Introduction

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

Yet even they were shocked by the way police responded when their home in Chislehurst, south-east London, was burgled in 2019. The couple were on their way back from a family holiday in Dubai when their childminder called to say the back door had been smashed in. The Eatons, who now run a vegan yoghurt business, asked a neighbour - a Met civilian employee - for help and she immediately called the police. It was at this point that the first signs of institutional inertia emerged, when the operator who answered the call replied: 'I'm sorry but you don't have an appointment, so officers will not be attending the scene today.'

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

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

The Eatons, who have two children, followed the advice they'd been given and waited for their former colleagues to attend. When no one arrived after forty-eight hours, they tried again and Paul placed a call to his former employer. The response was shocking: 'Oh yes, the lady who took the call has closed the case.' A civilian operator had decided to record the incident as 'no crime', a move that improperly boosted overall police statistics at the expense of the victim. By this stage, the Eatons were furious. They had clear CCTV footage identifying the offender, but when they persuaded a scenes-of-crime officer to call around, he refused to take it.

The Eatons' experience is sadly all too familiar for London's 8 million residents, and millions of others across the country. They have seen the capabilities of local forces undermined by a combination of budget cuts and a dangerous passivity that has been allowed to evolve among the boys and girls in blue. In 2015, Leicestershire Police even briefly launched a policy of refusing to attend attempted burglaries at houses with odd numbers, apparently in a bizarre attempt to cut costs.

We are living through an unprecedented crisis in British policing, with a devastating direct effect on the victims of almost 6 million crimes that occur in England and Wales each year.1 The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics make grim reading. Before the unprecedented Covid lockdowns skewed crime rates, a national rise in murders and manslaughters in 20202 was mainly driven by a 28 per cent rise in offences in London (67 to 86).3 The number of knife crimes in England and Wales also rose to a record high, partly driven by a 7 per cent rise in London. This was 51 per cent higher than when data of this kind was first collected in 2011 and was the highest number on record.

By contrast, the proportion of crimes in England and Wales that are solved has fallen to a record low. In the twelve months to the end of March 2020, just 7 per cent of offences led to a suspect being charged or ordered to appear in court. That compares with 8 per cent the previous year and 16 per cent in 2014/15.4

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

The measures were a response to historic government curbs on police spending that have been implemented since 2010. Scotland Yard was attempting to save £400 million by 2020, in addition to the £600 million the force had already lost from its £3.7 billion annual budget. But the flaws in the strategy were criticised on the day they were announced. Mick Neville, a former Met detective chief inspector, said:

This is justice dreamed up by bean counters in shiny suit land. No consideration is being given to victims. The new principles will focus police attention on easy crimes where there is a known suspect. Few professional criminals target people who know them, so the worst villains will evade justice. Not investigating high volume crimes like shoplifting with a loss of under £50 will give junkies a green light to thieve.5

Stephenson, who led Scotland Yard between 2009 and 2011, agrees. He told me: 'It is entirely legitimate to ask the Met to try and do more with less. However, the scale of the cuts to policing was simply foolhardy, and you didn't need hindsight to come to that judgement. We can see the consequences of it now.'

The crisis deepened in March 2020 when London was hit by the coronavirus pandemic. As the Met 'war-gamed' for potential mass sickness or a breakdown in law and order, I was passed documents that detailed its contingency plans. In the event that Scotland Yard's threadbare resources were overwhelmed, senior officers were considering pulling traditional bobbies off their beats and suspending all 'proactive' police operations, where officers investigate to prevent crimes and conspiracies before they take place. The worst-case scenario outlined in the documents was to respond only to incidents involving the potential loss of life. The once-mighty Met, the first modern police force and a model for much of the world's policing, would reduce its priorities to 'major, critical and emergency incidents, serious crime, firearms incidents, protecting vulnerable people, serious public order and fatal and serious road traffic collisions'.6

Scotland Yard was further embarrassed in July 2021 when thousands of intruders without tickets managed to break into Wembley Stadium during the final of the European men's football championships. With the world watching on, crowds of troublemakers, including known hooligans and gang members, forced their way into the stadium as England played its first major men's final since 1966. One yob was filmed putting a lit flare up his bottom outside Wembley and even managed to enter the stadium without a ticket.7 The father of England defender Harry Maguire was one of dozens of innocent spectators who were injured in the chaos. Ministers, London mayor Sadiq Khan, Wembley staff and the Football Association later blamed the Met for allowing public disorder and drunken and violent behaviour to develop outside the stadium in the hours before the high-profile game kicked off.8

Just before Mark Rowley was announced as the new commissioner in July 2022, Scotland Yard suffered the ignominy of being placed into special measures, a status applied by regulators of public services in the UK to providers who fall short of acceptable standards. The Met will now be subjected to increased monitoring and scrutiny. It is a measure commonly applied to failing schools and hospitals, not one of the world's most famous police forces.

Step by step, the Met has strayed from the nine principles laid down by its founder, Sir Robert Peel, and issued to every new police officer since 1829. The ninth of these is 'to recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them'. The new contingency plans meant that they would potentially have to ignore hundreds of thousands of serious offences such as robbery and fraud. Peel's promise would not have been kept.

The force is not only suffering from chronic under-funding. Barely a week goes by without the Met finding itself at the centre of a new crisis, lambasted by MPs and criticised in once-friendly newspapers. Scandal after scandal has buffeted the force. Many are linked to the abuse of power. Two of the most recent examples include Ben Hannam, a PC...