The British public was “expecting to be surprised” by the first tranche of the Mandelson files, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. Yet despite hopes for “damning correspondence” to be in the 147-page document, “there was very little I didn’t already know”.

As it turned out “the first drop of the Mandelson files contained neither a smoking gun nor bombshell revelation”, said Beth Rigby on Sky News. Details about Peter Mandelson’s severance payment after being sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US, and the “rushed” vetting process for his appointment have made the headlines, but the number of documents withheld, redacted or yet to be released mean the picture remains incomplete.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer “must release all the Mandelson files”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. It appears some of the files “may not see the light of day for years” due to ongoing police investigations. The police are “entitled to do their job and proceed with their investigation without undue interference”, but “questions about the prime minister’s judgment on this matter are not going away. The public deserve to know just how credulous Sir Keir really was.”

The comment in the files by Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser who was also Tony Blair’s chief of staff, that the appointment of Mandelson was “weirdly rushed”, is a “quietly damning analysis that will haunt Starmer forever”, said Rea. And the decision to give Mandelson a “£75,000 payoff” after his dismissal, when his contract, also included in the release, showed that “he was owed precisely £0”, raises questions, too.

But there is undoubtedly a “missing piece of the puzzle”, such as the correspondence between the former No. 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Mandelson. Reportedly, McSweeney asked Mandelson “three questions”, which Mandelson claimed he answered truthfully, a comment the government disputes.

It was clear from the files we have seen so far that due process was not followed in the vetting of Mandelson for the US ambassador role, said The Times in an editorial. The documents show Mandelson was “offered classified briefings” by government officials before he was granted appropriate security clearance: “it is hard to imagine this being granted to other ambassadorial appointments”. The government refuted allegations that the vetting process was “fast-tracked”, yet now it is claiming this was allowed “because Mandelson was a privy councillor, which does suggest due process was not followed”.

The files released in this first tranche “failed to include any interventions, comments or guidance from Starmer himself”, said Anna Gross in the Financial Times. “The prime minister emerges from this admittedly partial picture less as the main character in his own drama than as an oddly disembodied presence,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. We are left to wonder whether Mandelson’s appointment was the result of the PM’s readiness to “delegate” high-level decisions to McSweeney, or belief that the risk of having “his own personal Machiavelli” close to Donald Trump “was worth it”. Either way, as he was forced to admit this week, it was “his mistake”.

What next?

It will be several weeks at least before more documents are released, as they must first be examined by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. Senior government figures told The Guardian that Starmer “could suffer further resignations when ministerial WhatsApp messages are published in the next tranche”.

These files will include informal messages between Mandelson and government figures “for six months before his appointment, and during his time as ambassador”. These “could prove a powder keg for already inflamed tensions between Washington and London”, said Rigby. Only documents that pose “significant security concerns” will be withheld.

A new National Police Service dubbed the “British FBI” will be tasked with tackling the most serious crimes, enabling strained local forces to concentrate more resources on everyday offences, the Home Office has announced.

The announcement comes ahead of a series of reforms that will be “the biggest shake-up to the crime-fighting structure” in more than half a century, according to The Telegraph.

How will the new unit work?

The National Police Service will target terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Despite the “British FBI” nickname, the NPS will only operate in England and Wales, as policing is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The new organisation, set out in a government White Paper, will bring together the responsibilities of existing agencies such as the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, Regional Organised Crime Units and National Road Policing. The NPS will also be in charge of setting professional standards and training requirements and purchasing new equipment for all forces. This includes overseeing the nationwide roll-out of controversial facial recognition software.

The NPS will have its own uniform and a new national police commissioner will be appointed to lead the force, serving as the most senior police officer in the country.

The establishment of the new body will be accompanied by a reduction in the number of police forces in England and Wales, “with some merged to create bigger regional constabularies tackling complex crimes, such as murder, drugs and county lines gangs”.

What is the goal?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has insisted the radical overhaul is urgently needed because the “outdated” and “fragmented” current model is “buckling under the strain” of tackling complex modern crime, leaving “serious offending unpunished”.

“The current policing model was built for a different century,” she said. The “British FBI” will deploy “world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch dangerous criminals”. Ministers claim the NPS will be better placed to tackle criminals whose activities increasingly cross local constabulary and national borders.

Another of the “main aims” of the new service is to “boost the 43 local forces’ ability to spend more time fighting crime in their communities, such as shoplifting, drug dealing, phone theft and anti-social behaviour”, said Sky News.

How have the plans been received?

The establishment of the NPS “reflects a widespread consensus” among law enforcement experts that “more specialised officers are needed to combat threats such as online fraud and international organised crime, and that only larger forces can support the level of expertise required”, said the Financial Times.

The heads of Counter Terrorism Policing, the Metropolitan Police, the College of Policing, the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have all welcomed the move, writing jointly in The Telegraph that the current system is “messy and complex, and neither as efficient nor as coherent as it should be. That is why reform is needed – not as an ideological exercise, but as common sense. National crime demands a national response.”

While the policing world is “almost giddy” about the plans, “amending police structures, processes and institutions won’t affect people’s lives in the short, or even the medium, term”, said crime expert and former BBC journalist Danny Shaw. The White Paper “is not intended as an urgent plan of action to address our immediate concerns about safety on the streets, crime and anti-social behaviour”, but rather “a roadmap towards a more efficient and effective police service in the decades to come”.

“To government ministers and police chiefs, it is the biggest investigative breakthrough since DNA screening,” said Mario Ledwith in The Times. “To privacy campaigners, it is ‘turning the country into an open prison’.”

Live facial recognition is already used by eight police forces, who used the technology to scan tens of thousands of faces a day with “ruthless efficiency”, looking for matches to a police hit list of offenders and suspects. Now the Government is looking into expanding its scope.

‘Orwellian’

Under the plans, all 43 police forces in England and Wales would have access to facial recognition. The Home Office would also develop a national face-matching system based not just on images of all offenders in custody, but potentially the passport and driving licence photos of everyone in the UK.

This database could be used to analyse footage of suspects from CCTV, doorbells, dashboard cameras and the like. If that sounds “Orwellian”, it’s because it is, said the Daily Mail. Using facial recognition to keep people safe at large events is proportionate. Having our faces tracked in every town, city and village is truly dystopian.

There would need to be strong safeguards, said The Times. In Luton, for example, faces captured by live recognition that don’t result in a match are immediately deleted. Used responsibly in this way, the technology has clear benefits for police, helping them keep up with “increasingly adept” modern criminals. Over the past two years, the Met has used facial recognition to find more than 100 sex offenders who’d broken their bail conditions – freeing up officers “for the actual job of policing”.

‘Nothing online is ever secure’

It’s true, said Fraser Sampson in The Daily Telegraph: facial recognition really is the biggest policing breakthrough since DNA matching, but there’s one key difference between them. The retention and use of DNA by the police is “very carefully controlled under several acts of Parliament with clear rules, reporting obligations and layers of independent oversight”. The same isn’t true of facial recognition. In fact, right now, the forensic comparison of suspects’ bootprints is better regulated than the use of their faces. That needs to change, and mandatory accountability processes need to be put in place before any wider rollout.

That’s without even considering the risk of hacking, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. As the recent experiences of M&S and Jaguar have taught us, “nothing online is ever secure”. Mark my words, if the state develops a database of every human face in the UK, it’s only a matter of time before that precious data “ends up in the wrong hands”.

The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has refused to be interviewed by the Metropolitan Police, just days before he is due to be released from a German prison.

Christian Brückner, 49, who denies any involvement in the case, remains the focus of investigations by British, German and Portuguese police nearly two decades on from the three-year-old’s kidnapping, which attracted global attention.

Who is he?

A “drifter and a petty criminal”, Brückner was just a teenager when, in 1994, he was first convicted of sexual abuse of a child, said The i Paper. A year later he fled to Portugal to escape custody before returning to Germany in 1999 to finish his sentence.

He returned intermittently to Portugal after his release in 2000 and is currently serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American tourist in Praia da Luz in 2005, two years before McCann disappeared from the same Algarve town.

In October last year, Brückner was cleared by a German court of unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Why is he a suspect?

In 2020, Brückner was named as an official suspect in the McCann case by the German authorities.

The three-year-old disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in 2007, sparking one of the most high-profile missing persons investigations of recent decades. The Met’s investigation, named Operation Grange, has cost more than £13 million.

Brückner has always denied any involvement in the case and has never been charged, despite evidence he was in the area at the time.

German, Portuguese and British police have carried out a number of searches over the years, most recently in June when officers scoured 120 acres of scrubland east of Praia da Luz where Brückner was known to have spent time. Despite repeated efforts, authorities have found no trace of McCann or evidence directly tying her disappearance to Brückner. But they remain convinced he was involved, a claim backed up by a “former associate”, who told ITV News this week that he was "100% sure" Brückner had a hand in the kidnapping.

He “is not just our number one suspect, he’s the only suspect”, Hans Christian Wolters, the lead German prosecutor investigating the disappearance, told the BBC last month. Wolters claimed there is evidence that indicates Brückner is “responsible” for the toddler’s disappearance and death, but that it is “not strong enough to make a guilty verdict likely” so he hasn’t been arrested or charged.

What happened with the Met?

With Brückner due to be released on Wednesday, the Met Police had requested an interview that “for legal reasons” could only be done via an international letter of request, which he subsequently refused.

DCI Mark Cranwell, the senior investigating officer for Operation Grange, confirmed the German “remains a suspect in the Metropolitan Police’s own investigation” but “in the absence of an interview, we will nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry”.

German law enforcement authorities have already voiced concern that Brückner will soon leave prison and could flee the country, with Wolters saying the expectation was that he would “commit further crimes”.

Around 78,000 people reported having their phones or bags snatched across England and Wales in the year to March 2024, according to government statistics. That's a 153% increase from the previous year.

In London, dubbed the 'phone-snatching capital of Europe', the experience will be "depressingly familiar" to many in the city, said The Times. According to a recent investigation by The Independent, an average of 180 phones is stolen in the capital every day. So why are phone thefts so common and what can you do if your phone is stolen?

What's behind the rise in crime?

The last comparable increase in "snatch theft" was in 2002, said John Rentoul in The Independent. Tony Blair and his then home secretary David Blunkett made tackling rising street crime a priority, but what really quelled the epidemic was phone companies "designing it out" by introducing more sophisticated security so that handsets became useless if stolen. "For the best part of two decades, phone thefts ceased to be a significant problem," but now thieves have found ways around the security.

Once stolen, phones are quickly taken out of the country – they have been found as far away as northern Africa, Dubai and Shenzhen in southern China, where they can be re-sold on the black market. They are also valuable for their parts – thieves can expect to get a couple of hundred pounds just for a screen from a new iPhone, said The Guardian.

What's more, the rise in the use of illegal e-bikes is making it much harder for police to catch thieves. "E-bikes are capable of doing 50, 60, 70mph sometimes on something the same size as a mountain bike," Inspector Dan Green told The Independent. "They are really agile and we can't get anywhere near some of them."

What's being done about it?

The Met Police says it is cracking down on the "£50m-a-year trade in stolen phones". Earlier this month it reported it had seized 1,000 stolen mobiles and arrested 230 people in one week. More teams of plain-clothed officers have been deployed.

The government is also toughening its response. Among the 35 measures proposed in Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's new Crime and Policing Bill, is one that would give police the power to search a property for a stolen phone without a warrant. Officers would be able to act in a "golden hour" to search a location where stolen items have been electronically traced via a victim's phone-tracking app or Bluetooth. Cooper said victims currently felt "extreme frustration" when tracking technology appears to show them where their stolen phone is, only to be told by police that nothing can be done.

What can I do to prevent my phone from being stolen?

The Met advises people to use their phones for the shortest time possible on streets and to avoid texting while walking. It also urges people to look out for e-bikes and mopeds and to stay away from the roadside.

Use all the security measures that make it harder for thieves to access information from your phone – such as biometrics, like fingerprints or facial recognition. Make sure you know your International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) – the unique 15-digit number used to identify your phone. (Type *#06# into your keypad, or go into the settings app.) You can use this number to blacklist the phone if it is stolen.

You should also check that your cloud storage and messaging apps like WhatsApp are backed up daily, so you can retrieve photos or other personal information in the event of a theft.

What should I do if it's already been stolen?

Once the phone has been stolen, you should immediately call your network provider and tell them, ask them to block the number and blacklist the IMEI number. Ask for a new SIM card to be sent to your address.

You can also log onto Find My iPhone (for iPhone), Find My Device (for Android) or visit findmymobile.samsung.com (for Samsung) to mark the device as stolen and erase it. Register the phone as stolen on the police website or call 101, as you'll need a crime number to file an insurance claim. Let your bank know so that they can suspend your banking apps, and change the passwords to your accounts and apps.

It's been almost two years since the Metropolitan Police was severely criticised by the Casey Review for "over-policing and under-protecting" Black Londoners, said the BBC. Now, the force has come up with a new charter which aims to strengthen and improve the use of its controversial stop and search powers.

More than 8,500 Londoners of all ages and ethnicities were involved in the new charter, which was put together over the past 18 months. Surveys and events were held in each of the capital's 32 boroughs, and around 80 young people were invited to New Scotland Yard to work on the new proposals.

What is stop and search?

Stop and search has been used as a policing tool since the Vagrancy Act of 1824, but has attracted criticism more recently for being ineffective and for disproportionately targeting Black people and those from an ethnic minority background. It allows officers to detain a person without arresting them if they believe they have reasonable grounds to suspect that an unlawful item, such as weapons, drugs or stolen goods, is being carried.

There is another category of stop and search, often referred to as a section 60, which requires police officers to only "reasonably believe" that a serious crime "may" be carried out.

Does it work?

The Met has defended stop and search, arguing that it saves lives. In the last four years, 17,500 weapons were seized as a result, with 3,500 in 2024 alone. According to the force, up to 68% of Londoners, including young people, support its use, while the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has described it as a "vital policing tool".

However, when implemented badly, it has the potential to "burn through trust with those we are here to protect", said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan, who leads the new project, in London's The Standard.

Davarel Gordon told the BBC he was around 12 when he was first stopped by police. "The first time it happens you're in shock," he said. "There wasn't any communication, I didn't understand what was going on."

Stop and search has been described as a "rite of passage" for Black boys in the capital, according to Sky News. Last year a police watchdog said two officers committed misconduct when they handcuffed and restrained a 14-year-old Black schoolboy in a case of mistaken identity during a stop and search in Croydon.

In December 2020, a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl, known as Child Q, was wrongly accused of having drugs, and was strip-searched while on her period by female officers, without an appropriate adult present. Three officers will face gross misconduct proceedings later this year.

What's the current situation in the capital?

In London 53% of fatal stab victims and 45% of offenders in 2023 were Black. Black people represent 13.5% of the city's population. Black men aged 18 to 20 made up the majority of those caught with knives.

Yet such is the controversy surrounding stop and search that some officers are hesitant to use it for fear that inadvertent misuse could be career-ending. Despite an increase in knife crime in the capital, the number of stop and searches in London fell 17% to 120,783 in the year to January 2025, according to The Times. Black people accounted for 40% of those searched.

What does the charter say?

The charter includes new commitments around the communication and tone that police use during stop and search, and improved training for officers, so that they can better understand and serve their communities. There will be a more robust supervision process, with more regular and random reviews of how the new system is working, and better handling of complaints, which will involve local communities to avoid internal bias.

Feedback from the public found that the police need to be "less aggressive" and that the tactic needed to be more targeted and tailored to avoid "embarrassment and trauma", which the Met says it has taken on board.

What's the reaction?

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ade Adelekan has said that the scope of the new charter involving the participation of so many Londoners means that lives will be saved. "We went wherever people would talk to us, and we went to knock on doors that we knew people didn't really want to speak to us in some organisations, and we consulted with those people," he told the BBC.

There is tentative optimism that the new charter will have the desired results. Gordon told the BBC that despite his experience, he still supports stop and search and hopes that the new charter will mean improved aftercare and empathy for those wrongly implicated. "There's not enough of that. They need to remember we are people. Just make sure the person is OK."

"Shoot to Kill: Terror on the Tube" is a "mesmerising feat of documentary-making", said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian.

For the first time since the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005, the Metropolitan Police officer who killed him gives a "raw and detailed interview" about the events that led to the Brazilian electrician's death.

De Menezes was on his way to repair a broken fire alarm when he was shot and killed in an underground carriage at Stockwell station. In a tragic case of mistaken identity, police wrongly suspected De Menezes as being one of the suicide bombers who took part in a failed copycat attack two weeks after the 7/7 London bombings.

The first instalment of the "gripping" two-part series is "all atmosphere", said Nicholson, capturing the "palpable nervousness and anxiety" of Londoners in the aftermath of the attack. Commuters were already "frightened and jittery" when, just two weeks after the bombings that killed 52 people on 7/7, another four bombers attempted to detonate explosives on the underground, failing to go through with it only because their devices didn't go off.

The Metropolitan Police officer's "minute-by-minute" first-hand account of the events that led to the tragic mistake is "riveting", said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. From the "grainy, faxed image of the real suspect" to the surveillance officers who identified De Menezes as a potential bomber, we gradually find out how it went so wrong.

Despite the then Met commissioner Cressida Dick's instruction to stop De Menezes getting on the Tube being "woefully unclear", the police officer avoids criticising the higher powers at the Met. And he stops short of offering an apology to the innocent man's family. "Ultimately our sympathy should be for Mr de Menezes, killed on what should have been an ordinary journey to work."

Perhaps the series was a little rushed in its examination of the serious errors made by the Met Police, said Nicholson in The Guardian. But it "untangles the mess made" in the aftermath of the shooting, allowing those who were there that day to "give their version of events". It's a "compelling" watch.

Keir Starmer has announced a review into how fatal police shootings are investigated after a police officer was cleared of murdering an unarmed man during a police stop in south London two years ago.

Sergeant Martyn Blake, 40, shot Chris Kaba, 24, in the head during a "hard stop" in Streatham Hill in September 2022. Kaba was driving an Audi Q8 "linked to a non-fatal shooting in Brixton the previous night", said The Times. Blake denied intending to kill Kaba, who was not carrying a firearm, and told the trial he believed that one of his colleagues could be killed by Kaba's car as he tried to flee.

Reacting to the verdict, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said no police officer was above the law but expressed concern over "the lack of support officers face for doing their best".

How many UK police officers carry firearms?

In Britain, firearms are issued only to specially trained personnel within the police, known as Authorised Firearms Officers (AFOs). The rules are different in Northern Ireland, where all police officers are authorised to carry firearms.

In England and Wales, only about 4% of police are armed, amounting to 6,473 officers as of 31 March 2024.

According to the Metropolitan Police, an authorised firearms officer's duties typically include: responding to high-risk incidents and assisting in proactive policing operations where firearms support may be required, as well as providing "public reassurance" at events.

How common are police shootings in the UK?

