1k Met Police officers suspended or on restricted duties | Hacker News Reader

1k Met Police officers suspended or on restricted duties

bbc.co.uk

This person is actually quite optimistic: "This is going to take one, two or more years to root out those who are corrupt," he said.

Also being an optimist I wish that everyone accepted that "bad apples" are going to appear in any organisation and that weeding them out is a required part of the governance.

Priests, Police, Teachers, Politicians, Lawyers, Priests, IT Developers, Managers, Doctors, Priests... clear, quick processes are needed in all of these areas to safeguard both victims and alleged miscreants.

Don't forget Priests.

It's definitely good that they're realistic about it, it at least gives a sense that they're taking it seriously, as opposed to having a couple of scapegoats and calling "job done, we're good now, you owe us your trust again".

As I get older, I've found this to be true for a number of things: "don't worry, it's only for the rest of your life".

This should be a permanent effort.

Precisely. It never "roots out". Use and subsequent abuse of power is a fundamental human trait. All we can do to rectify it is to put systems and bodies of people in place to punish infractions that harm both the institution and society and, where possible and reasonable, prevent the people who might abuse said power from entry into the organizations in the first place.

> Use and subsequent abuse of power is a fundamental human trait.

yes, and worse: people who want physical power over others will seek out lines of work where they can do this. A police force will never be free of the concern that it is attractive to abusers. It will have to be managed always.

Maybe this abuse of power falls under the umbrella of corruption but IMHO it's a very different thing to "corrupt" practices such as e.g. taking a bribe, or giving the mayor's son a free pass for speeding. Calling these abusers "corrupt officers" seems disingenuous.

I suspect there is a bit of a tipping point effect though. If only 0.1% of your profession is an abuser of power, then those around them will react when they see them do it. If 10% are, it's normalised, and people will let it slide. So as you make progress with the rooting out, there comes a point where it gets easier to keep it clean after.

> one, two or more years

Are you sure it's not just dry British understatement?

> Are you sure it's not just dry British understatement?

From TFA:

> The Met's Stuart Cundy said ... Speaking to reporters at New Scotland Yard, Mr Cundy said there were plans to hold around 30 misconduct hearings and 30 gross incompetence hearings each month ... This is going to take one, two or more years

If I can try to translate from English Establishment:

"Look we know that the London Met Police's reputation, while never good as such, has recently nosedived to the extent that we simply cannot get away without being seen to do something about it. So we're going to be seen to do this, and we'll continue to be seen to do it for a year or so. That should get use though this crisis.

What's that? Stop the Met from being institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic? Lol, not possible and not of interest to us. If we get most of the ones who have rape and murder as hobbies that's good enough."

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance" - John Philpot Curran (often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, at least according to https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers... )

It's hard to process, but the senior police officer was quoted a few months back as saying "give me the powers to get rid of dirty cops".

It's not clear if 1/34 cops are "corrupt", or what the current senior officers think means corrupt, or just useless.

But it's pretty certain that large scale drug money is going to have had some impact.

In the main, the publicity has been around racism, mysogeny and thiose who cover up such behaviour. I haven't heard much about financial/drug-related corruption

Fair enough - it's hard to parse "corrupt" however.

A cop taking bribes from criminals to look the other way is a threat to other officers.

A cop using his position to sexually abuse vulnerable women in a not a (direct) threat to his fellow officers. But is of course indirectly as the trust eventually goes.

> The force has also checked all officers against records on the police national computer, uncovering 11 cases which were subject to further assessment and five which are now gross misconduct investigations.

Well I would have thought that was part of the hiring process, but better late than never?

Massive reductions in the number of police support staff was a part of the coalition government's austerity plan and the reduction in service quality in the police recruiting agency was a (positive!) case study in a degree I did in organisational management.

With anti-corruption purges, I always wonder how much it gets used as a pretext for getting rid of people they don't like for more political reasons. I never had a high opinion of the Met Police, but even I don't think there are 1000 David Carricks.

one of my muslim colleagues in london was just sanctioned with something called a "non crime hate incident" by the met police. I wonder if the officers involved will be sacked as a result of this larger investigation

Finally, someone is cleaning up their police department.

If this was in the USA, I would move there and lend my support.

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Going into a tangent here, do you think that the topic of police corruption is inherently political ? That would be a very political point of view...

I have no clue of it being a political issue in this particular instance. I would categorize it under Crime than Politics from the first paragraph I read. From the comments I can see that this would interest some on HN but IMHO this is too regional. If the purpose of HN is to find "Anything that good hackers would find interesting", this does not fit the bill. Answering generally, the topic of police corruption being inherently political or not, isn't it too wide to speculate? Police forces and LEAs are established at multiple levels like City, State/Province, Nationwide. There are factors driving Police corruption from collective psyche of the population they are suppose to serve to the individual choices; from systemic endorsements to ancient traditions, how can one generalize in the scope of the entire World?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com