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Finito World
It was Sir Robert Peel, the founding father of modern British policing, who once said: “The police are the public and the public are the police.” His vision, born in 1829, was of a force rooted in local communities, with legitimacy drawn not from state power, but from the consent of the public. Nearly two centuries on, it is hard to imagine that Peel could have foreseen the scenes revealed this week.
The footage captured by BBC Panorama is horrifying: a toxic clique of officers inside the Metropolitan Police expressing casual racism, misogyny, and violent fantasies, all behind the thin blue line. It’s easy to understand the public fury and political pressure now mounting. But it’s also important to ask what comes next — and whether the entire force deserves to be tarred by the reprehensible actions of a few.
Because for every “ghastly individual” now suspended, as Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley put it, there are thousands of officers doing honest, dangerous, and essential work. One former sergeant told 5Live of the camaraderie and diversity he saw in the force, while another serving officer described feeling “ashamed” by the scandal, even though he had never witnessed such behaviour himself. These are not men and women looking the other way; they are grappling with how the actions of a few can demoralise the many.
The problem is not just bad apples — it’s the barrel they’re in. Institutional cultures, like any ecosystem, can turn rotten if left unchecked. Rowley is right to say the Met is in the middle of “the biggest counter-corruption initiative in policing history,” having removed nearly 1,500 officers over the last few years. But the scale of the task only proves how far the institution has drifted from its Peelian roots.
Part of the issue lies in scale. The Met is the largest police force in the country, with more than 30,000 officers and sprawling responsibilities across London. The distance — physical and cultural — between officers and the communities they serve can breed mistrust and alienation. The answer may not be endless restructuring or public relations campaigns, but something more radical: a meaningful return to neighbourhood policing.
That means more officers walking the beat in communities they know, and who know them. It means smaller, locally accountable forces — or at least divisions — where misconduct is harder to hide and trust is easier to build. It also means empowering whistleblowers with genuine protections, ensuring that the cost of calling out wrongdoing is never greater than the cost of staying silent.
Trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild. But it is not impossible. As Peel himself insisted, the measure of effective policing is not the number of arrests, but the absence of crime — and that cannot happen without public cooperation.
No reform will be easy, and none will be quick. But the alternative — a slow, corrosive loss of legitimacy — is far worse. It would be a tragedy if we allowed the actions of a few to overshadow the good work of so many. It would be a scandal if we did nothing to prevent it from happening again.