Fatal police shootings are rare. In 2022/23, three people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, police in England and Wales have shot and killed 83 people, according to Inquest, an independent organisation that monitors and records fatal police shootings.

When are police allowed to open fire? 

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, officers have the right to use "reasonable force" when necessary. More generally, police officers share the right to self-defence or the protection of others upheld by common law and Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

More specifically, the Police Conduct Regulations 2020 for England and Wales state that officers should only discharge firearms to "prevent a real and immediate threat to life". The guidance is to aim for a target's torso, when possible, but if it is "imperative the subject is immediately incapacitated", officers are allowed to aim for the person's head. In all circumstances, officers must not use excessive violence and must ensure medical aid is provided as soon as possible.

Police shootings are investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, an independent watchdog. But officers can also face prosecution in the courtroom.

How are police shootings handled in court?

Under English law, police "theoretically have no greater protections than the ordinary subject when using force," said The Guardian; it must be proportionate, reasonable, and based on an honestly held belief of necessity. But the "received wisdom" is that juries are often "reluctant to convict cops 'standing up' for themselves".

No police officer in England and Wales has ever been convicted of murder after a shooting, although there have been a small number of criminal prosecutions.

Police officers can also be prosecuted under civil law. However, many officers want the burden of proof to be the criminal test: what the officer honestly believed as chose to act, rather than the lower burden of proof used in civil court, said BBC legal correspondent Dominic Casciani. Police chiefs argue that using the criminal burden of proof only would "end confusion".

Scotland Yard and its beleaguered commissioner are under renewed scrutiny over their handling of Gaza protests in London.

"Britain's streets have become another frontier in the war between Israel and Hamas," said The Times's crime editor Ben Ellery, "and often the police are being caught in the crossfire." A "series of flashpoints" involving supporters of Israel and Palestinians has "plunged" police forces "into complex scenarios and at times drawn criticism for its handling of them".

The latest controversy is over an exchange between a Metropolitan Police officer and Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, during a pro-Palestinian protest in central London on 13 April.

'Fear and favouritism'

In a now-viral video clip, the officer told Falter that he was "quite openly Jewish" and that "I'm worried about the reaction to your presence" at the pro-Palestinian march. The officer offered to escort him away from the area and said that if Falter remained, he would be arrested for causing "a breach of peace".

The force subsequently apologised, before issuing another apology for having said in the initial statement that Falter's presence could be deemed "provocative".

The Met's actions, wrote Falter in The Sunday Times, suggested "it's not just that central London is a 'no-go zone' for Jews, as has been said previously, but a police-enforced Jew-free zone". The incident was an "inevitable outcome" of a policing approach that "sacrifices the rights of law-abiding Londoners to appease lawless mobs".

Falter called for the head of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, to stand down, a demand supported by the former home secretary Suella Braverman. "I've seen too much fear and even more favouritism in the policing of pro-Palestinian protests," she wrote in The Telegraph.

A 13-minute clip newly revealed by Sky News "gives context to the lengthy and fraught exchanges", said the broadcaster. In the footage, the officer disputes Falter's claim that he was just trying to cross the road. The officer claims  Falter had "deliberately" walked "against the flow of people" and offers to escort him on a route of "no resistance".

"Watching the video in its entirety (not just the inflammatory words picked out for headlines), I do feel some sympathy for the policeman, whose tone and demeanour do not look intended to be hostile," said Anne McElvoy on the i news site. 

"Seeking to protect a smaller group of people from a larger one and insisting that he did not want 'anyone to antagonise anyone' has a good grain of common sense to it." That said, it is a "worrying and oppressive situation if a small group of Jewish people cannot cross paths with a Gaza march without being told they are in the wrong just for being there".

'Careful choice of words'

The Met's latest "clumsy intervention" has "shone an unhappy light on police tactics at demonstrations" in general, said McElvoy.

Since Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, a pro-Palestinian protest has been held, on average, every two weeks in London. It has been the "biggest continuing drain on police resources since before the 2012 Olympic Games, costing tens of millions of pounds", said Ellery in The Times.

But rather than ban the protests, "the Met has sought to place conditions on them and attempt to police them to the letter of the law". This has led to "accusations of not taking a strong enough stance on antisemitism".

In The Telegraph, Braverman reiterated her concern about the "perception of two-tier policing". Marchers who are "engaged in weekly carnivals of hate" are "treated with kid gloves", while Jewish people are forced out of the capital and "told to keep their heads down", she wrote.

A lot of the ongoing issues around policing protests "arises from a lack of certainty from the Met about communicating what conduct at demonstrations is within the bounds of the law and where it intends to intervene or not", said McElvoy. One answer would be to remind officers to be "more careful in choice of words" and to learn "lessons about language and approach".

A year after an independent review labelled it institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic, the Metropolitan Police's attempts to reform itself remain under scrutiny.

The Met recently announced it has scrapped its controversial violent gangs database, following claims that it disproportionately targeted Black Londoners. The gangs violence matrix (GVM), launched in 2012 in the wake of the London riots the year before, has "repeatedly" been described by the Met as a "crucial tool to prevent gang violence", said the BBC. At its peak in 2017, there were nearly 4,000 names on the list. 

However, some were reportedly added "simply because of where they lived or who they knew", said the Daily Mail. There were concerns that those on the list could wrongly face "harsher enforcement actions", while the matrix had been shown to lead to "breaches of data protection laws" and a failure to "distinguish between criminals and victims when adding names". 

The GVM will be replaced by an existing but "adapted" violence harm assessment (VHA) to identify the capital's most violent people, the force said. But serious concerns remain about police prejudice towards ethnic minorities. This month, the head of the National Police Chiefs' Council Gavin Stephens became the most senior serving officer in the country to say that policing in the UK is "institutionally racist". 

What has happened since the Casey report?

In 1999, an inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence led Sir William Macpherson to conclude that the Met was institutionally racist. Then last year, Baroness Louise Casey's landmark report, commissioned by the Met after the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard, concluded that the force was guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia. The report warned that "public consent is broken".

A year later, the Met remains in a "race crisis", said The Guardian's police and crime correspondent, Vikram Dodd. This month, Black and Asian officers called on ethnic minority recruits to "boycott the force" after the chair of the Met Black Police Association (Met BPA), Inspector Charles Ehikioya, was placed under investigation. His supporters say the gross misconduct charges against him are "trumped up". 

Ehikioya allegedly received an inappropriate message from a colleague and did not report it, which he denies. Ehikioya claims he is being targeted because he has "challenged racism and discrimination within" the force, said the i news site. 

The National Black Police Association (NBPA) has since sent a "rallying cry" to ethnic minorities "not to join the Met" in the first boycott in 20 years, wrote assistant editor Darren Lewis in the Mirror. It is clear "we still do need a diverse police force", but it is "so hard to argue the case for joining the police" given the evidence of "the culture that many Black people have warned of for years".

The president of the NBPA, Andy George, told The Voice that Met Commissioner Mark Rowley had "refused to discuss his concerns". "There has been a desire to silence dissenting voices including an attempt to weaken the Met BPA," George said.

Rowley has previously come "under fire" for refusing to "describe racism within the force as institutional". He has shown "reluctance to take key steps in addressing the issue", wrote Richard Sudan in The Voice.

What will it do next?

The Met is trying "to get its house in order", wrote crime editor Ben Ellery in The Times, as it continues to reel from a long "series of scandals". But it is also hamstrung by the lack of "powers of dismissal" for chief constables as well as a "chronic shortage" of new recruits and funding.

Baroness Casey said in her report that the force's efforts were "not good enough", though admitted more time was needed for sweeping changes. But Gavin Stephens told The Guardian that "little progress" had been made since. Stephens acknowledged that there was a need for a "fundamental redesign of national policies and practices", and that "black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force". 

Other changes include an ongoing "recruitment drive" for Black, Asian and minority ethnic officers to better reflect London's diversity, said The Independent's race correspondent Nadine White. However, at the current rate of progress it would take nearly 50 years to achieve this, according to figures analysed by Byline Times last year. 

Ultimately, if the Met is "genuine in its desire to move forward and build trust with Black Londoners", said George, then it needs to "adequately resource" organisations like the Met BPA, rather than target them.

The news that two male bodies were recovered from the River Thames while the search for chemical attack suspect Abdul Ezedi was under way could easily have been overlooked.

Neither body was Ezedi's. He was last seen "leaning over the railings" on London's Chelsea Bridge on the night of the attack in Clapham in January, according to Metropolitan Police. The force said its main working hypothesis was that Ezedi had "gone into" the river. The two bodies found are being treated as unexpected deaths, pending inquiries, but the discovery highlights the "gruesome" reality of the river, said The Guardian's Caroline Davies. 

On average, 25 bodies have been retrieved from the 47-mile urban stretch of the Thames each year since 2012, according to Metropolitan police figures, most found washed up on mudflats or spotted floating in the water. But along the full 213-mile course of the river, "a dead body is washed up once a week on average", wrote Davies. "Few make the headlines."

What is the main cause of death?

"If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains," wrote river mudlark Lara Maiklem in The Spectator. It is "a river of lost souls, filled with suicides, battles, burials, murders and accidents".

The number of corpses that wash up every year is "positively Dickensian", wrote William Boyd in the Financial Times, referring to Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" (1865), which begins with a body being hauled from the Thames one night. But most of the deaths are accidental: people caught by the rising tide or by the force of the current.

The initial shock of cold water is often the cause of drowning, said Davies. "The muscles freeze, the mouth opens, they take in the water and they sink to the bottom. Only with decomposition will they begin to float."

Even in summer, people start to suffer from the effects of cold water shock within three minutes, according to Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) figures reported in Metro. Last year, at least 109 people went into the water and survived, according to Port of London Authority (PLA) data, while 27 died. 

Neil Withers, RNLI Area Lifesaving Manager for the Thames, said swimmers could be swept hundreds of metres away just "seconds" after entering the river.

Very few of the bodies are homicide victims. The tides mean the bodies could "pop up" unexpectedly, said Davies. But "with advances in DNA and better reporting of missing persons, almost all are identified".

How are the bodies found and recovered?

The Met's Marine Policing Unit (MPU) is responsible for retrieving the bodies found along the urban stretch of the Thames, between Dartford and Hampton Court, as well as the lakes, reservoirs and 200 miles of canal in Greater London. 

But the enormously strong tide makes retrieval difficult. "If someone jumps at Westminster Bridge, depending on weather, within 10 seconds they could be 100 metres up or downriver," said Davies.

The MPU's team of 10 divers can therefore only go into the Thames in certain circumstances. The river is also extremely dark and deep: up to 20 metres in places. Even if police are aware of where and when someone went into the water, the MPU must typically "wait for the body to pop up" after decomposing, or carry out a "low water search" for three days, sometimes finding bodies on the mudflats. 

Some corpses are found after becoming tangled in old piers; others are caught in "rubbish catchers, which are like big bins with mesh to catch river rubbish".

Despite popular folklore suggesting more likely places for bodies to wash up, such as Dead Man's Hole at Tower Bridge, there are no predictable locations, said BNN Breaking. "The river's strong tide and dangerous environment make it a formidable adversary, often leaving bodies severely mutilated and difficult to recover."

However, those washed down river "tend to pool at the great U-bend of the Isle of Dogs", said Boyd.

"At this time of year, the Thames is very fast flowing, very wide and full of lots of snags," said Jon Savell, the Met commander in charge of the Ezedi inquiry. 

"It is quite likely that if he has gone in the water, he won't appear for maybe up to a month and it's not beyond possibility that he may never actually surface."

The Army is preparing to offer counter-terrorism support in London after a growing number of police officers stood down from firearm duties following a murder charge against one of their colleagues.

An unnamed Metropolitan Police officer appeared in court on Thursday, charged with killing an unarmed Black man, 24-year-old Chris Kaba, in south London last September. 

Although the majority of the Met's 2,500 armed officers have so far continued work as usual, The Telegraph reported that "more than 300 officers" have said they will not carry a gun. 

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it had received a request from the Home Office to "provide routine counter-terrorism contingency support to the Metropolitan Police, should it be needed" – this is known as military aid to the civil authorities (MACA). This could include the deployment of SAS special forces in very specific circumstances. 

It comes amid a crackdown on rogue Met officers, with Scotland Yard admitting last week that the number of officers currently suspended or on restricted duties was more than 1,000 – equivalent to “the size of a small police force”.

What is behind the officer 'revolt'?

Chris Kaba was driving in south London on 5 September last year when the car, later found to be registered to a different name, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), was picked up by an automatic number plate recognition camera for having been linked to a recent firearms incident. Police officers pursued the vehicle, before a specialist firearms officer fired a single shot through the driver's side of the windscreen. Kaba died later that night in hospital.

The fatal shooting "sparked mass protests from the black community, including from British rapper Stormzy", said the Daily Mail, and led to the IOPC launching a murder investigation.

Last week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) issued a murder charge against a police officer identified only as Officer NX121. In response, more than 100 officers turned in the permits that allow them to carry weapons, a move described by Sky News as a "revolt". 

Home Secretary Suella Braverman was quick to defend officers who make "split-second decisions under extraordinary pressures". She posted on Twitter, now known as X, that "they mustn't fear ending up in the dock for carrying out their duties".

But The Guardian said the "scale and speed" of the "protest" by Met armed officers prompted her to order an emergency review of armed policing, with several sources telling the paper of "fears the rebellion could spread further within the Met and around the country".

One area of the force that has been "significantly hit" is the armed response vehicle units, which each include three firearms officers and patrol the capital 24 hours a day in case of a major incident, said The Telegraph. Sources told the paper the unit had been "severely depleted".

What has the reaction been?

Braverman's intervention was backed by Rishi Sunak, who argued that armed police needed greater clarity about their legal powers. 

The Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said it was an area "long overdue for reform". Firearms officers have become concerned about potentially lengthy legal proceedings simply for doing their job as they have been trained, he said.

The Met chief said that of the roughly 4,000 armed incidents a year, on average officers only open fire twice. He suggested legal changes over the way self-defence is interpreted in police misconduct cases, the introduction of a criminal standard of proof for unlawful killing in inquests and inquiries, and changes to the threshold at which the IOPC can launch an investigation.

The home secretary's comments have, however, also been met with "criticism from Labour MPs", reported The Independent, including Harriet Harman, former shadow attorney general Karl Turner and shadow business secretary John Denham, alongside human rights lawyers and a former chief prosecutor.

Nazir Afzal, chief crown prosecutor for northwest England from 2011 to 2015, accused Braverman of "intervening in an ongoing prosecution", claiming “there is no justification for doing so". 

"Strict legal laws apply to publishing statements which could prejudice a jury at a trial and subsequently be held to be contempt of court," said The Independent.

What would special forces be doing?

An MACA is only offered to the police or the NHS in "emergency situations", said BBC News, such as when the military helped medical staff during the Covid pandemic, and covered for striking border staff and paramedics last year.

The Met stressed that the MACA request was a "contingency option" that would only be used "in specific circumstances and where an appropriate policing response was not available".

The police spokesperson also insisted military staff would not be used "in a routine policing capacity" – meaning there is little chance of seeing armed soldiers patrolling London.

The number of Met officers currently suspended or on restricted duties amid a push to root out rogue officers is equivalent to “the size of a small police force”, Scotland Yard has admitted.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy told reporters that of the Met's workforce of about 34,000 officers, 201 were suspended and 860 were on restricted duties. "That’s 1 in every 34 officers," said ITV News's UK editor Paul Brand on Twitter, now known as X.

The London force said that 450 officers were under investigation for alleged sexual or domestic violence, and that 275 were already awaiting gross misconduct hearings. The former head of His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Zoe Billingham, told BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme that the newly revealed figures were "eye-watering". 

The crackdown follows the convictions of former officers David Carrick and Wayne Couzens, which triggered a "blistering review" by Baroness Casey earlier this year, said the BBC. 

The review found that women and children had been failed by what Casey has described as a "boy's club" culture rife at the Met, and by racism, misogyny and homophobia at the heart of the force. In the past year, 100 officers have been sacked for gross misconduct – "a 66% increase on historical averages", said The Guardian.

Since the conviction of serial rapist Carrick, 1,600 cases spanning the past ten years have been identified where officers faced allegations of domestic or sexual violence but no action was taken. 

Cundy has now outlined plans to hold about 30 misconduct hearings and 30 gross incompetence hearings each month. "This is going to take one, two or more years to root out those who are corrupt," he said.

The scale of the Met’s clean-up operation, said ITV's Brand on X, "underlines the crisis of trust in the force, especially for women, if it needed further emphasising". 

Andy Cooke, head of His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, warned earlier this year that “public trust in the police is hanging by a thread”.

Huw Edwards’s wife Vicky Flind has named him as the BBC presenter accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour. Around the same time, the Metropolitan Police said that they had no information to suggest that any criminal offence had been committed.

The initial story, published in The Sun, was that an unnamed BBC employee had paid a teenager £35,000 for sexually explicit photos. The alleged victim’s mother said that her child had used the money to fund a crack cocaine addiction, and alleged that the payments had begun when he or she was 17. It is a crime to create, distribute or possess sexual imagery of under-18s.

The family reported the issue to the BBC in May, and went to The Sun when nothing seemed to be done about it: they claimed that their child was still receiving payments from Edwards in June.

Allegations and denial

The story had set off fevered speculation on social media about the presenter’s identity, leading the likes of Gary Lineker and Jeremy Vine (who then led calls for the presenter to make his identity known) to issue statements over the weekend denying that it was them. On Monday, however, events took an unexpected turn when a lawyer for the young person dismissed The Sun’s story as “rubbish”, insisting that “nothing inappropriate or unlawful” had taken place. The lawyer said the person, now 20, had sent a denial to The Sun, but the paper had published its story regardless.

The next day, an unnamed person in their early 20s claimed that the presenter had contacted them on a dating app and put them under pressure to meet up. When they hinted that they could name him publicly, they say he sent them abusive messages. In later reports, The Sun alleged that the star had broken lockdown rules to meet a 23-year-old he’d met on a dating site.

In an interview about the BBC’s handling of the family’s complaint, director-general Tim Davie conceded that lessons needed to be learnt, but he defended the BBC’s failure to raise it with Edwards until last Thursday. He said that managers had had to try to validate the complaint first. The Met has said the BBC can now resume an internal inquiry it had paused while police investigations were ongoing.

A question of privacy

Being a BBC reporter “must be a nightmare” this week, said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. For days, they were standing outside their own workplace, reporting on serious allegations concerning the institution they work for, and a person they may have known – while not being able to tell their viewers anything much at all (though apparently they all knew his identity).

The BBC has treated its audience with “a degree of contempt”, said Matthew Garrahan in the FT. True, it had legitimate concerns about Edwards’s welfare and that of the young person. But that was all the more reason to temper its reporting. Instead, it spent the best part of a week leading its news bulletins with “breathless coverage” of the story while declining to name the presenter. It was even running a live-blog, for goodness sake.

