QotD: “The police have used a ‘wokescreen’ to cover their racism and misogyny”

Where to start, with a police force where decent behaviour seems to be the exception rather than the norm?

For a quarter of a century since the murder of Stephen Lawrence caused the Macpherson report to call the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ we’ve been comforting ourselves – in the manner of frightened children humming in the dark – with the Few Bad Apples theory. It’s just so silly to say that. There are bad apples in all professions, but a milkman doesn’t have the right to arrest people and strip-search them, last time I checked. As Doreen Lawrence said, ‘It is not, and has never been, a case of a few ‘bad apples’ within the Metropolitan police. It is rotten to the core.’

Is it a Met thing? I remember striking miners would talk about hating the Met much more than any other force, because they were the bully boys who’d be sent in to break up pickets when the local police had turned out not to be brutal enough. They were renowned for being the Hardest Bastard Coppers in the country, and a lot of them took a lot of pride in that, as with fans of Millwall Football Club.

So it seems inevitable that bullying would be endemic in their workplace. Once you’ve cut off a Sikh colleague’s beard and put a banana on the desk of a black colleague, once you’ve treated the people on your own team with such disrespect, a little light sexual assault of ‘civilians’ is nothing.

You can practise on your female colleagues first, as happened in the case of the female officer who reported abuse and rape from a colleague to no avail, concluding that if the same thing happened again ‘I wouldn’t report it to the police’. When an army conquers a city, mass rape inevitably happens.

A large minority of men at the Met – big enough to do damage to the whole culture – seemed to view sex with the women they were supposed to protect as a ‘reward’ for their supposed hard work in keeping society ‘safe’. What a piece of logic. To some it seemed like a project or a hobby; Met officer David Carrick committed 21 rapes over 17 years while Wayne Couzens, killer of Sarah Everard – the 15th woman killed by a policeman in 12 years – was affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ by his workmates at the Met. Not even 1 per cent of the 1,500 officers accused of violence against women have been sacked.

But it’s not just the Met – the rot has spread to police forces all across the nation. We became aware of this when the horrific scale of the grooming gangs was exposed, police sometimes arresting the girls themselves for ‘disorderly behaviour’ when they reported rape and torture. It’s telling that it was a woman, former detective Maggie Oliver, who became a whistleblower after resigning in disgust at the handling of the cases by the police force during the years when the grooming gangs had the pigs in their pockets.

A friend tells me:

When I worked in a police force in the Midlands, our DCI did all these little simpering speeches about diversity, while he and a rival DCI on the floor below laid bets as to who’d get me into bed first. There wasn’t a department in which this didn’t happen. The officer heading up Public Protection was demoted after sexual harassment. One of our murder squad DCIs had to leave and become a handyman because of the same stuff. Head of ballistics intel was basically Jimmy Saville with a degree. When I first joined that unit, I was warned not to go for a drink if he was about because he’d ‘rape you.’

All of this would be bad enough, but what lends a terrible situation an awful air of surrealism is that as police misogyny, racism and homophobia flourished, the police adopted ‘woke’ ways with enthusiasm.

In my book Welcome To The Woke Trials, I put forward the theory that wokeism is a reactionary, not a revolutionary, creed. The fact that the police seem to prefer taking the side of the males who score high in the victimhood olympics, be they mostly Muslim men torturing mostly white female children or men pretending to be women and boasting that they kill Terfs, shows how misogyny has shape-shifted, happily assisted by the ‘justice’ system.

When Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, told a police association conference that ‘sexist’ police were putting ‘male brotherhood’ above the protection of women and girls from sexual violence, she highlighted a frightening fact.

How can a police force be both reactionary and woke? Well, when you consider that woke is a secular theocracy with a strongly authoritarian bent, it’s not that difficult to pull off at all. It’s hard to know whether the same coppers waving rainbow flags at Pride had any cross-over with those bullying the young gay policeman who heartbreakingly said ‘This will sound quite laughable. I am scared of the police. I don’t trust my own organisation’ and how much the ‘wokescreen’ – virual-signalling in order to obscure evil-doing – was at work.

Of course there were corrupt police long before identity politics began choking the breath out of our civil life. But it’s interesting that the police have paid such lip service to #BEKIND while becoming ever more nastier.

On rape in particular, the Woke Bros and the PC PCs seem to agree; the first don’t believe that ‘carceral feminism’ (sending rapists to jail) is the answer and the Met’s conviction rate for rape is so low that an anonymous officer chillingly said ‘you may as well say it’s legal in London’.

It’s interesting that though the Met is named as sexist, racist and homophobic, it’s not called transphobic. The police in general have adopted the dubious claims of the trans lobby with astounding enthusiasm. Cynics used to advise women not to shout ‘RAPE!’ but ‘FIRE!’ if they needed assistance from the bobby on the beat. Today, I’d go with ‘MISGENDER!’ Is it coincidence that taking up the trans cause has given policemen a whole new way of harassing women?

What a mess it all is. We have to ask ourselves questions we thought we’d never have to. What are we paying the police for? To dress up in uniforms and drive fast? To do the Macarena with a bunch of obstructive crusties living off the public purse? All those antics with Extinction Rebellion make sense now: both protestors and police are a bunch of anti-social parasites who look down on the rest of us for playing by the rules.

What proportion of the police are fit for purpose? And how many have left the force in despair over the endemic corruption, like the officer who said that he had so little respect for his ‘laddish’ colleagues that he took the trouble to avoid them outside of the workplace. How do we begin to clean up this mess? We can’t even say ‘give the job to a woman’ because of two awful little words: ‘Cressida’ and ‘Dick’.

Andy Warhol once wrote that if you see a man dressed up as cowboy walking along a city street, be careful because he’s probably not your fantasy – but his own. The same could be said of the 21st century British police man.

Were we naive all those years, believing that with a very few exceptions men joined the police force because they wanted to make society better instead of worse? Or ever since Dixon of Dock Green was replaced by the bent coppers of GF Newman did the sort of boys who were bullies at school think ‘That looks like fun!’ What are the brutes in blue doing right now – running around destroying evidence? Looking with fear at the Good Cops among them for the first time, not so cocky now? Or, my guess, still sneering at the chumps who pay their wages because what are we going to do, abolish the police?

Julie Burchill