Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

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This is despite the failures of successive home secretaries, from Theresa May’s disastrous slashing of the numbers of officers by 20,000 – only now being very belatedly addressed – to Priti Patel’s treatment of the police as little more than handy photo opportunities. 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. 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, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public.

Couzens has the hall­marks of a person who has killed before – his pre-planning suggests as much, while his criminal history shows that his behaviour wasn’t a strange aberration. Until this changes – and until a caveman canteen culture is addressed – the crisis within our police force looks never ending. That Mackey stayed in his vehicle led to visceral anger from rank and file cops, as stoked up (or reported on, take your pick) in the mainstream media.This was the time when corruption among detectives was so endemic that the commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, famously declared that the measure of a good force was that it “catches more crooks than it employs”. The acronym ACAB – all coppers are bastards – once a taunt among a small minority, is looking more like a reasonable analysis of how things are. While not wanting to reopen all that here, Harper does say that what Mackey did was sensible while resented by some as ‘us and them’.

The backlash from public opinion was the final nudge needed for the Tories to sack their leader, yet the police’s investigation is shown to be seriously lacking.He shows how some reporters were thrown under the bus to save the executives and keep Rupert Murdoch from being too heavily censured.

Are those quoted, and those speaking anonymously, by querying the institution having a dig at it, and the individuals who worked and still work for it? The new commissioner has already announced that there will now be major changes at the Met, with an increase in the number of officers in the directorate of professional standards (DPS), the squad responsible for rooting out corruption and dodgy behaviour.He also quotes at length Jonathan Rees, the strange former partner of the murdered private eye Daniel Morgan, and shines a light on his extraordinary relationship with the Murdoch papers.