Our strict privacy laws made it difficult for the press to name him, said Sean O’Neill in The Times. The 2012 Leveson Report “set the direction of travel” in this developing area of the law, and Cliff Richard’s 2018 legal victory over the BBC (for reporting a police raid of his home sparked by unfounded sexual assault allegations) cemented the course. But the wave of online speculation as to the BBC star’s identity – in which numerous people were wrongly named – suggests that it may be time to “redress the balance” between privacy and the public interest, by giving the press some of its freedom back.

More questions than answers

Yet the facts at hand were always murky, said Jane Martinson in The Guardian: even five days after breaking the story, The Sun still hadn’t produced any firm evidence of anything beyond “unwise, questionable behaviour”. Flind’s statement doesn’t say much, says The Daily Telegraph, except that her husband is suffering “serious mental health issues” and is in hospital. It’s still hard to know what to make of this strange news week, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent, but at the moment it looks as though what it has left us with is families “torn asunder, lives destroyed, and the BBC trashed”.

In her statement, Vicky Flind noted that her husband had previously been treated for depression (something he had discussed publicly) and said that he will remain in hospital for the foreseeable future. However, she said that once he is well enough, he intends to respond to the stories published about him.

Even before the police’s statement, insiders at The Sun were distancing themselves from the most incendiary allegations in their reporting, said The Guardian, notably that the presenter had effectively commissioned child sex abuse images.

A new suspect has been named in the murder of Stephen Lawrence, sparking a furious response from his mother and renewed calls for officers involved in the case to be sacked for repeatedly bungling the investigation.

Three decades on from the UK’s most notorious racially motivated killing, the Metropolitan Police has named Matthew White, who died in 2021 aged 50, as a suspect.

White first came to the attention of the police in 1993 as a witness to the attack. He was arrested and interviewed in 2000 and again in 2013 “but the Met reportedly seriously mishandled inquiries related to him”, reported The Independent.

Five men have previously been suspected of carrying out the fatal stabbing in southeast London in April 1993. Two of them, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were handed life sentences in 2012 after being found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey.

However, Duwayne Brooks, who was with Lawrence on the night of his murder, always maintained there was a sixth attacker. Now, thanks to an investigation by the BBC, he is believed to have been identified.

Based on witness testimony, police documents and new evidence “that shows how officers mishandled investigations relating to White”, the BBC’s Daniel De Simone said that “at key moments the police failed to pull together all these pieces of evidence” on the man known publicly as Witness K.

The information regarding White “raises fresh concerns over the Met’s decision to cease its investigation into the murder three years ago”, said the Evening Standard.

Despite a new apology by the Met for its “failings”, the naming of White has prompted a furious reaction from the mother of Stephen Lawrence. Baroness Doreen Lawrence demanded “serious sanctions” against the officers who failed to investigate him.

“Only when police officers lose their jobs can the public have confidence that failure and incompetence will not be tolerated and that change will happen,” she said.

The Metropolitan Police will no longer attend emergency calls linked to mental health incidents from later this year, the force’s commissioner has confirmed.

In a letter to health and social care bosses seen by The Guardian, Mark Rowley has stated his intention to order officers not to attend such incidents from 31 August onwards.

Rowley has argued such a move is required as officers are being “diverted from their core role of fighting crime”, the newspaper added, with the commissioner stating the current situation is “untenable”.

But questions have now been raised about what the change could mean for the police, 999-call responses and mental health services more generally.

‘Potentially alarming’

Zoe Billingham, a former inspector of constabulary who is now chairwoman of NHS mental health services in Norfolk and Suffolk, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme of her increasing concern at the “terrible quandary” facing families with a loved one struggling with their mental health.

Billingham suggested that police are the only agency for those suffering a mental health crisis, and warned of a potential “vacuum” once this service is removed, stating the policy is “potentially alarming”.

Others concurred, with deputy charity boss for Rethink Mental Illness, Brian Dow, having told The Times it is “not appropriate” for the Metropolitan Police to impose an “artificial deadline and threaten to walk away”. He argued such a move would heighten the risk of those in mental health crisis being “left in limbo” as they look for support.

A former Met superintendent agreed, telling ITV the policy would cause “a lot of anxiety”. “To pull out now I think is a dereliction of duty,” he told the broadcaster, “I think it’s extreme, it’s unnecessary”.

“Police and health services struggle to serve everyone with limited resources”, and concerns linger about what the decision could mean, said Sky News’s Martin Brunt.

He questioned the notion of mental health patients securing a “better deal”, and asked “what other patients will suffer?”.

‘Too long spent babysitting’

Nationally, officers spend “a million hours a year waiting for mental health patients to be assessed”, said the Daily Express, and it is this that Met Commissioner Mark Rowley appears to argue is a waste of time.

Writing for the newspaper, Andy Bell, the chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health, said the police “should not be the default responder to a mental health emergency” and called for “greater investment” to help Britons “before they get to crisis point”.

Rowley has insisted the Met is “failing Londoners twice” by sending police to deal with mental health crises, and in not using the force’s time in the most efficient way.

In the letter to health and social care services, he added that allowing the “status quo to remain” would mean he is “not setting up officers to succeed”.

Rowley is modelling the Met Police’s latest actions on a scheme first implemented by Humberside Police in 2020, entitled Right Care Right Person, which tasks health professionals with responding to mental health crises instead of the police.

An inspection undertaken by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services found the Humberside force has saved “1,100 police hours per month” by doing so, The Independent reported.

The newspaper added that the report said that the public received “more timely care from the most appropriate care provider”.

Ken Marsh of the Metropolitan Police Federation argued officers spend too long “babysitting” people, The Mirror reported, although he did concede “it is not for the commissioner to say whether my colleagues can or can’t attend”.

Rowley “wants to prompt national debate about what society regards as the priorities for forces,” wrote the BBC’s Mark Easton, “and whether there needs to be greater focus on other public services’ responsibilities”, but also questioned “what are the police for?”.

In a statement, the Met said that while police are “compassionate and highly skilled, they are not trained to deliver mental health care”. The force confirmed officers will continue to respond “where there is an immediate threat to life”.

Questions are being asked about how a serving Metropolitan Police officer convicted of multiple sexual offences including 24 rapes was allowed to carry on unchecked for so long despite numerous complaints against him over many years.

It has been revealed that PC David Carrick had pleaded guilty to 49 charges against 12 victims covering a total of 85 separate offences over nearly two decades, making him one of Britain’s most prolific rapists.

Yet while the “details are harrowing”, said The New Statesman’s Rachel Cunliffe, the “really chilling bit is that none of this should have been a surprise”. Allegations were “ignored” and he was allowed into a force “that enabled him to commit these crimes” by “nurturing a toxic working culture”.

What did the papers say?

“The missed opportunities to stop Carrick in his tracks as his police career unfolded are damning,” said the Daily Mail.

The paper reported that “nine times he came to the attention of fellow officers and nine times he was allowed to continue working”, adding that “eight of those times included alleged incidents involving women, but he was never arrested or even suspended from his role as an elite firearms officer guarding embassies and parliamentary buildings”.

Like fellow police officer Wayne Couzens, who confessed to the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, Carrick “used his position as a police officer to gain the trust of his victims, sometimes flashing his warrant card and telling them they would be ‘safe’ with him”, The Telegraph reported.

The paper said the shocking revelations mark the “first major crisis” for the new Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, who is less than five months into the job.

Issuing what the Daily Mail described as a “grovelling apology”, Rowley said opportunities to remove Carrick from policing had been missed due to weak policies and weak decisions.

But while he vowed to “put in place ruthless systems to squeeze out those who shouldn’t be with us”, he told Good Morning Britain that he could not guarantee that a woman visiting a police station to report a sexual offence would not meet a police officer whose past behaviour was now under review, or who was tolerating similar behaviour in their department.

What next?

The Telegraph said the scale of the task facing Rowley and the Met was “laid bare” on Monday when it emerged that more than 1,000 officers accused of sex offences or domestic abuse were still in service despite currently being under review.

Ultimately, said Byline Times’s Sian Norris, “the Carrick case exposes two urgent, frightening and painful issues”.

“The first is… that the orchard is rotten,” she said. “As well as having been found to be institutionally racist and institutionally corrupt, the police is institutionally misogynistic because its structures are built on pillars of patriarchal power, violence and authority.”

She added that “the second issue is that misogyny in policing reflects misogyny in society”, fostering a “culture of impunity when it comes to men’s violence against women and girls”.

Critics say that the cases of Couzens and Carrick are not isolated incidents but part of a clear pattern within the police that also covers Charing Cross police station officers swapping jokes about gender-based violence and PCs exchanging lurid photos of the murdered sisters Nicola Smallman and Bibaa Henry.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has previously made recommendations for the force to tackle what it called “toxic masculinity, sexism, and misogyny”, only for fresh revelations to emerge that further undermine trust in the police.

“Police culture matters to us all,” wrote Stephen Otter, a former Met commander and chief constable of Devon and Cornwall Police, in the Financial Times in February last year. “If the public trust the police, they are more likely to co-operate with them. This consent has real conditions attached; when police behave badly, as they did at Charing Cross, co-operation is withdrawn and suspicion grows until the whole fragile structure is re-erected.”

But trust has to be earned, said Anna Birley, a councillor who co-founded the Reclaim These Streets group after Sarah Everard’s murder, in The Independent.

“How do we trust an institution if thousands of decades-old allegations are only just being dealt with properly now?” she said, adding that while it is “right this review is happening, it’s enraging that women have been gaslit by the police for so long.”

Birley said: “We are tired of being told misogyny is being dealt with, when every fresh horror that emerges from the Met shows us that they categorically are not.”

History suggests the “scale and entrenched nature of Scotland Yard’s problems is beyond the reach of individual commissioners”, said Otter. “But permanent change in the Met will require a long-term plan, and one to which successive commissioners are obliged to commit. This means the Home Office and London mayor will have to see it through.

“Many would say I’m naive to even imagine this might happen. I sincerely hope I am not.”

More than 100 people have been arrested in the UK’s biggest ever fraud investigation into what the Metropolitan Police described as “an international one-stop spoofing shop”.

The Met began investigating the iSpoof website in June 2021. The site allowed users, who paid for iSpoof’s services in bitcoin, to make it look as though calls they made to individuals were coming from trusted sources, including “banks, tax offices and other official bodies as they attempted to defraud victims”.

iSpoof “turned ordinary crooks into cyber criminals”, said The Sun, using “slick videos to advertise would-be lawbreakers through encrypted messaging apps”. The website was set up in December 2020 and amassed 59,000 user accounts.

The Met’s Operation Elaborate involved the National Crime Agency, Europol, Eurojust, Dutch authorities and the FBI working with Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit. The investigation found that around 10 million fraudulent phone calls were made through iSpoof globally in the 12 months from August 2021; just over a third of those were made in the UK.

With more than 200,000 potential victims in the UK alone, people are thought to have lost millions of pounds overall. The Met said that the average loss from people who have reported being targeted is thought to be £10,000, while “one victim was scammed out of £3m”, said The Guardian. The paper added that “those running the scam shop made about £3.2m over a 20-month period, it is estimated”.

Met Commissioner Mark Rowley described “the exploitation of technology by organised criminals” as “one of the greatest challenges for law enforcement in the 21st century”. Working with international partners, Rowley said UK police “are reinventing the way fraud is investigated”.

Police are asking anyone who thinks they have been contacted as part of a spoof number scam to make a report online through Action Fraud.

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

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In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Policing

The new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, began his role on Monday, a week before one of the biggest policing operation in UK history: the Queen’s funeral. And after the official mourning period has ended, Rowley will face many other challenges. Following a series of scandals and crises involving the Met, how can he implement change?

Sweden’s far-right

The Sweden Democrats enjoyed a surge of support in the country’s general elections this week, winning around 20% of the total vote. The nationalist party’s campaign focused on gang violence and immigration, two key issues for Sweden’s electorate. As part of the ruling right-wing coalition, the party look set to play a bigger role in Sweden’s domestic and international affairs.

‘Passkeys’

The rollout this week of Apple’s iOS 16 operating system brought a number of changes for iPhone users, including the introduction of Passkeys – billed as an ultra-secure technology set to replace passwords. Apple has teamed up with Google, Meta and Microsoft for the push towards a passwordless future. But will the public get behind the tech giants’ ambitious project?

The Metropolitan Police commissioner has admitted that some officers are “treating women appallingly” after an interim report condemned the behaviour of hundreds of London-based officers as well as the force’s systems of redress.

Mark Rowley replaced Cressida Dick in July as commissioner at Scotland Yard following a series of controversies and scandals, including the murder of Sarah Everard, the strip search of Child Q, and findings of misconduct at Charing Cross Police Station.

An independent review of standards at the force was commissioned by Dick in the aftermath of the rape, kidnap and murder of Everard by serving Met PC Wayne Couzens. Baroness Casey, who is leading the review, published her interim report today.

Who is Mark Rowley?

Born in Birmingham in 1964, Rowley attended Handsworth Grammar School before studying mathematics at Cambridge, where he rowed for the St Catharine’s College 1st VIII. “But even before he went to Cambridge he knew he wanted to be a police officer,” said the BBC’s home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford.

Rowley was turned down by the Metropolitan Police, however, owing to “poor eyesight”, and instead “joined his local force, West Midlands Police, in 1987”, Sandford continued. In 1989, while “still a probationer, he was beaten unconscious and had his nose broken while responding to a pub fight”.

Rowley climbed “through the ranks” in his own profession, after “pioneering some innovative ideas to tackle the 1990s burglary epidemic as a young detective”, before joining the National Criminal Intelligence Service, a forerunner to the National Crime Agency.

In 2011, he joined the Met as an assistant commissioner, and led the response to the riots sparked by the police shooting of Mark Duggan.

He was appointed head of counterterrorism at the force in 2014, as the UK faced the threat of Islamic State “and its ability to attract young Britons to its campaign of violence”, along with “a rise in the extreme far-right”, said The Guardian’s police correspondent Vikram Dodd.

Rowley was “the man who had to steady the nation’s nerves” during multiple terrorist attacks in London and Manchester in 2017, said the BBC’s Sandford.

The then counterterrorism chief applied for the role of Met commissioner that same year, but lost out to Cressida Dick. He retired from policing in 2018, before returning to take up his new role.

Rowley is now encountering “the biggest series of challenges any commissioner in modern times has faced”, said Dodd, after the Met was placed in special measures in June by the policing inspectorate, “for the first time in its history”.

‘Systemic racism and misogyny’

Published today, Casey’s interim report found “systemic” racism and misogyny, with allegations of sexual misconduct or discrimination less likely to result in a case to answer than other claims.

The review team “talked to officers who said they had observed colleagues who had displayed shocking behaviour but had no confidence in the force’s internal misconduct system to tackle it”, reported Police Oracle.

The report gave an example of one serving officer who had 11 misconduct notices for allegations “involving abuse, sexual harassment and assault, fraud, improper disclosure of information and distribution of an explicit image of himself”.

In a written response to Casey, Rowley said he was “appalled” by the extent of the findings she exposed and said “the public would be shocked that we do not have the final say when dismissing those who are guilty of gross misconduct”. He has accepted the findings in full and asked the Home Office to consider changing the regulations to give more power to the senior management team of the force.

He told journalists “We currently sack a bit less than one person a week – that’s clearly massively under engineered. There must be hundreds who shouldn’t be here.”

Asked on LBC whether he could look presenter Nick Ferrari in the eye and “say there’s not another Wayne Couzens in the force at the moment”, Rowley replied: “I can’t look you in the eye and say that we haven’t got officers who are treating women appallingly. Absolutely not.”

Casey found that “the leadership of the Met has for years ignored the need to get rid of the bad, corrupt, dangerous officers and that has put their families, their fellow officers and the people they serve - the public - all at risk”, said the BBC’s special correspondent Lucy Manning.

“And this isn’t her last word. She has much more to expose about the Met, its officers and its way of working when she delivers her final report.”

The 100-day plan to ‘turn the force around’

The police shooting last month of a 24-year-old unarmed black man, Chris Kaba, has also sparked street protests in the capital. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has opened a homicide inquiry into the death, and the Met officer who shot Kaba dead has been suspended from duty.

The Guardian reported that Rowley’s arrival marks the “launch of a 100-day plan to turn Britain’s biggest force around”. He is seeking to “lift public confidence” in the force by “increasing the proportion of crimes the Met solves and boosting the number of officers in local neighbourhoods to build relations”, the paper said.

Rowley reiterated his commitment to reforming the Met when he took up the role, pledging to “begin the journey of reform to renew policing by consent”.

The arrests of anti-monarchist protesters has sparked furious debate between free speech campaigners and commentators from across the political spectrum.

The Metropolitan Police has stressed that people “absolutely have a right to protest” against the monarchy following the death of the Queen. But anger is mounting after a string of people were detained for expressing anti-royal views.

Barrister and climate activist Paul Powlesland said he had been threatened with arrest under the Public Order Act after holding up a blank piece of paper in London’s Parliament Square. Powlesland told The Guardian that “interventions like that are having a chilling effect”.

‘Not the week for protest’?

Anger over the police interventions has been stoked by videos posted on social media showing protesters being detained. Powlesland tweeted footage of an exchange “that he appeared to have had with the officer, who could be heard telling him that someone might be offended if the lawyer were to write ‘not my king’ on the piece of paper he was carrying”, The Guardian reported.

Powlesland told the paper that “I speak in a certain way, was dressed in a certain way and understood the law, but someone else might have been in a different situation”.

In a separate incident, history tutor Symon Hill was detained on suspicion of a public order offence after shouting “who elected him?” during the proclamation in Oxford on Sunday of Charles III as the new king. In a blog post, Hill said he was later “de-arrested” and taken home in a police van, but was told that he would be asked to attend a further interview and might be charged.

Police officers’ seemingly heavy-handed approaches have been criticised by many commentators from across the political divide, although others are “supporting these arrests”, said the Daily Express.

Ruth Smeeth, chief executive of Index on Censorship, told Politics Home that “we must guard against this event being used, by accident or design, to erode in any way the freedom of expression that citizens of this country enjoy”. Jodie Beck, policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, said: “Protest is not a gift from the state, it is a fundamental right.”

Veteran journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the arrest of anti-monarchy protesters was “outrageous”.

“We are a democratic country. We are an open disputatious country where we can say what is on our minds and I don’t believe for a moment that this is what the new king would have wanted,” Marr said.

Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer at Spiked, also condemned the “alarming, almost medieval act of censorship”. In an article in The Spectator, O’Neill described the arrests as “an intolerable assault on freedom of speech”.

“But many people who were coming to pay their respects in Windsor said this was not the week for protest,” reported Sky News’ home editor Jason Farrell.

Critics called such protesters “disrespectful” and “crass”, Farrell wrote, “though some still felt people should not be arrested even if their comments were offensive”.

Test of new legislation

Campaign groups including Big Brother Watch claimed that the growing number of reported anti-monarchist arrests were likely to be “unlawful”.

