annual budget.

Just before Mark Rowley was announced as the new commissioner in July 2022, Scotland Yard suffered the ignominy of being placed into special measures, a status commonly applied by regulators of public services to failing schools and hospitals, not one of the world’s most famous police forces.

I have covered Scotland Yard as a journalist for 16 years, beginning not long after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by Met Police officers after being mistaken for a terror suspect in 2005.

Despite the shambles of that operation, the Met at that time still seemed immensely powerful, was largely trusted, and was not to be trifled with.

Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard – and British policing in general – has been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash. Barely a week goes by without the Met finding itself at the centre of a new crisis, lambasted by MPs and criticised in once-friendly newspapers.

With scandals including Plebgate and the arrest of Damian Green, the force has been dragged into open warfare with the electorally-dominant Conservative Party. After the phone-hacking furore, its close ties with the press were also shattered, leading to increased scrutiny of corruption and incompetence in murder cases such as Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan, where the police’s search for the truth was so limp they seemed deliberately designed to fail.

In recent years, the media also started to publish and broadcast stories exposing rotten corners of society that had long been ignored by the police; the rise of “modern slavery” offences and the industrial-scale abuse of children – from Asian child-grooming gangs to Jimmy Savile. When disturbing details of these “new” offences spilled out into the public domain, the government ordered the police to make them as much of a priority as traditional crimes such as violent offences and drug trafficking. Scotland Yard and other forces quickly became overwhelmed

The perfect storm facing policing also includes the consequences of mass internet use. The digital explosion in the 21st century ushered in a new era in cyber and online offences, estimated to cost UK victims £10bn a year. Soon, the police were so swamped that officers were allowed to record them differently from other types of crime, which kept them off the official crime statistics by which forces are measured.

For years, in fact, until 2017, the government simply didn’t recognise online fraud and computer misuse offences. When the Office for National Statistics, which compiles the Crime Survey for England and Wales, finally started to do so, the change captured five million more offences in the previous 12 months alone, doubling the overall crime rate overnight.

Demoralised and depleted in numbers, the Met is a shadow of its former self.

Xural.com