The arrests represent the first major public test of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, “which was drawn up by ministers largely in response to disruptive protests by Extinction Rebellion last year”, said Politics Home, “and voted through the Commons in April, despite fierce criticism from opposition parties”.

The legislation gives police more power to disrupt protests deemed to cause “significant impact” on others. Interpretation of that definition “clearly depends on the circumstances and sensitivities of the situation”, said Sky News’ Farrell.

But, he continued, “what is complicated in this instance is that two things are happening at the same time” – a period of national mourning but also a new king being proclaimed. “So, it is a big constitutional change during a time of high emotion.”

A number of protest groups have ruled out campaigning over the common week.

“But some people will, and it is the police, in the first instance, who will have to decide what is and is not appropriate,” Farrell concluded.

A Metropolitan Police officer has been suspended from frontline duties after fatally shooting an unarmed black man last week.

Chris Kaba was driving a car in south London on 5 September when the vehicle, which was later found to be registered to a different name, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), was picked up by an automatic number plate recognition camera for having recently been linked to a firearms incident.

Police officers pursued the vehicle, which was “subsequently cornered by two police cars” in Streatham Hill, said HuffPost. A specialist firearms officer then fired a single shot through the driver’s side of the windscreen.

The IOPC said that CPR was “immediately administered” and ambulance service support quickly requested. Kaba, who was 24, died later that night in hospital.

In a statement last week, his family said: “We are devastated; we need answers and we need accountability.

“We are worried that if Chris had not been Black, he would have been arrested on Monday evening and not had his life cut short.”

It’s since become known that Kaba was expecting a child with his fiancée, Karima Waite, who described the rapper as a “very kind, loving and caring young man”, said South London Press.

The IOPC’s investigation “entered a new phase” four days after Kaba’s death, when it was announced that a homicide investigation had been opened.

Kaba’s death “has shaken people across the UK”, said HuffPost. Metro reported that “hundreds of protesters” gathered in central London last weekend “to express fury” at the shooting.

At a vigil last night, the atmosphere was “tense”, with many in attendance saying that the officer’s suspension “is far too little, far too late”, said the BBC.

Assistant Commissioner Amanda Pearson said that the decision to suspend the firearms officer “does not determine the outcome of the IOPC’s investigation”.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted that he welcomed the decision, and said he is in regular contact with the police watchdog and the Met’s new commissioner, Mark Rowley.

The Metropolitan Police has said 24-year-old Owami Davies is “safe and well” after being found in Hampshire following the 118th reported sighting by a member of the public.

The student nurse was last seen walking along London Road in West Croydon on 7 July. She had left her family home in Grays, Essex, three days earlier on 4 July and was reported missing two days later.

“This is the outcome we were all hoping and praying for,” said Detective Chief Inspector Nigel Penney. He added that his team were “immensely relieved” that Davies had been found, and thanked the media and public for sharing appeals to find the missing student.

Commander Paul Brogden acknowledged that concerns had been raised about the police search. It emerged last weekend that the police had been in direct contact with Davies on 6 July, but were not aware at the time that she was a missing person because the central police database had not been updated.

Handling of case under ‘scrutiny’

The force’s handling of the case faced “increased scrutiny” when it became known that Scotland Yard had issued CCTV images which incorrectly identified another black woman as Davies, said The Guardian. “The Met hurriedly apologised and withdrew the images”.

Brogden and Penney said they were trying to “compassionately” deal with finding out how and why Davies disappeared. The police had been working through 50,000 hours of CCTV footage in an attempt to trace the student nurse’s movements.

Five people were arrested and bailed over Davies’s disappearance, two on suspicion of murder and three on suspicion of kidnap. The men remain on bail and officers have confirmed that “a decision on what happens next to them would follow a ‘full debrief’”, said the BBC.

The police said Davies appeared to be in “good health” and was in “a place of safety”, and confirmed that she had spoken to her family.

The Metropolitan Police has warned its officers they face disciplinary action if they participate in a gay nightclub’s “Porn Idol” contest in their spare time. The force has advised officers to not partake in the event at Heaven over concerns about “upholding standards” and potential “awkward” encounters when they return to the venue in uniform on shift. The Independent said the event, which is hosted by drag queens from the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, sees men and women strip for cash prizes at the venue.

Moon conditions may support human life

Researchers have found that parts of the Moon may provide stable temperatures for humans, reported CNN. The Moon has pits with shaded areas that steadily hover around 17C (63 degrees Fahrenheit) a temperate range that’s stable for humans, the team of experts found. “We could be able to establish a long-term presence on the Moon sooner than may have otherwise been possible,” said lead study author Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at University of California, Los Angeles.

Retrain your mind to ease back pain

Back pain sufferers can ease their discomfort by retraining how their back and brain communicate, a study suggests. A randomised controlled trial run by researchers at UNSW Sydney and Neuroscience Research Australia found that sensorimotor retraining alters how people think about their body in pain, how they process sensory information from their back and how they move their back during activities. More than 10m people in the UK report persistent back pain, and the condition is the leading cause of disability globally, noted The Times.

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Just 15 minutes of police patrols can reduce levels of violent crime by more than 70%, according to a new study.

The Youth Endowment Fund analysis of an Essex Police pilot in Southend-on-Sea in summer 2020 found that violent crime fell by 74% on days when patrols took place.

Other patrol schemes have got similar results. Operation Rowan in Bedfordshire “involved patrols of 15 minutes each day in 30 hotspot areas where a third of the county’s serious violent crime was taking place”, said The Times’ crime editor Fiona Hamilton.The patrols were credited for a 38% reduction in violence and robbery.

West Midlands police reported a 14% drop in street crimes and antisocial behaviour following patrols in Birmingham.

While forces nationwide are spending more money on “the latest artificial intelligence to predict crime patterns”, the findings “underline the effectiveness of old-fashioned policing”, wrote Hamilton.

The analysis by the Youth Endowment Fund, which works to stop young people becoming involved in violence, suggested that patrols in crime hotspots resulted in significant drops in wider crime too, and fewer calls to emergency services.

“Hot spots policing” – which focuses policing resources and activities on locations where crime is most concentrated – “can also make a difference in the surrounding areas”, said UK law enforcement journal Police Professional.

The data “boosts” arguments by new Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley, who takes over in autumn, that the UK needs “more bobbies on the beat”, said The Times’ Hamilton. In his first public statement after landing the role in the scandal-hit force, the former head of UK counterterrorism policing pledged to “fight crime with communities – not unilaterally dispense tactics”.

The policing watchdog has placed the Metropolitan Police under special measures after a force-wide inspection raised “substantial and persistent concerns”.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services said in a statement that “we are now monitoring” the London force “to help it make improvements”.

The measures “will place extra scrutiny on the Met”, which is “already suffering a leadership vacuum and fighting to improve public trust”, said The Times.

What triggered the move?

The decision followed the uncovering of a “litany” of failings by Scotland Yard in “fighting crime and serving victims”, The Guardian’s police and crime correspondent Vikram Dodd reported. The watchdog pointed to misconduct scandals, a failure to stamp out corruption, and “barely adequate standard of crime-recording accuracy”, with an estimated 69,000 crimes going unrecorded each year.

Matt Parr, who led the recent inspection, said other concerns included a lack of victim engagement, a vast backlog of online child abuse referrals, and a “lack of detailed understanding” of capability across all policing.

The Met was also found to be failing to meet national standards, and to be making errors on stop and search. The grounds for a quarter of stops were not recorded, “thus thwarting scrutiny of whether they were justifiable”, said Dodd.

What are special measures?

Inspectors usually conduct a “root-and-branch review of forces every few years”, according to The Times. But the watchdog can escalate a force into the “engage” stage, also known as special measures, on the basis of “significant or enduring concerns” about their ability to address underperformance.

For the Met, that means increased scrutiny and a requirement for the force’s leadership to produce an improvement plan. The Met will also have to report regularly to inspectors, the Home Office and other organisations.

And “later on”, a policing performance oversight group will scrutinise the changes made by the Met to “address its problems”, said��BBC home affairs researcher Lucy Gilder.

Only three other of the total 43 forces in England and Wales are in special measures. Greater Manchester, Cleveland and Gloucestershire are facing the same restrictions.

What next for the Met?

The watchdog’s criticisms follow a series of scandals involving the force. Inspection chief Parr said that the abduction, rape and murder last year of Sarah Everard by a serving officer had also had a “chilling effect on public trust and confidence”.

Former Met commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was forced out of the role earlier this year after losing the confidence of London Mayor Sadiq Khan as well.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is seeking a replacement for Dick, with the shortlist reduced to two Met insiders: Mark Rowley, a former head of counterterrorism, and Nick Ephgrave, currently part of the force’s top leadership.

A source told The Telegraph that the special measures move could prove “helpful for the new commissioner”, as “a launchpad to reform”.

Backing the special measures move, Patel said she expected “the Met and the London mayor to take immediate action to begin addressing” the issues raised.

Khan said that he would work closely with the watchdog and that the extra scrutiny was a “crucial first step” in reforming the force.

In a statement, the Met acknowledged the “cumulative impact of events and problems” facing the force. “We understand the impact this has had on communities and share their disappointment,” the statement continued.

“We are determined to be a police service Londoners can be proud of. We are talking to the inspectorate about next steps.”

1. Boris is deluded if he thinks firing Sunak can save him from oblivion

Allister Heath in The Telegraph

on chancellors and scapegoats

“Will Rishi Sunak jump, or will he be pushed?” asks Allister Heath in The Telegraph. Boris Johnson’s allies have reportedly “urged him” to appoint Jeremy Hunt as chancellor, while some of Sunak’s supporters “believe that, even at this late date, he would be better off leaping from a sinking ship”. But “such drastic action wouldn’t be enough to save the career of either man”. The prime minister may fire the chancellor “in a shameless attempt to pin the taxes and looming recession entirely” on Sunak, but “such a cynical ploy wouldn’t by itself rescue the PM”, writes Heath. “Virtually every decision” Johnson has taken since 2019 “has conspired to undermine” the “historic achievement” of delivering “a clean Brexit”. Britain faces “major, historic challenges” that require “bold and imaginative solutions” – sacking Sunak “won’t answer these epic questions, as even Boris Johnson must surely realise”.

Read more

2. The infuriating reason why Fox News won’t broadcast the January 6 hearings live

Noah Berlatsky in The Independent

on channel choices

There is “an expected dynamic to political scandals”, writes Noah Berlatsky in the Independent. “Politician does bad thing, politician tries to cover it up, news media tries to expose the story” is how it used to go. But “thanks to the increasing dominance of hyper-partisan right-wing media”, they often now take a “different trajectory”. Now, “when conservative politicians do something horrible, Fox News” and other “like-minded imitators don’t try to expose the truth. They rush to cover it up.” Most networks are providing live, continuous coverage of the 6 January insurrection hearings “because it is a major, important news event”. But Fox News “is taking a different route”, instead broadcasting them on Fox Business, a much smaller channel than its flagship. “This is hardly the first time Fox has tried to mislead its viewers about the insurrection,” says Berlatsky. “Fox barely pretends to engage in journalism” and now “it is attempting to keep evidence of Republican complicity in the insurrection from its viewers”.

Read more

3. Isn’t it frightening that a lone woman seeing a policeman now feels afraid, not reassured?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

on rising fear

The Metropolitan Police is pressing its case against six people who attended the vigil for Sarah Everard in March last year. “At every turn, the force’s behaviour has been the exact opposite of what it should have been,” writes Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Any killing by the police “changes policing for ever, and changes the experience of being a police officer”. It is “impossible to overstate how damaging it is that a woman on her own, seeing a policeman, would be more likely to feel afraid than reassured”. Williams thinks that “the Met’s approach was too often similar to that of the Vatican when allegations of sex offences were first made against priests: circle the wagons, protect the insiders, wait for it to pass”. If a women’s citizen army were to spontaneously mass, “the Met needs to hear it… How can you show that you’re listening if you won’t acknowledge people's anger?”

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4. China’s smart cities have gone from utopia to dystopia

Frédéric Lemaître in Le Monde

on padlocking down

“Is it a coincidence” that Shanghai was named “the world’s smartest city” in February just as it became “the world’s largest prison”? writes Frédéric Lemaître in Le Monde, with 25 million people “strictly confined to their homes”. It may be “too early to draw up a balance sheet of this great – probably unprecedented – lockdown”, but the toll “has been much more dramatic than authorities have claimed”. The “illusion of a ‘dynamic’ management of zero Covid” has, says the French paper’s Beijing correspondent, “failed miserably”. At the end of March “Shanghai authorities were reduced to the most ancient of solutions: forcing the population to stay at home by putting good old padlocks on the doors of their residences”. In attempting to curb the spread of the virus, “China’s smart cities have been moving from utopia to dystopia”.

Read more

5. Is the #MeToo movement dying?

Spencer Bokat-Lindell in The New York Times

on limited potential?

“If there is a standard metric by which the progress of the #MeToo movement has been measured, it is the conviction of high-profile men accused by women and girls of sex crimes,” writes Spencer Bokat-Lindell in The New York Times. It’s “small wonder, then” that the legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard “has been read as a low-water mark for the movement”. Even before the verdict last week, “commentators were declaring ‘the death’ and ‘the end’ of #MeToo”. Some say the movement “hasn’t actually done much to curtail sexual harassment and abuse”, and social media conversation around the trial “could indicate that the court of public opinion is also becoming less friendly to accusers”. But “Was #MeToo’s potential limited from the start?” Some have pointed to the movement’s “overreliance on punishment” to produce “social change for all women, not just the most well-off ones like many a Hollywood actress”, as a significant “flaw”.

Read more

Police forces across the UK are reportedly preparing for a wave of civil unrest sparked by the cost-of-living crisis.

According to a “senior source”, chief constables and policing organisations are “sharing intelligence about potential disorder” in the coming months, and assessing how forces nationwide could “bolster their numbers during major incidents”, The Times reported.

The source said there was no “specific intelligence” about disorder, but added: “We know historically that where the economy suffers, acquisitive crime goes up and there is more potential for unrest.”

Martin Lewis has also predicted that violence may break out unless the government takes urgent action, after annual inflation hit a 40-year high of 9% last month. The MoneySavingExpert founder told ITV’s Robert Peston last week that the public mood was “desperate, it’s angry... if we don’t sort this... I worry about civil unrest”.

Violence has already erupted in some other countries, including Sri Lanka, as populations are pushed to the brink by the global economic crunch. Here are five historic uprisings triggered by rising prices.

1. England riots, 1981

Thatcher-era Britain “exploded with rage” in the summer of 1981, in the wake of a UK recession, with civil unrest and clashes with police in Brixton in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Nottingham, as well as other smaller urban areas, between the months of April and July, said Politics.co.uk.

As the “polarising” first phase of Thatcherism took effect, government-supported factories and industries closed, leading to a rapid increase in unemployment. In Toxteth in Liverpool, for example, male unemployment rose to 40% by 1981, “which was quadruple the national average of approximately 10%”. Meanwhile, unemployment rates were “more like 80% for black youths” according to community activists.

Racial tensions and allegations of police discrimination were also major factors in many of the riots, with policing tactics used in inner-city areas that saw young black people “disproportionately targeted and harassed”, said the news site.

2. Chilean protests, 2019

More recently, Chile was gripped by protests and unrest in the “worst violence the country had witnessed since the 17-year-long military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which ended in 1990”, said Al-Jazeera.

Initially beginning in October 2019 as a student-led protest over rising transport costs in Santiago after the government announced that rush-hour prices would rise by 30 pesos ($0.04), the protests soon spread across the country as millions expressed their anger over “the increasing cost of living, low wages and pensions, a lack of education rights, a poor public health system and crippling inequality”, said the news site.

At least 26 people died during the unrest, said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), while a further 28,000 people were jailed, “many arbitrarily”, while some 350 people sustained injuries to their eyes due to the use of less than lethal weapons by police.

3. Yellow vests protests, 2018

A populist French movement named after the fluorescent yellow jackets worn by its participants, the group Gilets Jaunes held 52 weeks of consecutive protests calling for the government to take measures tackling “economic hardship” and “mounting inequality”, said France 24.

Made up of financially insecure urban and rural workers from across France, the protests were first triggered in November 2018 by an unpopular fuel tax, “ostensibly designed to finance France’s transition to a green economy”, which “infuriated motorists in rural and suburban areas starved of public transport,” said the news site.

Frédéric Gonthier, a political scientist at the Pacte research centre and the School of Political Studies in Grenoble, described the movement as a “watershed in French politics”. It forced Emmanuel Macron’s government into “billions of euros of tax breaks”, said France 24, and “put neglected swathes of the country back on the map”.

4. The Arab Spring, 2010

Food scarcity and rising costs also led to the series of anti-government protests in the Middle East in the early 2010s which would become known as the Arab Spring.

Droughts and fires in Australia and floods in the US between 2009 and 2011 led to a significant drop in exports from those countries, contributing to inflation in high-export countries in the Middle East.

“Shrinking farmlands, bad weather, and poor water allocation” in Middle Eastern nations also contributed to higher food prices, said PBS, ultimately contributing to anti-government sentiment that would spread across swathes of the Arab world.

5. Russian Revolution, 1917

Although there were a number of economic and political factors that lead to the acute crisis that precipitated the Russian revolution, it was ultimately “a shortage of food in St Petersburg and persistent bread queues in the city” that triggered the so-called February Revolution of 1917, which would lead to the overthrow of the monarch and the end of Tsarist Russia, wrote Andrei Markevich, a professor at the New Economic School, for Vox EU.

On 8 March 1917, demonstrators “clamouring for bread” took to the streets in the Russian capital of Petrograd, now St Petersburg, where they clashed with police and soldiers, said HistoryExtra. The demonstrators were supported by some 90,000 men and women on strike, and the revolution ultimately “triumphed” when “regiment after regiment of the Petrograd garrison defected to the cause of the demonstrators”.

It led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of autocratic rule in Russia and the beginning of the Russian Revolution.

The Metropolitan Police is in the spotlight again following the news that officers strip-searched a black 15-year-old girl without an appropriate adult present, leaving her deeply traumatised.

The teenager, known only as Child Q, was pulled out of an exam she was sitting at her school in Hackney, east London, after she was wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis. Two female officers forced her to remove her sanitary pad and expose her intimate body parts.

After finding no drugs, they asked her to go back into the exam “without any teacher asking her about how she felt knowing what she had just gone through”, said her mother during an interview. She wasn’t even allowed to go to the bathroom to clean herself and had to reapply the same dirty sanitary pad to her underwear.

The law on strip searches

The government says that a police officer can only stop and search someone if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect that person is carrying illegal drugs, a weapon, stolen property or something that could be used to commit a crime.

An officer can ask the person in question to take off their coat, jacket or gloves or anything they are wearing for religious reasons, “for example a veil or turban”. The latter must be done out of public view. If the officer wants the person to remove “more than a jacket and gloves”, then they must be the same sex as the person under suspicion.

A strip-search can only be conducted if an officer has a specific reason to search further and this must take place in a private area, such as a police station. It can only be carried out by an officer of the same sex, without anyone of the opposite sex present, and there must be at least two people in the room other than the detainee, “except in cases of urgency”.

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence (Pace) Act 1984, an “intimate search” – a physical examination rather than visual – should only be carried out by a registered medical practitioner or registered nurse, “unless an officer of at least inspector rank considers this is not practicable”. If that is the case, having a non-medical professional conduct a strip-search “must only be considered as a last resort”, the code states.

The rules for children

Children aged 17 and under need to have an appropriate adult present if they are to be strip-searched, except in urgent cases where there is risk of harm or if a juvenile has specifically stated that they don’t want an appropriate adult there. However, this decision must be recorded and signed by an appropriate adult.

The City & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership (CHSCP), which covers the area where Child Q was searched, states that 25 children under the age of 18 were subjected to “further searches” by officers between 2020 and 2021 – “further searches” meaning strip-searches. Of the 25 children, 19 were male and handcuffed during the process.

Nothing was found during 22 (88%) of the searches and 20 (80%) had an outcome of “no further action recorded”. In terms of ethnicity, 15 (60%) of the children searched were black, two were white, six were Asian and two were Arab or North African.

In 2016, the BBC reported that more than 5,000 children in England and Wales had been strip-searched between 2013 and 2015, and that more than 4,000 of those searches had been carried out by the Met Police.

The BBC asked all 45 police forces in the UK for their strip-search figures, but just 13 responded with the information.

‘From happy go lucky to timid recluse’

In the damning report by the CHSCP, Child Q’s maternal aunt said she had seen her niece change “from a happy go lucky girl to a timid recluse that hardly speaks to me”. She also said that the girl is “now self-harming and requires therapy”.

The teenager said she felt so negatively impacted by the incident, which took place in late 2020, that she has wanted “to scream, shout, cry or just give up” every day since.

The report found that racism “whether deliberate or not” was “likely” to have played a part in the officers’ decision to undertake the strip search. Writing for The Guardian, Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said the incident showed that “black schoolgirls are not safe from police abuse, even at school, supposedly a place of safety”.

According to The Guardian, three Met officers were placed under investigation by the police watchdog over the incident in 2020, but remain on full duties.

‘Should never have happened’

The Met has apologised and said the strip search “should never have happened”, while Hackney Council’s mayor and deputy mayor have requested a report “in six to nine months” on progress made following the findings of the report, said the BBC.

This apology comes just two months after the Met Police publicly apologised for the verbal abuse of an academic during a strip search almost a decade ago that she claims left her with multiple injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The force admitted that officers used “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” about Dr Konstancja Duff following her arrest for obstruction in May 2013. Duff said she had “intrusive thoughts about the strip search [which] often brought on panic attacks” for months afterwards.

A search is underway for Cressida Dick’s successor after she stood down last night as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police amid mounting tension with Sadiq Khan

Dick resigned the £230,000 a year role after the mayor of London accused her of failing to deal with a culture of misogyny and racism within the force.

She told reporters she was left with “no choice” but to step aside after Khan made it clear that he had no confidence in her leadership. The announcement came after the mayor said public trust in the Met had been “shattered” by recent scandals.

No way back

Khan had demanded a plan from the police commissioner on how the force would “win back the trust and confidence” of the public prior to her resignation.

He said he was “disgusted and angry” about the litany of police failings that has come to light in recent months, and was therefore prepared to “take action” against Dick unless she offered a convincing plan to restore the public’s “knocked and shattered” confidence.

His intervention came after a probe into the behaviour of 14 police officers based in Charing Cross uncovered a series of messages, sent between 2016 and 2018, where officers joked about rape and made homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct branded the messages as “disgraceful” and made 15 recommendations on how the culture within the Met can be overhauled. It also warned the actions were “not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few ‘bad apples’”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Khan said he had told Dick to produce a “response to the examples not of one officer [but] 14 officers being involved in racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic and the like behaviour”. He also said he had asked to see what “her plans are to win back the trust and confidence” of the public and that his support for Dick had been “contingent upon the response”.

‘A series of scandals’

Khan he repeatedly questioned whether the culture of the force had “fostered a series of scandals”, said The Guardian.

Recent scandals include two officers taking photographs at the scene where two sisters lay murdered in a northwest London park, as well as the Metropolitan Police’s leadership’s mishandling of the Sarah Everard case, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving police officer.

At the time, Dick said she recognised that “a precious bond of trust has been damaged” between the public and the police, and she would ensure that lessons were learned from the case.

She faced pressure to resign then, and several “high-profile” figures wrote an open letter accusing her of “presiding over a culture of incompetence and cover-up”, said the BBC.

In the weeks following Everard’s murder, a YouGov survey for the End Violence Against Women coalition found 47% of women and 40% of men reported declining trust in the police.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said at the time that “serious questions” needed to be answered by Scotland Yard, but ultimately backed Dick, whose contract as the head of London’s police force had been extended by another two years that month.

More recently, an Ipsos-Mori poll suggested that public trust in the police has been further eroded by their handling of lockdown-busting parties held in Downing Street, with fewer than a third of Britons confident that the investigation will be “independent or lead to disciplinary action”.

The Met’s “foot-dragging reluctance to investigate” now looks like a “catastrophic misjudgment”, said The Guardian’s columnist Gaby Hinsliff, who suggested that distrust of the police had now gone “mainstream”.

Efforts to improve policing

Louisa Rolfe, an assistant commissioner at the Met, told the Financial Times in December that Everard’s murder was “a watershed moment” for the police, after which Dick launched a “wholesale review of culture and standards” of the force.

Other limited efforts to improve policing in other parts of the country have seen some success through the use of “evidence-based policing” where new methods “backed by data” are applied to police work, said the paper.

Avon and Somerset Police have taken part in a Home Office backed trial of of “pulse patrols”, where officers “embark on 15-minute foot patrols of places that generate the highest number of calls about crime at the busiest times”. Targeted areas have seen a 13% fall in street violence compared with previous years.

Dal Babu, a former Metropolitan Police commander who now advises Khan, said culture change was needed to rebuild trust in the force.

“It’s about getting the culture of the organisation to change, understanding [public] confidence, engaging with the community and working more effectively in terms of partnerships,” he told the paper. “It’s not rocket science.”

Life after Dick

A Home Office source told The Times there are “no suitable candidates” to replace Dick and that the search for her replacement could therefore take some time.

Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu was seen as a favourite, but has clashed with Priti Patel and Boris Johnson over the issue of race, prompting the source to state that “No. 10 would block Basu even if we wanted him, which we don’t”.

Home Secretary Patel is also “said to be unimpressed with the UK’s other police leaders, several of whom she clashed with over the Black Lives Matter protests”, the paper added. But she “might favour” Shaun Sawyer, the chief constable of Devon and Cornwall.

A Home Office source said that an interim commissioner could be brought in while a full application process was undertaken. Politico’s London Playbook said there are a number of “runners and riders” in the frame.

Stephen House, the deputy commissioner, is an “obvious candidate”. Mark Rowley, former assistant commissioner for specialist operations, is also seen as “something of a reformer”, having recently criticised the Met’s over-reliance on stop and search.

Andy Cooke, former Merseyside Police chief “cut his teeth jailing dozens of millionaire drug kingpins in Liverpool” and has fans in government circles. And Essex police chief B.J. Harrington has won rave reviews in the county, but did himself “few favours” last summer when he criticised Patel over the freeze in police pay.

1. Munira Mirza’s resignation suggests the game is up for Boris Johnson

John Rentoul in The Independent

on an ailing premiership

“She may be unknown to most voters, but Munira Mirza’s resignation yesterday was the breaking of another pit-prop under Boris Johnson’s creaking premiership,” writes chief political commentator John Rentoul for The Independent. Although Johnson tried to make it look as if her exit was part of the No. 10 clear-out promised by the PM in the wake of the partygate scandal, in reality “her departure was different”. Conservative MPs could now feel that Mirza’s letter of resignation – which cited her anger over Johnson’s false claims that Keir Starmer in his role as director of public prosecutions had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile – has “weakened their bonds” of loyalty towards the prime minister, and some could now send in letters of no confidence. Her departure also “suggests that some people in No 10 think it’s all over”, Rentoul writes. “I am sure that Mirza’s anger about the Savile slur is genuine, but it is also true that if you want another job, it might be better to get out now on a point of principle than to hope for a place on the last helicopter out of Saigon.”

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2. As the scandals keep coming, distrust of the police has gone mainstream

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian

on Met misjudgments

“An Ipsos-Mori poll this week found that fewer than a third of Britons are confident that the police investigation of alleged lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street will actually result in anyone who broke Covid rules getting punished, while considerably fewer than half expect the police to be thorough or independent,” writes columnist Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The Metropolitan police’s strange, foot-dragging reluctance to investigate, at least until shamed into it by a Whitehall inquiry, now looks like a catastrophic misjudgment,” she continues. “But it wouldn’t have been so damaging had it not reinforced a more longstanding sense that something has gone very wrong in British policing,” she continued. “This is a dangerous moment for decent officers trying to do a good job in thankless circumstances, including female officers horrified by some male colleagues’ behaviour who may have felt forced to ‘play the game or stay quiet’,” she writes. “Given this government’s proven tendency to ignore constitutional niceties, it may also be a dangerous moment for the perennially delicate balance between police operational independence and political meddling.”

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3. The Baftas’ disdain for British brilliance feels like self-sabotage

Tim Robey in The Telegraph

on home-grown talent

“The Baftas have certainly embraced all things boutique, alternative and grungy this year,” writes film critic Tim Robey in The Telegraph, but they have missed an opportunity to “wave the flag for UK film production”. While in some years “resisting that urge might in fact look commendable, for fear of looking too parochial or boosterish”, this year “it feels an awful lot like self-sabotage. Amid acting nominations that range from the terrific and surprising to the dreary and obvious, two big British stars have also been left out” – namely, Olivia Colman for her turn in The Lost Daughter, and Andrew Garfield for Tick, Tick… Boom! “Many would argue the great achievement” of cinema this year “has been to stop cinema going under,” he continues. And the Baftas could at least acknowledge one major “home grown triumph” in this department by showing “a bit more respect” to British-made blockbuster No Time to Die.

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4. Putin’s grand plan is failing

Ian Birrell for UnHerd

on an own goal

“Admirers and appeasers of [Vladimir] Putin – who can be found across the political spectrum – often repeat a well-worn cliché that he plays chess while his foes play chequers,” writes Ian Birrell for UnHerd. “But is Putin really such a grandmaster on the geo-political chessboard?” After two weeks of reporting in Ukraine, what has been made “abundantly clear” to Birrell is in fact “the failure of this supposed Machiavellian mastermind, whose goal of rebuilding Russia’s empire and shattering Nato lies in tatters”. It is clear that “despite Putin’s efforts to blame the West for meddling in Ukraine”, in reality his “belligerence and toxic intervention” has only “hastened” Ukraine’s move towards Europe.

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5. Three steps Queen Elizabeth should take after 70 years on Britain’s throne

Autumn Brewington in The Washington Post

on royal reforms

The Queen has every right to “celebrate her record-breaking 70 years on the throne”, writes Autumn Brewington in The Washington Post. “But with the broader royal family in a far less sterling state, this latest milestone is an opportunity to do more than take a victory lap.” The Platinum Jubilee is the ideal moment to settle three questions. “First, specify what a future, ‘slimmed-down’ royal family looks like,” she suggests. “Second, announce whether Camilla will be crowned queen.” Waiting until Charles becomes king would lead to an unseemly debate during a period of national mourning – and in any case, Brewington says, the Queen “is the only royal who can make this change without a potentially debilitating public outcry”. Finally, “she could suggest a limit to how long any person reigns – perhaps to ensure that the crown changes hands at least once every generation. That could help the institution stay relevant.”

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1. A desperate new low for the disgraced Met Police

Daily Mail Comment

on ‘abhorrent’ attitudes

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has offered a “tin-eared defence of the constabulary”, said the Daily Mail. “A force the size of Scotland Yard would invariably employ the ‘occasional bad ’un’”. Yet anyone who is today reading the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s “damning report into the toxic culture at the Met might draw a strikingly different conclusion”. “Far from a few rotten apples, Dame Cressida has a whole barrel”. The report exposes “shocking evidence of a profoundly sick force”, including “disturbing texts between serving officers” that have been “passed off as ‘banter’”. For members of the police force to hold such attitudes is “abhorrent. Yet only two culprits have been sacked.” The report trains “an intense spotlight on ingrained dysfunctionality” within the force “that is at best tolerated, at worst swept under the carpet”. This “dangerously corrodes” the public’s trust in the police, and “their leaders face tough questions for failing to eradicate the vile microclimate” that persists. “It is hard to think of a public servant who has failed so consistently and comprehensively as Dame Cressida.” Before her detectives investigate partygate, “shouldn’t she get her own rackety house in order?”, asks the newspaper.

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2. Addressing poverty means financial education in primary schools

Robert Halfon at the Financial Times

on money lessons

“The first weeks of the year are viewed by many as some of the toughest,” says Robert Halfon at the Financial Times: “but this year, things are even worse.” The cost-of-living crisis should give “pause to consider long-term solutions for families’ financial instability”, says the Conservative MP: “that is, not just ensuring people have enough money in their pockets but making sure people have the skills to manage their income to maximum benefit”. Halfon says “reforming financial education is at the heart of this.” He believes too many adults “lack the basic skills which underpin financial capability”. And while the Chancellor’s announcement of a £560m adult numeracy programme last year “has the potential to be truly life changing”, “the truth is we have to start earlier”. People who leave school “without an effective financial education are at high risk of financial abuse, fraud and debt”. The financial marketplace is evolving “at an electrifying pace”, says Halfon, and “financial education must recognise that the TikTok generation faces altogether different challenges to those armed with a cheque book years ago.”

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3. Scottish Tories can’t rely on Boris Johnson to set a good example but can’t defect to Labour either

John McLellan at The Scotsman

on staying put

“Representing the Conservative Party these days”, as John McLellan does, “means there is little middle ground”. Writing at The Scotsman, the Tory councillor says those “at the sharp end” of the unfolding Westminster drama “just have to get on with it”. The “blunders, U-turns, accusations and bad headlines” are now “so frequent that they are losing their currency”. The Scottish Conservative Party “is the only solid opposition to the SNP and independence”, however, “so we can’t indulge ourselves by stropping out like the traitorous MP Christian Wakeford”. The party would “of course” be in a better position if Johnson “behaved like a statesman and set an example of which to be proud”, but then, “he wouldn’t be Boris Johnson”. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, Scottish Conservatives “can only wait”. Unlike Becket’s characters “and unlike Wakeford, we do not move”.

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4. Blaming Carrie Johnson for No. 10 mess is deeply unfair

Alice Thomson at The Times

on reputational disarray

Ever since Anne Boleyn entered Henry VIII’s court, “she has been blamed for leading her husband astray”, says Alice Thomson at The Times. “Half a millennium later nothing much has changed.” Now, it’s a different court, and Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie “is taking the rap for her man’s actions”. She is “accused of causing havoc”, says Thomson, and her personality “is being cited to excuse many of the prime minister’s most egregious mistakes”. The “most serious charge” against the prime minister’s wife is “that she forced” the government to save cats and dogs from Kabul “rather than airlift desperate Afghans fleeing from the Taliban”. Then there’s “Carrie Antoinette’s scrolling fern wallpaper”, and the claim that she “‘ambushed’ him with a cake” at a surprise birthday party. But ultimately the Downing Street “mess” is Boris’s “responsibility, no one else’s; he causes chaos”. And yet if he’s “ousted”, “he will return to a well-paid column and the lucrative lecture circuit”, while “it’s Carrie who will have lost her reputation”.

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5. Rihanna’s pregnancy announcement was tongue-in-cheek perfection

Clemence Michallon at The Independent

on mastering a new art

Clemence Michallon wasn’t surprised “when Rihanna nailed her pregnancy announcement”. Writing at The Independent, she notes that the Barbadian singer “tends to excel at, well, practically, everything she undertakes”. Over the weekend, she “offered us a masterclass in that most modern of genres, the celebrity pregnancy announcement”. Rihanna “stepped outside in an eye-catching pink winter coat, which she kept open to reveal her bare pregnancy bump overlaid by a large, jewelled cross necklace” next to her partner, A$AP Rocky. That the New York backdrop was “blanketed in snow” only made the feat “all the more impressive”. Such announcements are a “rich genre” of “Hollywood history”, and Rihanna’s announcement “picks up where her celebrity peers left off”. It’s “traditional” in that “it relies on a bump photo – understandably a favourite medium” of the genre. It’s “staged at just the right amount”, and achieves “the perfect mix of controlled aesthetics and casual cool”. The announcement is “deliciously casual in the most tongue-in-cheek manner”, particularly given Rihanna “was the subject of unfounded pregnancy rumours for years”. “Congratulations,” says Michallon.

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Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Religious tolerance

Reports from the UAE suggest that school textbooks are shifting to promote tolerance towards Jews. They still don't all put Israel on the map, but it is a big step in the direction of acceptance, according to the authors of a recent study. It coincides with a report in The Economist suggesting that “the Arab world is re-embracing its Jews”, having largely sidelined and rejected their Jewish populations since the creation of Israel. Will Israel soon be back on the map in the Arab world – and could this help to heal some of the Middle East’s wounds?

Waiting to transition

The treatment of trans people is back in the news this week on multiple fronts, as the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission called on Scotland to delay plans for reform of its approach to gender recognition and the Council of Europe raised the alarm about “extensive and often virulent attacks” on trans people across the continent. And a crowdsourcing campaign by a trans woman in Worthing has drawn attention to the length of NHS waiting times for gender-confirming surgery, which can be more than three years.

Police misogyny

The Metropolitan Police have this week apologised to a female academic who they admit was subjected to “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” when she was strip-searched after being arrested while giving a legal advice leaflet to a 15-year-old who had been stopped and searched. For years, police had denied any impropriety, but CCTV footage of the incident confirmed that she had been taunted about body hair and a “rank” smell as officers restrained her and cut off her clothes with scissors. What does this tell us about police attitudes towards women?

The Metropolitan Police has publicly apologised for the verbal abuse of an academic during a strip search almost a decade ago that she claims left her with multiple injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The force admitted that officers used “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” about Dr Konstancja Duff following her arrest for obstruction in May 2013. Duff, now an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, was detained after trying to hand a “know your rights” legal advice card to a black teenager caught in a stop-and-search sweep.

Duff, then 24, was taken to Stoke Newington Police Station in north London, where she was carried to a cell and bound before three female officers cut off her clothes with scissors and ripped out her ear piercings.

‘Three officers on top of me’

Duff has described how she was stripped completely naked, despite police guidelines stating that suspects should not be required to remove all of their clothes at the same time. She said that the officers “grabbed” her breasts and touched her genitals, claiming they were looking for genital piercings.

“It was three officers on top of me but it felt like it was more because they were kneeling on me with their full weight and they were all over me,” she told the BBC in 2018.

In comments caught on CCTV footage following the strip search, a male officer inspecting Duff’s possessions in the station reception asked: “Sorry, sorry, what’s that smell?” Another male officer replied: “Oh, it’s her knickers, yeah?”

“Is she rank?” asked a female officer. “She is, her clothes stink,” a male officer answered.

The video footage – published by The Guardian this week – also showed Sgt Kurtis Howard, who was in charge of the station custody area, telling officers to demonstrate to Duff that her “resistance is futile”, to search her “by any means necessary” and to “treat her like a terrorist”.

“It was really clear that they were trying to humiliate me,” Duff, who only gained access to the footage last year, told BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour on Tuesday. “It was really dehumanising language… it does give a kind of peephole into a culture of misogyny and immaturity.”

Injuries and derailed degree

Duff was a final-year master’s student in piano performance at the Royal College of Music when she was arrested, but “says her injuries meant she could not practise for her recital and had to postpone the completion of the master’s until the following year”, said the BBC.

These injuries reportedly included cuts and bruises on her arms, a 5in cut on her collarbone and ear pain where a piercing was removed. Duff said she also suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and had “intrusive thoughts about the strip search [which] often brought on panic attacks” for months afterwards.

Duff was later charged with two counts of assaulting a police officer and one charge of obstructing a police officer, but was acquitted of all charges following a trial. However, the police watchdog (then known as the Independent Police Complaints Commission, or IPCC) did not uphold her complaint of wrongful arrest.

Legal battle begins

Following her acquittal, Duff made a formal complaint about her treatment. But it was only when she sought a judicial review against the IPCC’s decision that custody sergeant Howard was put before a disciplinary panel.

Howard faced a misconduct hearing in August 2018 over alleged breaches of the Met’s standards of “professional behaviour in respect of authority, respect and courtesy, orders and instructions, and discreditable conduct”, Metro reported at the time.

But he was cleared of gross misconduct by the panel without having to give evidence. Halfway through the hearing, the panel decided that he had no case to answer.

Misconduct hearing ‘sham’

Following the verdict, Duff told The Guardian that she had stood up at the hearing and accused the panel of “endorsing the commonplace use of repressive and violating tactics like strip searching to punish and intimidate anyone who does not simply go along with being treated unjustly by police”.

Duff told the BBC that the misconduct hearing was a “sham”, adding: “I feel we are dealing with a real culture of impunity that needs to be challenged.”

The Met said in a statement to the broadcaster that Howard had “made several attempts to respectfully engage with the complainant, all of which were caught on CCTV”, and that he had “reasonable grounds” to authorise the strip search.

Civil claim settled

Duff made a civil claim against the force, which was paid for through crowdfunding. “The costs of a civil action against the police are prohibitive,” she wrote in an article published this week on left-wing site Novara Media. “In my case, the insurance payments alone required a crowdfund to raise £7,560.”

Duff said that the claim was settled by the Met in October 2021, and that “I received £6,000 in compensation and an apology”. But “I don’t believe a word of it”, she added.

After the claim was concluded, allegations of misconduct relating to the officers’ comments were referred to the Directorate of Professional Standards – the body responsible for investigating complaints against the professional conduct of police officers.

The Met also made a voluntary referral to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), the watchdog that has replaced the IPCC.

CCTV footage revealed

The Met apologised to Duff once again this week after The Guardian published clips from the CCTV footage, which was acquired by Duff last year as part of her civil action.

In a statement to Duff, Inspector Andy O'Donnell of the Directorate of Professional Standards said he “sincerely and unreservedly” apologised “for the sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language used about yourself and for any upset and distress this may have caused”.

He added: “I hope that settlement of this claim and this recognition of the impact of what happened that day will enable you to put this incident behind you.”

Duff said it was “really striking” that the Met had apologised only for the language used by the officers. “They apologised because they got called out for using embarrassing language, but they didn’t apologise for violently stripping me naked,” she told Women’s Hour.

“At every stage, they have used false accusations to discredit me,” she said, adding: “I just feel like I’ve been on trial for eight years.”

The publication of the CCTV footage followed what The Times’ crime correspondent John Simpson described as “a string of scandals for the Met”. High-profile cases including the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving firearms officer, and the gross misconduct of two officers who shared photos of two murdered sisters, have highlighted “deep-seated cultural problems” in the force, Simpson wrote.

A Met investigation into Duff’s allegations of misconduct is ongoing.

1. If the Met police are serious about rebuilding trust after Sarah Everard, they should actually talk to women

Parm Sandhu for the i newspaper

on taking swift action

The horrifying murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a police officer “leaves me with the most awful feelings of anger and deep upset”, writes Parm Sandhu, a former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police. It’s important to remember that the vast majority of officers are “good people” who are “also struggling to come to terms with the actions of the monster who killed her”. What has concerned many is the force’s “failure to identify [Wayne Couzens] as the risk he was”, she says, as well as “the various stories from serving and ex-officers of their experience of misogyny and sexual harassment from other officers”. The police need to show they are taking swift action to address such issues, writes Sandhu, who served in the Met Police for 30 years. We need to see action fast, she adds, as “the time now is desperately short to regain the trust and confidence of women in the police”.

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2. Breaking promises won’t get Keir Starmer into power

Owen Jones for The Guardian

on a leader whose time is up

“Dishonesty corrodes democracy like acid,” writes Owen Jones. However, it is not the “broken promises of Boris Johnson” that are on The Guardian columnist’s mind this time, but those of his opposite number. Jones rages that “Starmer stood for Labour leader under a banner of Corbynism without Corbyn” but has now discarded that promise. He dismisses Starmer’s conference speech as “Blairism without Blair” but says comparisons with Blair’s leadership are nonetheless “wrongheaded” because the “architects of New Labour” were “genuinely substantial figures”. Furthermore, he argues, “where Blair and Neil Kinnock were talented orators, Starmer lacks any charisma or warmth”. He notes that Starmer is “less popular than a prime minister presiding over a country with fuel shortages, empty supermarket shelves, and an impending cut to universal credit that will drive hundreds of thousands of children into poverty”. It is too late for the Labour leader to win Jones over. “He needs to be removed,” Jones says.

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3. Thank God furlough has ended. Now give businesses the freedom to employ

Annabel Denham for The Daily Telegraph

on becoming ‘risk allergic’

At one point, close to nine million people were on the furlough scheme, making it “one of the largest interventions that the UK government has launched in any crisis, ever”, writes Annabel Denham in The Daily Telegraph. Few disagree that the decision to nationalise the workforce “was the right medicine in the pandemonium of March 2020”, she says. “But as the months wore on, it became harder and harder to justify.” The longer workers were furloughed, the more we became “risk allergic” to jobs being lost; “we ignored that jobs disappear all the time, even without pandemics”. When furlough eventually winds up, there will “regrettably” be an increase in unemployment – but “this will likely be less than was once feared”. “Protecting jobs was core to Rishi Sunak’s pandemic strategy,” Denham concludes, but “it’s not a job the government can do forever”.

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4. Hire ex-offenders to help society and the economy

John Timpson for The Times

on the upside of ex-cons

John Timpson welcomes news that Dominic Raab is encouraging bosses to employ ex-prisoners because “if this represents a permanent shift in attitude it will significantly reduce the number of prisoners who reoffend and will cut the vast cost of our prosecution and prison service”. Writing for The Times, Timpson, whose shoe-repair and key-cutting chain started recruiting ex-offenders 20 years ago, points out that more than 60% of prison leavers reoffend within two years of release, a figure that falls to under 20% for those with a job. “We use the same criteria as for all other applicants: we pick them on their personality,” he writes, adding: “Drug dealers are often successful: they are very commercial!” He calls for more employers to follow his lead. “Ex-offenders can only get a job with most companies if they lie on their application form,” he says, but “if employers think ex-cons can help with the current crisis, and beyond, they should scrap for good their insistence on a clean criminal record”.

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5. Britney Spears’ bid for freedom comes at a crucial moment

Nicole Hemmer for CNN

on the right to body autonomy

A judge’s decision this week to remove Britney Spears’ father, Jamie, from the decades-long conservatorship that has controlled nearly everything – from her movements to her healthcare decisions – has brought the pop star “a step closer to regaining her freedom”, writes Nicole Hemmer on CNN. But this move “isn’t the end of the conservatorship” and even ending it “will not make Britney Spears whole”, she adds. For more than ten years, Spears has been denied “the most personal of all freedoms: the freedom to choose to have children”. Sadly she’s not alone. “Women in the United States do not have, and have never had, full reproductive autonomy,” Hemmer says. “Spears’s struggle helps highlight the moral catastrophe of those limitations, especially at a moment when women’s reproductive rights are under renewed attack.” The attention being paid to Spears’ conservatorship case “is happening at a crucial moment”: “seeing a woman being freed from the control of her father, and slowly regaining full autonomy over her own life and body, is a reminder of why all women deserve the right to control their lives as well”.

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A highly decorated police officer who was sacked after being sent a WhatsApp message featuring a child abuse video has been reinstated after a tribunal ruled her dismissal “unreasonable” and “unfair”.

A former acting chief superintendent, Novlett Robyn Williams was sentenced in November 2019 to 200 hours of community service for possession of an indecent image and was then sacked by the Metropolitan Police in March 2020 after a disciplinary hearing ruled that she had committed “gross misconduct”.

But in a Police Appeals Tribunal hearing on Wednesday, an independent panel concluded her dismissal was “unfair” and that it was “unreasonable” to sack Williams after her conviction, adding that she should have received a final warning instead.

‘Grave error of judgement’

Jurors at her trial heard Williams had been sent the video by her sister, Jennifer Hodge, who was “outraged” that it was circulating on social media and sent it to “all 17 people in her WhatsApp contacts list”, The Guardian reported in 2019.

Williams said she was “unaware” her sister, who wanted the culprit found, had sent her the video. However, the judge presiding over the trial rejected the explanation given Hodge’s “extreme reaction” to the video and because the two sisters “had spent hours with each other” without Williams reporting it, the paper adds.

Prosecutors also cited a text from the officer to her sister to “please call” as evidence that she wanted to discuss the content of the video, the BBC says.

Judge Richard Marks said Williams’ decision to do nothing about the video was “a grave error of judgement” given her duty to safeguard the five-year-old child involved, adding: “It is a complete tragedy you find yourself in the position you now do.”

‘Institutional racism’

Before her dismissal, Williams was a “rising star” in the Met Police and had been “tipped to become the first black head of Scotland Yard”, the Daily Mail reports.

Her sacking caused “widespread anger” among her colleagues, who pointed to her “unblemished” 36-year career record, The Telegraph says. She was highly decorated for her work, winning the Queen’s Police Medal in 2003 and receiving high praise for her role after the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

The Black Police Association (BPA) was highly critical of her conviction, arguing in 2019 that it was a “classic example of institutional racism” and questioning why she was pursued when an “investigation concluded that there has been no sexual gratification” from the images, The Guardian says.

“The clip was sent to 17 people and only three people were convicted,” the Met branch of the BPA said in a statement. “It is well documented about the disproportionally that exists within misconduct and complaint of officers and staff from an African, Caribbean or Asian background.”

The Metropolitan Police denied that ethnicity was a factor in its decision to press for charges, arguing that dealing with the allegations internally would have been “entirely wrong”, The Times reported.

Back to work

After the appeal verdict Williams, 56, said: “I am extremely pleased with today’s outcome and would like to thank the members of the panel for their decision, Gerard Boyle QC for continually fighting my case, and for the countless people within policing and beyond, including representatives of the Police Superintendents’ Association, who have supported me throughout,” Sky News reports.

“For over a year, before and during the pandemic, I have continued to support local people by working within community initiatives. I am therefore delighted to be able to return to the work I love, serving our communities within London.”

Police Superintendents’ Association professional standards coordinator Victor Marshall said: “We are pleased that today’s panel agreed that her dismissal was unreasonable in light of the complex circumstances surrounding her conviction and we are delighted she will be able to continue to serve the communities of London.”

A Met Police spokesperson added that it will “await the full judgment” and “engage Ms Williams’ representatives accordingly”.

1. The Times view on the Daniel Morgan inquiry: Institutional Corruption

The Times editorial board

on justice denied

“It is 22 years since the Metropolitan Police was branded ‘institutionally racist’ by Sir William Macpherson after his public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence,” writes The Times editorial board. “To that badge of shame, the Met can now add another.” The 1,200-page inquiry report into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator killed with an axe in a London car park in 1987, “amounts to a damning account of police failure”, the paper continues. The most “damaging” of the report’s charges relate to “the extraordinary lengths to which the Met went to cover up its own mistakes”. Much of this subterfuge “took place on Dame Cressida Dick’s watch”, raising further questions over the Met chief’s leadership following recent scandals, “not least the grotesque failures of Operation Midland”, the investigation into what proved to be untrue claims of historical sex abuse. “Such institutional corruption has become an all too familiar feature of public life, as victims of the Hillsborough disaster and the postmaster scandal, who have faced similarly long waits for the truth to emerge, can attest.”

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2. Is the EU about to crumble?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on UnHerd

on Nexit

Five years have passed since Britain voted to leave the EU, but now the bloc is grappling with the “existential question” of “which, if any, of the remaining 27 countries will be next”, writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali on UnHerd. “If you believe the bookies, the odds-on favourite is Italy”, but “it would be unwise to rule out the country sitting in fourth place: the Netherlands”. The Dutch, “who are notoriously frugal, have become increasingly frustrated with the frivolity of EU spending” over the past decade, Hirsi Ali contends. Indeed, newly published research reveals “a striking decrease of support for the EU” in the Netherlands. And while a majority still favours remaining in the bloc, “we forget now how unlikely Brexit seemed to most commentators - until the first, stunning results came in”, she writes. “Could watching a successful exit by the UK push the Dutch population further in this direction? Don’t rule it out.”

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3. Sorry, Biden. Putin honestly could not care less

Elena Chernenko in The New York Times

on Biden vs. Putin

“For a while, it wasn’t clear that this week’s meeting in Geneva between President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Biden would go ahead,” writes Elena Chernenko in The New York Times. Fears that Biden would “publicly lecture his Russian counterpart on democracy and human rights” looked set to scupper the talks - “yet the Kremlin eventually accepted the invitation”, Chernenko continues. “Why? Besides the chance to de-escalate tensions, there’s one very good reason: Mr Putin has nothing to fear from Mr Biden. Enduringly popular and freshly buoyed by the quashing of the opposition, Russia’s president has ample cause to feel secure.” So secure, in fact, that the Kremlin can be confident that “whatever the American president might say in Geneva - or his administration do, by way of sanctions - will not affect Mr Putin’s rule in Russia”.

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4. We must protect press freedom

The Telegraph editorial board

on unhindered journalism

“The hounding of BBC Newsnight journalist Nick Watt by a mob during an anti-lockdown protest in Westminster this week was disgraceful,” says The Telegraph editorial board. And “astonishingly, police officers at the protest just stood and watched”, the paper continues. While both Boris Johnson and Priti Patel may have condemned Watt’s treatment, “it counts for little” if police officers who witness abuse fail to intervene. Journalists should “be able to report the facts without fear or favour, not be intimidated by thugs”. While “it is welcome to see politicians defend the free press and its role underpinning our democracy”, their words “mean nothing if officers sit on their hands when they have an opportunity to act”, the paper concludes. “If police forces fail to understand their responsibilities, what is Ms Patel going to do about it?”

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5. British politics is still drunk on Brexit spirit, and Boris Johnson won’t call time

Rafael Behr in The Guardian

on different hymn sheets

“There is a simple reason why Boris Johnson and European leaders failed to find common ground over Brexit at last week’s G7 summit” in Cornwall, writes Raphael Behr in The Guardian. “They are not even talking about the same thing.” For Johnson, “Brexit is a matter of national character that cannot be described in legal document” and the “withdrawal agreement was a single-use tool for levering himself out of a tight spot” . But for Brussels, “legal texts contain the true meaning of a project that only exists in the real world as a set of rules to be implemented”. That difference of interpretation “will continue to cause friction because it is not a misunderstanding”, Behr continues. “Johnson knows that legal arguments over the Northern Ireland protocol favour the European position. He chooses not to care.” To concede that any part of the UK might be subject to European regulatory standards “would be to admit that a portion of sovereignty was conceded in the negotiations”. And “that would be a stain on his self-image as the man who made a clean break from Brussels. He finds confrontation more appealing, not least because he expects it to achieve more than compliance. Whether that is true depends on how you define achievement.”

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1. We’ll miss Cressida Dick when she’s gone

Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator

on policing problems

“To all those – from Left and Right – joining in the clamour for Cressida Dick to resign as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a pertinent question hangs in the air”, writes Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator. “Who would you hire to replace her and what good do you think it would do?” London policing must answer to “two sharply diverging audiences: the local one and the national one”, says O’Flynn, adding that “it is an impossible job on the cutting edge of the culture war”. Dick manages to “somehow pull it off to a largely acceptable degree”, talking the jargon but committed to “strong policing” on the ground. The Met Commissioner is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, he adds.

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2. Women need tougher laws to make them safe

Rachel Sylvester in The Times

on the policing bill

“It is rightly said that hard cases make bad law”, Rachel Sylvester writes in The Times, but the murder of Sarah Everard “has highlighted a wider culture of male violence and a flawed criminal justice system that is failing to protect women”. However, the government’s new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill “does more to protect statues than women”. Carrie Symonds, the prime minister’s partner, has suffered her own trauma at the hands of a violent criminal, meaning Johnson “has a personal, as well as a political, understanding” of the response to Everard’s death. But while Symonds may do her best to influence his position, “it is the prime minister who needs to act”.

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3. Europe’s AstraZeneca vaccine suspension is bad science that will cost lives

Stuart Ritchie in New Statesman

on jab fears

“You don’t have to be a hardcore utilitarian to understand the balance of harms”, writes Stuart Ritchie in the New Statesman. As European countries halt the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine over blood clot fears, we must consider the “double-figures in the whole of Europe for reports of blood clots” against the “potential hundreds or thousands of deaths” non-vaccination will cause. In Europe, “cases are creeping up, the EU has also been struggling to get shots into arms”, Ritchie adds. “After this new, unforced error, that struggle is going to become all the more difficult.”

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4. The Brexit deal was astonishingly bad, and every day the evidence piles up

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian

on a bad deal

“Now we know that British exports to the European Union plummeted by a cataclysmic 41% after Brexit on 1 January, what next?” asks Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. So far, Brexit had provided little “upside”, although the “pro-Brexit press barely cover” our trade fiasco. “The question is when the sheer weight of evidence exposes how astonishingly bad the Brexit deal is,” Toynbee adds. “The remain ship sailed long ago, but the boat to Norway may eventually dock here.”

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5. Voters will have to pay higher taxes to make a transient stimulus permanent

Janan Ganesh in Financial Times

on an American welfare state

“America’s social democratic turn has been in the works for decades now”, writes Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. “Quietly, voters have grown to like Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Public surveys disclose a culture that is no longer one of masochistic self-reliance, if it ever was.” But President Joe Biden’s $1.9trn fiscal relief bill is still far from a “resounding” progressive moment. Voters may welcome extra spending in a crisis, but the test is whether they will accept higher taxes to make it sustainable in the long run. “A proper welfare state must be paid for. Such is the political Everest that should daunt the Democrats, and the opening that awaits the Republicans.”

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The head of London’s police force has resigned after London mayor Sadiq Khan put her “on notice” over a “return to the bad days of the Met of his childhood in the 1970s and 80s”.

Cressida Dick said she was left with “no choice” but to step down from her £230,000 a year role after it became “clear that the Mayor no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership to continue”. She added that “undertaking this role as a servant of the people of London and the UK has been the greatest honour and privilege of my life”.

Dick’s tenure as the head of the Metropolitan Police has been marked by “several controversies”, The Telegraph said, which critics have suggested “pointed to a rotten culture” within the country’s largest police force.

Controversies before top job

Dick faced repeated calls for her resignation during her five years in the top job, with critics blaming her for the erosion of public trust in forces across the UK.

The daughter of an Oxford philosopher father and historian mother, Oxbridge graduate Dick was “embroiled in a string of controversies” at the Met long before she was appointed commissioner, the Daily Mail reported last year.

She was the commander in charge of the team that shot 27-year-old electrician Jean Charles de Menezes seven times in the head at Stockwell tube station in 2005, after police marksmen mistook him for a suicide bomber.

She also sanctioned the creation of Operation Midland in 2014, the Met’s investigation into “spurious” allegations of a VIP child-abuse ring, said the paper.

An inquiry uncovered more than 40 failings in the police operation, and the force was later made to pay compensation to several people whose reputations were damaged as a result of the investigation.

Appointed in 2017

When Dick was named the first female commissioner of the Met in 2017, The Guardian’s Vikram Dodd described her as “tough and resilient”. “Those who are fans love ‘Cress’, as she is known, in a fever of adulation rarely bestowed on a police chief,” he wrote.

She had won praise for her “coolness under pressure, personal warmth and compassion” throughout her three-decade career, he added, and had “a wealth of operational experience and achievement unsurpassed by previous commissioners”.

Her appointment as Met boss was a “significant moment” in the force’s 188-year history, said The Telegraph. “But a series of crises – many of which were beyond her control – have conspired to tarnish her time in post and frustrate her agenda,” the paper added.

Her first day as commissioner was just weeks after the murder of PC Keith Palmer during a terrorist attack on Parliament. Four more terrorist attacks on London followed in the next six months, claiming a total of 31 lives.

Since then, Dick has faced criticism for failing to drive down violent crime in the capital, with homicides hitting the highest level in a decade in 2019.

She has also been slated over efforts to crack down on violent crime through the use of stop and search.

And critics turned on Dick again in 2020, after she urged Home Secretary Priti Patel to use the Extinction Rebellion protests as a “much-needed” opportunity to change laws on demonstrations, in a letter seen by openDemocracy.

Sarah Everard vigil

One of Dick’s worst PR disasters was triggered by the Met’s response to a peaceful vigil in memory of Sarah Everard, who was murdered by a serving PC in March last year. Images of the vigil, in Clapham Common, made for “worrying viewing” and showed women being “forcibly removed” by police, said The Times.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey subsequently shared a letter to Dick on social media calling for her to step down. “Cressida Dick has lost the confidence of the millions of women in London and should resign,” he tweeted.

Two reviews were launched into the policing of the vigil: one commissioned by the home secretary, and the other by Boris Johnson and led by Dick.

The Guardian said Dick was “walking a tightrope” as public anger mounted, but she kept her job, earning her the nickname of “Comeback Cressida”. A senior Downing Street source told Politico’s London Playbook at the time that Dick retained the “full confidence” of the prime minister.

She faced yet more resignation calls following the sentencing of Everard’s killer, Met officer Wayne Couzens, last September. Mandu Reid, leader of the British Women’s Equality Party, was among those calling for Dick to go.

However, Reid warned in an article for Grazia magazine that “it is almost too easy to focus our anger on one figurehead” and that removing Dick would “not address the fact that there are systemic and institutional problems in our flagship police force and a complete lack of political will that fails to make ending violence against women and girls a priority”.

Euro 2020 and Daniel Morgan

Dick was awarded a damehood in 2019 in Theresa May’s resignation honours. And last July, the police chief was made dame commander by the Prince of Wales in recognition of her public service.

The latest honour was handed over on the same day that Dick backed her officers over their handling of crowds at the Euro 2020 final at Wembley. After thousands of ticketless fans managed to storm into the stadium, a review “found there were a series of ‘near misses’ among crowds which could have led to significant injuries or even death”, said the i news site.

Dick had faced further criticism weeks earlier after an independent panel investigating the Met’s handling of the 1987 murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan described the force as “institutionally corrupt”.

The panel said that Dick repeatedly denied them “access to an internal police database without satisfactory explanation over a period of seven years”, the i reported.

Sue Gray report

Sue Gray’s report into lockdown-breaching parties at No. 10 quickly became “the latest chapter in Dame Cressida’s eventful stint as London’s top police officer”, said Anne McElvoy in the Evening Standard.

The force initially ruled out a Met investigation into the “partygate” allegations, stating that officers “do not normally investigate breaches of coronavirus regulations when they are reported long after they are said to have taken place”. Dick then rowed back on the decision, announcing that the force was looking into “potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations” in Downing Street and Whitehall since 2020.

Dick’s decision to launch the Met’s probe delayed the much-anticipated publication of Gray’s report, after the top civil servant was asked to make “minimal reference” to the events being investigated by the force. Following Dick’s last-minute intervention, MPs accused her of presiding over a “stitch-up” and a “farce”, reported the Financial Times.

“A stitch-up between the Met leadership and No. 10 will damage our politics for generations and it looks like it is happening right in front of our eyes,” said Lib Dem leader Davey.

Contract extended

Amid growing anger over the partygate row, sources told the BBC that Patel considered going through the civil service recruitment process to find a replacement for Dick last year, during the fallout from the policing at Everard’s vigil.

Patel was reportedly “overruled” by Downing Street and a decision was made to extend Dick’s contract for two more years. Dick said she was “honoured and humbled” to remain in the post.

A panel of victims of “police corruption, incompetence and malpractice”, led by Stephen Lawrence’s mother, Doreen, signed what the Daily Mail described as a “bombshell” letter to the PM calling for Dick’s contract not to be extended.

The letter said that Dick had “presided over a culture of incompetence and cover-up” and called for her to be “properly investigated for her conduct, along with her predecessors and those in her inner circle, who she appointed and who have questions to answer”.

But her luck ran out when London mayor Khan demanded a plan from the police commissioner on how the force would “win back the trust and confidence” of the public.

He said he was “disgusted and angry” about the litany of police failings that has come to light in recent months, and was therefore prepared to “take action” against Dick unless she offered a convincing plan to restore the public’s “knocked and shattered” confidence.

Her departure has proven no less controversial than her tenure in the job, with Khan “reportedly not informing the Home Secretary of developments”, The Telegraph reported.

Home Office officials will “press City Hall for an explanation surrounding the departure”, which led to Khan being accused of “political opportunism” and “grandstanding”.

A nationwide vigil highlighting women’s safety issues is being organised following the disappearance of Sarah Everard in south London last week.

After as-yet unidentified human remains were found yesterday in a wood in Kent, the “Reclaim These Streets” organisers said the event was “for Sarah, but also for all women who feel unsafe, who go missing from our streets and who face violence every day”.

The 33-year-old’s disappearance has renewed debate about the endemic abuse as the government prepares its latest “violence against women and girls” strategy. Here is what we know about the plans.

‘One woman every three days’

The arrest of a serving Metropolitan police officer in connection with Everard’s disappearance prompted thousands of women to share their experiences of harassment and assault, using the hashtag #SarahEverard.

Amid the outpouring of testimonies, Sky News political correspondent Kate McCann tweets that “what happened to Sarah Everard has hit home hard for so many women because we make the calculations she did every day too”.

“It is frustrating and tiring and constant. And yet sometimes, despite all those calculations, it still isn’t enough,” she adds.

The extent and seriousness of the problem is revealed by data from the Femicide Census, a charity that tracks the number of women killed by men in the UK. A total of 1,425 women have been murdered over the past decade - an average of one woman every three days.

The findings of a recent YouGov survey of more than 1,000 women reveals that other forms of abuse are also widespread.

A total of 97% of respondents aged between 18 and 24 have been the victim of sexual harassment, according to the findings of the poll, which was conducted on behalf of United Nations organisation UN Women UK and shared with The Guardian.

Four in five women of all ages said they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces.

The survey also exposed what the newspaper describes as “a damning lack of faith in the UK authorities’ desire and ability to deal with sexual harassment”, with 96% of respondents saying they did not report the incidents and 45% saying it would not change anything.

UN Women UK executive director Claire Barnett said the results of the survey revealed “a human rights crisis”, adding: “It’s just not enough for us to keep saying ‘this is too difficult a problem for us to solve’ - it needs addressing now.”

Calls for action have been growing since the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales warned in a report published last summer that rape prosecution rates in the UK have reached a “catastrophic” low.

Vera Baird QC said that the crime had effectively been “decriminalised”, with “just 3% of rape complaints” resulting in criminal charges. Police in England and Wales referred 2,747 rape cases to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2019-20 - the lowest total since the records began in 2014.

Domestic abuse has also increased significantly since lockdown restrictions were imposed in March last year. The Femicide Census found that domestic homicide rates were three times higher than usual during the initial few weeks of the first national lockdown.

What’s the government’s plan?

The government last month finished gathering evidence for its latest Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy, which is due to be released later this year. A total of £100m of funding has been committed to support abuse victims since the programme launched in 2010.

Government officials are consulting with women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence, as well as members of local government; experts who work with survivors and social care; the education sector; and law enforcement professionals.

Downing Street has said that under VAWG initiatives, new measures have been introduced to tackle crimes including stalking, rape, so-called “honour violence” and female genital mutilation.

However, Home Secretary Priti Patel has conceded that more needs to be done - and quickly. In the forward to the latest call for evidence, she writes that while the “risks of violence against women and girls are still present, the pace of societal and technological change means that new and evolving forms of crime against women and girls are continuously emerging”.

The updated strategy for 2021 to 2024 will aim to improve understanding of newer forms of violent crimes against women and girls such as cyber flashing and online abuse via dating apps and social media.

A separate domestic abuse strategy will also be launched after the passing of the Domestic Abuse Bill, which is expected to become law later this month.

A major inquiry into undercover policing in the UK has finally begun almost six years after being announced by then home secretary Theresa May.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) is “one of the most complicated, expensive and delayed public inquiries in British legal history”, the BBC reports. The investigation centres on allegations of systematic abuses by so-called spycops that date back more than four decades.

Why was the inquiry launched?

The UCPI was established in early 2015 in response to a series of allegations that May said amounted to evidence of “historical failings” by undercover policing units. Among these allegations were that the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence had been spied on while campaigning for justice - claims that the police admitted were true.

After finally getting under way in London last week, the jury-led inquiry is looking at how at least “139 undercover officers spied on more than 1,000 political groups” over a period spanning back to 1968, writes investigative reporter Rob Evans, author of Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police.

Two undercover units are at the heart of the inquiry: the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which worked in London, and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) which operated across the UK. Both units have since been disbanded.

The inquiry, which is expected to continue for at least three years, is focusing first on the SDS.

The group was put together in the late 1960s amid protests over the Vietnam War, in response to “official concerns that public anger over the issue and unrest in Europe, particularly in Paris, signalled that far-left groups in England and Wales were planning disorder on home soil”, says The Independent.

“At first, officers were deployed undercover for weeks or months,” says the newspaper, but as the unit extended its investigations to infiltrate a long list organisations and trade unions, some of these assignments lasted for years.

The inquiry to expected to hear evidence from more than 200 witnesses, including politicians and Whitehall officials who oversaw the undercover operations.

Thousands of confidential documents that police “assumed would never see the light of day” are also due to be published, The Guardian reports. “However, one large tranche of documents, which may have shed light on operations since the 1990s, will not be released because it was recently destroyed by police.”

Policing the bedroom

One of the most sensitive issues to be explored by the inquiry are allegations that multiple undercover police officers deceived women into sexual relationships while using fake identities. One undercover officer, Bob Lambert, fathered a child with his unwitting partner, an animal rights campaigner, before disappearing from their lives when his deployment ended in the late 1980s.

The Independent’s home affairs correspondent Lizzie Dearden quotes a woman named only as Lisa, to protect her identity, describing how another spycop - Mark Kennedy - was “put in my life deliberately to deceive me”.

“Over 30 women have found they were also in relationships with people who didn’t exist,” Lisa added.

These cases date back to the 1970s and suggest that the “targeting of women may have been considered a justified means for officers to embed themselves deep into the movements they were targeting”, says the BBC.

In 2015, the Metropolitan Police issued an “unreserved apology” and paid compensation to seven women who had been deceived into relationships.

But many more are still waiting for justice - and other women have also suffered. Last week, a statement was made to the inquiry on behalf of three women who “believed they were making personal sacrifices” so their police officer husbands could go undercover to infiltrate political groups during long-term deployments.

“Those women fulfilled their role dutifully, towards both their husbands and the honourable causes they believed they were serving – the fight against crime, terror and violence,” the statement read.

“These sacrifices came with a heavy price for their own lives and their families, and they believed they were making them for all of us, the public.”

Spy games

Another major issue being tackled by the inquiry is the police’s use of undercover officers to infiltrate political groups, as well as intensive surveillance of private citizens.

Particular focus is being placed on how officers “circled” the family of murdered teenager Lawrence, “looking to smear them instead of catching their son’s killers”, the Daily Mail says.

The inquiry has heard that the family “were not terrorists, criminals or any threat to public order” and that there was “no conceivable justification” for the snooping.

A statement prepared by Imran Khan QC on behalf of Lawrence’s mother said that the family is “losing confidence” in “this inquiry’s ability to get to the truth”.

Another spying victim in the spotlight is left-wing writer and public intellectual Tariq Ali, who was monitored by at least 14 undercover police officers due to his anti-war campaigning.

“Previously secret reports disclosed how police spied on Ali as he helped promote political campaigns against the Vietnam War, violent racist assaults, fascism and other progressive causes,” investigative reporter Evans writes in The Guardian. Ali told the inquiry that “grotesque” police reports detailing such operations showed the spying network was “utterly out of control”.

Are the undercover operations still happening?

The Metropolitan Police has “repeatedly sought to paint the scandal as largely historical, and has never been drawn on whether such operations continue”, Evans reports.

The retired judge leading the inquiry, John Mitting, last week demanded to know whether the force is currently infiltrating political groups or helping the MI5 to monitor people considered to be subversives.

But Met Police barrister Peter Skelton failed to answer the question, simply saying that his opening statement had not been intended to “imply anything about the scope of the Metropolitan Police’s present undercover work”.

In response, Mitting warned that “they are questions that in due course I will want to be answered”.

An early draft of the delayed Windrush review report branded the Home Office “institutionally racist” over the department’s “hostile environment” policy towards migrants, it has emerged.

The findings of the independent review into the deportation of Caribbean migrants who had lived legally in the UK for decades were originally due to be published in March last year but have yet to be made public.

However, The Times reports that inside sources say the phrase “institutionally racist” was included in an initial draft but no longer appears in more recent versions - triggering claims that the review report has been watered down.

What is institutional racism?

Institutional racism is a form of racism that exists in institutional settings, usually of a social or political nature.

The Metropolitan Police force was famously branded “institutionally racist” in 1999 by Sir William Macpherson, who led the public inquiry into the fatal stabbing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

Macpherson defined institutional racism as “the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin”. This form of racism is seen in “processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people”, he said.

Two decades later, in 2018, a lawyer representing some of the families affected by the Grenfell Tower fire said the public inquiry into the June 2017 blaze should ask whether the tragedy, which claimed 72 deaths, was “a product of institutional racism”.

Others have claimed that institutional racism is also rife in the UK’s education system. In an article on The Conversation last year, Katy Sian, a lecturer in sociology at the University of York, wrote that “racism in British universities is endemic”.

An analysis of data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) showed that in 2012-13, of a total 17,880 professors in British universities, only 85 were black, 950 were Asian, and 365 were “other” (including mixed race).

Kalwant Bhopal, a Birmingham University professor of education and social justice, believes “white privilege” still dominates society, The Guardian reports.

She asks: “If the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) and Macpherson were effective, why is it that if you are a black student you are less likely to leave university with a 2:1 or a first, less likely to attend an elite university and are more likely to be unemployed six months after graduation?”

Campaigners say that as well as being seen in education and policing, evidence for institutional racism has been found in housing, loans, immigration, the civil service, psychiatry and other medicine, and politics.

Bhopal claims that policymakers, employers and others in power only advance racial justice if it supports their own interests, creating “a smokescreen of conformity” with race equality agendas.

“We seem to be going round in circles,” she concludes.

Where did the concept originate?

The term “institutional racism” was first used publicly in 1967 by African-American civil rights activists Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, according to The Guardian’s Hugh Mair.

In the book, Carmichael and Hamilton contrasted “individual racism and institutional racism”. They described the latter as “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life.”

Because institutional racism operates in “established and respected forces in society”, it receives “far less public condemnation”, the two campaigners argued.

“When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society,” they wrote.

“But when in that same city – Birmingham, Alabama – five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of power, food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.”

Ironically, in the UK, it was through the efforts of a white, public school-educated, knighted High Court judge that the spotlight was shone on the problem. When Macpherson branded the Met “institutionally racist”, he triggered change in British society that was “so significant, we have almost forgotten what it was like before”, according to Matthew Ryder QC.

“The notion that there was a structural component to racism that is more impactful than personal animus or hostility is now well established,” says Ryder, who served as London’s deputy mayor for integration until last year. “That was almost a completely alien concept before the Stephen Lawrence inquiry happened.”

The public denouncement of the Met empowered black people to hold institutions to account for racism, Ryder argues.

Any critics of the phrase?

The term “institutional racism” has been described as “incendiary” by Trevor Philips, former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), reports the BBC.

In a 2009 speech marking ten years since the Lawrence murder report in which Macpherson used the phrase, Philips said that Britain was “by far the best place in Europe to live if you are not white”.

“The use of the term was incendiary,” he said. ‘It rocked the foundations of the police service and caused widespread anguish in government.”

Facebook is to use footage from police body cameras to train its content moderation programmes in response to claims that it failed to prevent images of the New Zealand mosque shootings spreading across its platform earlier this year.

The social media giant will provide London’s Metropolitan Police with body cameras “for firearms training exercises”, the Financial Times reports. It also plans to supply US law enforcement agencies with wearable cameras.

Images captured by the cameras will then be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) powered content moderation systems to more quickly identify and remove first-person footage of real-life shooting incidents, the FT adds.

The agreement is the latest move by Facebook to limit extreme content on its platform. In May, the company employed a “one-strike policy”, where users sharing violent content - such as a statement from an extremist group “without context” - would be blocked from using Facebook Live, says Sky News.

Why Facebook was criticised for its handling of the New Zealand shootings

On 15 March, 51 people were killed when a “lone attacker opened fire during Friday prayers” at two mosques in Chirstchurch, The Sun says.

The gunman live-streamed the attack for 17 minutes through Facebook, where the footage remained for a further 12 minutes before being taken down, says Sky News. Some 200 people watched the stream live, though 1.5 million videos of the attack were uploaded and subsequently removed.

Facebook was criticised for failing to identify the stream and for leaving footage of the attack on its platform “weeks” after the event, according to Engadget.

How police footage could prevent future violent live-streams

In its defence, Facebook said in a statement that its moderation algorithms “did not have enough content depicting first-person footage of violent events to effectively train our machine learning technology.

“That’s why we’re working with government and law enforcement officials in the US and UK to obtain camera footage from their firearms training programs – providing a valuable source of data to train our systems.”

The Met Police’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, Neil Basu, believes that Facebook’s cameras may also benefit police “in their response to such incidents”, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The footage recorded by the Met will also be distributed through the Home Office to other tech firms developing software aimed at identifying mass shootings broadcast on social media, the newspaper adds.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Stephen Bush in The Daily Telegraph

on Labour and anti-Semitism

This time it’s different – why anti-Semitism could finally sink Labour

“Growing number of Labour figures, including those who are strongly supportive of the leadership, believe that the perception that Labour has questions to answer is beginning to sink in among the country at large. That realisation erodes Labour’s longstanding brand. If the Conservatives are British politics’ equivalent of the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man – all brain, and no heart – then Labour are the Scarecrow: all heart, no brain. Voters may not have acquired any particular concern for minority groups themselves but they expect Labour to do so. It could yet prove the party’s undoing if it comes to be seen as the party with no heart and no brain.”

2. Iain Martin in The Times

on a cross-Channel clash of political styles

Macron is ready for showdown with Johnson

“It is in this volatile new arena that, barring any upset, Johnson will be operating next month. He will have to ask Macron (‘Come on, old chap!’) to cut him a deal. Does the president — so imperialistically French in his demeanour that he makes Napoleon Bonaparte seem modest — look remotely likely to be charmed by a visit from Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? In a word, non.”

3. Kevin Maxwell in The Independent

on police institutional racism

Sorry Cressida Dick, but as a black former detective I know just how racist the Met still is

“In my decade of service, I saw entrenched prejudice, open racism and discrimination, but also the police’s lackadaisical response to race equality. In my 11 years on the force, I saw no real intention to stamp out racism and change the culture for the better, but only to suppress it.”

4. David Leonhardt in The New York Times

on the pitfalls of protest

Patriotism Done Right

“When progressive protesters reject American symbols, I think they’re making a tactical mistake. For one thing, they take attention away from their specific causes and turn attention toward the question of their patriotism. For another thing, protesting the anthem or the flag needlessly alienates people who otherwise could be won over by substantive arguments.”

5. MP Chris Bryant in The Guardian

on the latest British Social Attitudes survey

I’ve seen British attitudes to gay people change. But the battle is not yet won

“Progress is never a one-way street. Some of us look at the increase in hate crimes, the homophobic demands to stop teachers referring to homosexuality in schools, the increasing violence in Russia and elsewhere as signs that the battle is not yet won. Gay youngsters still face abuse. Shame still forces many to self-harm or take their own lives. And as long as that continues we’ll still need to sing the tender ballads.”

The first major legal challenge to the use of automated facial recognition (AFR) surveillance by British police begins this week.

Human rights group Liberty has launched a case against South Wales Police, the UK force which has pioneered AFR capable of mapping faces and comparing them to a database in real time.

Supporters claim facial recognition technology “will boost the safety of citizens and could help police catch criminals and potential terrorists”, reports The Daily Telegraph. But critics have labelled it “Orwellian” and say police have not been “transparent” about how they will use the data.

What's the case about?

The case has been brought by Ed Bridges, an employee at Cardiff University and former Lib Dem councillor, who claims that police scanned his face twice while he was out shopping in the Welsh capital.

Ahead of the hearing at Cardiff Administrative Court, Bridges said: “The police are supposed to protect us and make us feel safe but the technology is intimidating and intrusive.”

AFR technology “is a far more powerful policing tool than traditional CCTV - as the cameras take a biometric map, creating a numerical code of the faces of each person who passes the camera”, says the BBC.

The numerical code has similar properties to DNA or fingerprints but unlike these two markers, “there is no specific regulation governing how police use facial recognition or manage the data gathered”, the broadcaster reports.

Liberty says that even if there were regulations, the technology is too intrusive and should not be used for policing.

But Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, argues: “If there are hundreds of people walking the streets who should be in prison because there are outstanding warrants for their arrest, or dangerous criminals bent on harming others in public places, the proper use of AFR has a vital policing role. The police need guidance to ensure this vital anti-crime tool is used lawfully.”

What are the problems with AFR?

Facial recognition has attracted criticism from researchers and privacy advocates across the world, amid reports that authorities have been using the technology to track millions of Muslims in northwest China, as well as fears about race- and gender-related software failings.

And as GeekWire notes, “the face is such a big part of a person’s public identity”, which raises privacy issues.

Earlier this month, San Francisco became the first US city to ban the use of the technology for law enforcement purposes, over fears about its reliability and infringements of citizens’ liberties. In particular, the city’s municipal board highlighted concerns that face ID technology can exhibit racial bias.

Commercial face recognition software has repeatedly been shown to be “less accurate” about people with darker skin, and civil rights advocates claim that face-scanning can be used in “disturbingly targeted” ways, reports Gizmodo.

A recent example involved Amazon and its new technology Rekognition. The facial recognition tool, which Amazon sells to web developers, wrongly identified 28 members of the US Congress – of whom a disproportionate number were people of colour – as police suspects from mugshots, reports Reuters.

Why do these problems occur?

The reason for the racial false positives seems to be “not that the machines are inherently set against anyone, but that the people who are, in essence, teaching the programmes to identify features aren’t providing them with a diverse sample in the first place”, says USA Today.

A recent report on the technology by experts at Washington D.C.’s Georgetown Law school warns: “It doesn’t matter how good the machine is if it is still being fed the wrong figures – the wrong answers are still likely to come out.”

Gizmodo says that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers believe solving the problem will require “hard limits” on how and when face-scanning can be used, in order to protect vulnerable communities. Even then, they warn, face recognition will be “impossible without addressing racism in the criminal justice system it will inevitably be used in”.

In the UK, the Metropolitan Police is deciding whether to roll out the technology on a wider scale following a two-year trial. However, the BBC reports that “at least three chances to assess how well the systems dealt with ethnicity had been missed by police over five years”.

Will the technology improve?

Though not yet perfect, accuracy rates are as high as 99.98% thanks to machine learning and improved neural networks, according to Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. “That is a stunning advancement,” she told USA Today.

And facial recognition could be just the beginning. “There’s actually a whole bunch of other things that have similar properties to facial recognition that are equally pernicious, but don’t generate the same visceral reaction,” Cornell University information scientist Solon Barocas told GeekWire.

Margaret Mitchell, a senior scientist at Google Research and Machine Intelligence, added that these could include analysing a person’s walking gait, or the cadence of a person’s speech. “Machine learning is going to discover a whole bunch of new ways,” Barocas said.

The fatal stabbing of 15-year-old boy in southeast London on Thursday has fuelled fears about rising knife crime in the English capital.

The victim, named locally as Jai Sewell and described by neighbours as a “sweet boy”, was stabbed at a chicken shop in Bellingham, in Lewisham borough. Emergency services were called to the scene at 5:20pm and he was taken to hospital, where he later died.

The BBC reports that following the killing, a “Section 60 order” has been authorised in Lewisham between 12pm and 3am on Saturday. The act allows police officers to stop and search people without suspicion.

A local resident told the broadcaster that he believed young people “were turning to knife crime out of fear”.

“They are looking for the closest object to use to defend themselves. They’re scared,” said the man, who was not named.

Figures released last month by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that in the 12 months to June 2018, police recorded a total of 14,987 knife crimes - representing a 15% year-on-year rise.

The latest total included 91 fatal stabbings and 170 rapes or sexual assaults using a blade.

Rebecca Lawrence, chief executive of the London Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime (Mopac), says that some teenagers were undergoing “emotional desensitisation” because of the number of murders in their areas, The Independent reports.

That fear is shared by Temi Mwale, the founding director of social enterprise The 4Front Project. “Over the last 20 years, there has not been adequate support for young people impacted by violence,” she told Al Jazeera. “Why that is so significant is because it has created violent environments where violence is ingrained, where we've got a culture of desensitisation.

“If your friend is stabbed and killed, there is no support available to help you come to terms with the loss.”

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick says the force is on track to ensure that violent crime in London decreases “considerably” over the next year.

“We must focus on violent crime and in London and I’m glad to say the figures have stopped going up and up, as they have in the last three years,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

But according to the London Evening Standard, Thursday’s stabbing is the 116th murder recorded in the capital this year - the same as the total for the whole of 2017.

Writing in The Guardian, Mwale says that “the only way to radically reduce violence over the next few years is to invest in a long-term approach”, pointing to an initiative known as the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in Glasgow. The unit treats knife crime as a public health crisis, and uses health, education and social work to tackle the issue.

According to VRU statistics, murder rates in Glasgow fell by 47% between 2007-08 and 2016-17, and no one under the age of 20 was killed with a knife in 2016-17. The scheme has attracted the attention of London police branches, with Cressida Dick visiting its co-founders Karyn McCluskey and John Carnochan earlier this year. In September, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced the launch of a London-based VRU.

Scotland Yard is facing its biggest police corruption inquiry in 40 years, after it was revealed 14 officers working in the Met’s elite anti-corruption unit are under investigation for malpractice.

In a hugely damaging development, the police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), has confirmed it is investigating allegations of “serious corruption and malpractice” in Scotland Yard.

The Sun reports that three Metropolitan Police whistleblowers have accused the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) of shielding officers who were accused of assault, racism, child abuse and grooming.

The Met is Britain’s biggest police force and the DPS, the subject of BBC drama Line of Duty, is supposed to guard against lapses in the force’s ethics, integrity and standards.

IOPC said one of the most senior police chiefs in the country is also under investigation for malpractice for improperly interfering in an investigation into bullying.

Jonathan Green, the IOPC's London director, said: “The investigation includes alleged interference in, and curtailment of, investigations by potentially conflicted senior officers, failure to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, systemic removal of the restrictions of officers under investigation and racial discrimination”.

“As part of this investigation three officers have been served with gross misconduct notices and one of those officers is also under criminal investigation. Assessments on the status of a number of other officers remains ongoing” he added.

News of the investigation was not made public through an announcement by either the IOPC or the Met, but was first reported by The Sunday Times.

Tougher police tactics against criminal moped riders have significantly reduced the number of smash-and-grab crimes committed in London, but also pushed criminal gangs into the suburbs, new data suggests.

How common are moped attacks?

Moped crime has posed a growing threat in UK cities in recent years, with the number of offences in London alone rising from 827 in 2012 to more than 23,000 in 2017.

Comedian Michael McIntyre, finance pundit Martin Lewis and even Home Secretary Sajid Javid are among recent high-profile victims of moped-riding thieves.

Easy-to-steal scooters and the growing market for stolen mobile phones have been cited as two factors behind the crime wave.

What is the police response?

The surge in moped-related crime prompted the Metropolitan Police to adopt more aggressive tactics. “These include providing officers with a special marking spray to fire at suspects, using remote-controlled spikes to burst the tyres of bikes, and using police cars to knock suspects off their bikes,” says The Guardian.

While Prime Minister Theresa May has backed the ramming tactic, it appears to be legally dubious, with one officer potentially facing criminal charges after knocking a teenager off a moped last year, reports the BBC.

Nevertheless, Scotland Yard has recorded a 36% fall in moped-enabled crime in the past year. This has seen the number of snatch thefts, knifepoint muggings, acid attacks and smash-and-grab raids, fall to 12,419 in the twelve months to October.

“But as the crime has almost vanished in some boroughs, others on the outskirts of the city have experienced increases of more than 700%,” data obtained by The Times suggests.

While central London boroughs such as Islington, Hackney and Westminster have recorded a drastic drop in moped crime, in suburban areas, such as Harrow and Brent, incidents have quadrupled. It has also seen an increase in incidents recorded outside of London in cities such as Manchester and Birmingham.

Ramped-up police tactics may have led to a dramatic fall in the number of crimes committed, but they have only led to a 1% increase in the proportion of cases that led to a charge or court summons.

What can the public do?

David Videcette, a former Metropolitan Police counter-terror detective, took to Twitter this summer to offer tips on how to avoid becoming a victim.

“Vary your routine,” he writes. “Plan ahead. Not planning for these sorts of events is why we become easy targets. Different routes to and from home are a good idea. Are you being watched/followed?”

If you do become a victim, or a witness, to a moped offence, Videcette recommends looking out for distinguishing features on the mugger or moped. “We want to see makes of clothing. The attackers eyes. Distinctive marks or features on the moped, scratches, so we can link to the scene,” Videcette advises.

This has been made easier by the police decision to use a marking spray to help them to identify culprits at a later stage. This appears to have paid off, as cases where no suspect is identified have fallen from 92% to 82% in the past year.

Kirsty Henderson, director of Personal Safety London, which provides self-defence training, has also shared her tips.

Her main piece of advice is not to listen to music or use phones when on the move. “It means you are in a bubble,” she told the BBC.

Henderson recommends popping into a shop or cafe to take calls and check messages.

Scotland Yard has also advised people to use hands-free devices and to stick to well-lit streets at night.

Comedian Michael McIntyre was robbed by moped-riding criminals yesterday while collecting his children from school.

The 42-year-old TV personality was waiting in his car near the school, in Golder’s Green, north London, when the windows of the black Range Rover were smashed and he was reportedly forced to hand over his Rolex watch.

According to The Sun, McIntyre’s agent confirmed: “Michael was involved in an incident involving armed robbers. He is absolutely fine and helping police with their inquiries.”

The Metropolitan Police appealed for witnesses, adding: “The victim was stationary in his car when two males on a moped smashed the car windows with a hammer before stealing property. No injuries were reported. No arrests have been made. Enquiries continue.”

The incident is the latest in a spate of moped-related crime. Last year the Met reported that “gangs of youths were using stolen scooters, mopeds, motorcycles and bikes to commit tens of thousands of snatch offences across London”, says the London Evening Standard.

Research by Catch 22, a charity that works with former gang members, has found that moped criminals can make as much as £300 in a matter of minutes.

“People we’ve spoken to see this as almost a victimless crime and they don’t believe the police care about it,” Catch 22 director Beth Murray told The Guardian. “It’s done by 14- or 15-year-olds who are proving themselves. They stick to their own patch because they know the streets, or they’ll go to the West End (of London), because there will be more tourists and richer people with better phones.”

Why the sudden rise in moped crime?

There are a number of reasons for the increase in these types of crimes, argues James Treadwell, a professor in criminology at Staffordshire University, in an article on The Conversation. “While the [mobile phone] industry did much to stop the theft of phone handsets a few years ago, demand for parts such as screens and batteries has made phones worth stealing again,” he writes.

Scooters and mopeds “often have woefully bad security”, making them “easy pickings for determined offenders”, Treadwell adds.

“What’s really changed is the method,” says Superintendent Mark Payne, who runs Operation Venice, the Met’s response to moped, scooter and motorcycle crime.

“In the past it was done on foot or with bicycles. What they [thieves] have caught on to is that mopeds and scooters are just really easy to steal,” Payne told The Guardian.

The Met’s budget has also fallen by 20% in real terms since 2010, and the force is facing further cuts, “a situation that Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has blamed for a recent rise in violent crime, after years of falling offences”, says the Financial Times.

What are the statistics?

In Liverpool, Manchester and other northern towns, police teams have been struggling to combat the use of off-road bikes linked to anti-social behaviour, shootings and drug dealing.

But London remains the epicentre of the crime wave, with “moped crimes ranging from bike thefts, mobile phone snatches, acid attacks and violent attacks on stores and cafes, often involving hammers, knives, and other weapons”, says the i newspaper. “In 2015 the Metropolitan Police logged 4,647 such crimes, but in the year from June 2016 to 2017, they recorded a staggering 16,158 crimes.”

What’s being done to combat the crimewave?

Met police are focusing on a two-pronged solution to the problem.

One is making mopeds harder to steal. “Like bicycles, cheap mopeds need to be chained to steel posts,” says The Guardian, a point that the Met has been emphasising in its “Be Safe” campaign.

Meanwhile, the Government has introduced new legislation designed to give police pursuit drivers more legal protection if they are involved in a crash.

The new proposals “aim to smash the ‘myth’ that officers cannot pursue riders who are not wearing helmets”, reports the BBC.

“Criminals must not think they can get away with a crime by riding or driving in a certain way,” Minister for Policing Nick Hurd said.

New technological policing aids are also being trialled, with tablet computers being used by officers on the beat to predict where moped crime will happen, “based on records of previous crime spots, and the times of offences”, says the Financial Times.

The National Crime Agency is considerating launching a new investigation into the Stephen Lawrence case, 25 years after the teenager was stabbed to death, according to media reports.

Lawrence, 18, was attacked by at least five white youths in Eltham, southeast London, on 22 April 1993, in what has become one of the most high-profile racially motivated killings in the UK. It wasn’t until 2012 that two members of the gang were convicted for their part in the murder.

According to The Guardian, the NCA is considering a new criminal inquiry focusing on the police officers in charge of the first investigation into the killing. The probe would potentially place “four former detectives under criminal investigation for the offence of misconduct in public office”.

The crime enforcement agency reportedly wants to investigate why the Metropolitan Police bosses failed to make any arrests in the two weeks following the stabbing, despite being given the names of suspects.

The officers involved have now “retired from policing and have always denied any wrongdoing”, says The Guardian.

The newspaper adds that the NCA “does not believe it has evidence to suggest the four officers acted corruptly”.

There have been multiple reviews and inquiries into the case, including a 1999 report chaired by Sir William Macpherson that was highly critical of the Met Police.

Reports of the potential new inquiry emerged as Lawrence’s father, Neville, announced that he has chosen to forgive his son’s killers. Making the decision had been “one of the hardest things” he has ever done, he said. “The fact that I had to lose my first child has been devastating. I can’t begin to explain the pain and the anguish me and my family have suffered over the past 25 years.”

But he added: “When these boys killed my son Stephen, they created a legend. In his death, Stephen is a legend.

“There is debate about racism, there are organisations set up to help to make people understand about racism, the police have been put under the spotlight because of Stephen’s death.”

David Norris and Gary Dobson are currently serving life sentences for their roles in the murder.