A Case for Scotland Yard

The police are stumped until the hero, a maverick cop too busy with original thoughts to iron his clothes, tricks the perpetrator into a tearful confession. As the credits on the TV cop drama roll, three real-life constables, busy devouring the detective series along with their cheese-and-pickle sandwiches in the station canteen, discuss the denouement. Real policing isn't like that, they say. It's messier — and more dramatic. Their boss, Hackney Borough Commander Steve Dann, agrees. That's why he "can't bear to watch police shows," he says. "They drive me mad."

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Bobbies on the Beat

Sorting reality from myth may be particularly difficult when it comes to the Metropolitan Police Service. Most Londoners simply call it the Met, but around the world it's better known as "Scotland Yard" after the location of its original HQ. It's the world's most famous brand name in policing and — despite mounting travails — the most respected. Met detectives are the global go-to guys for anyone wanting assistance with politically charged investigations (Benazir Bhutto's assassination), forensics (the Asian tsunami's aftermath), or sensitive operations such as kidnappings. There are now Met liaison officers stationed in 16 countries.

Since its founding in 1829 by Home Secretary Robert Peel (two slang terms for cops — "bobbies" and "peelers" — derive from his name), the Met has provided the model for city forces around the globe. It pioneered fingerprint technology and DNA evidence, and its experience in combatting terrorism stretches back to the campaigns waged by the IRA and the Angry Brigade — a tiny gang that went on a bombing spree in the early '70s. Even the criminal classes seem to have a grudging respect for the Met. Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner since 2005, recalls a 1980s research trip to San Francisco when he joined his U.S. counterparts in an interrogation room as they prepared to question a suspected rapist: "I identified myself and the chap's reaction was, 'What on earth do you think I've done? I haven't done anything that serious to have Scotland Yard here.' "

Though alarmist headlines might suggest otherwise, recent statistics show that the Met has been living up to its international reputation. Across Britain's capital, crime is down by a total of 19% over the past four years, with sanction detections — where an offender has not only been caught but charged as well — up from 12.7% to 25.4% in the same period. "No one in Europe is better," says a senior Italian law-enforcement official.

At home, though, the Met's reputation has been taking some serious knocks. Most immediately, there's a real and disturbing rise in knife crime, especially among London's young. Last year, 27 London teenagers were murdered, many of them by fellow teens. This year the teen death toll from violence has already hit 21. The sense of danger on the streets comes at the same time as Commissioner Blair faces questions about his conduct. On July 20, he awoke to news reports about a Scotland Yard contract awarded to a technology company helmed by one of his friends. Blair said in a statement that he has behaved with "absolute probity," but he now faces an independent inquiry.

This isn't the first media firestorm to provoke speculation about whether the controversial Commissioner may be forced out of his job before his contract expires in 2010. In July 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian living in London, was mistaken by police marksmen for a suicide bomber and shot to death at Stockwell Underground station. The tragic bungle came 15 days after terror attacks in the capital killed 52 people and the morning after a second, failed bombing attempt. The shooting has already been the subject of two reports by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which found some fault with the handling of the original operation and the response to it among top brass. A separate investigation concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge individual officers, but prosecutors launched a case against the Met for breaching health and safety laws. A court later found the Met guilty and levied a fine of more than $350,000, plus costs of $770,000. An inquest into the shooting is scheduled to begin in September.

The case highlights the intense pressure the constant threat of terrorism places on the Met, which leads all counterterrorism investigations in Britain as well as those affecting British nationals abroad. A New York Police Department (NYPD) official who has worked closely with the Met says the scale of London's counterterrorism operation is striking: "The numbers there are just overwhelming — just an astounding number of people they're trying to keep track of." It's not just that his London counterparts have more practice in counterterrorism operations, says Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing, Commanding Officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's Counter Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau; they also "have more of a problem."

"The Met is absolutely brilliant at the big set pieces" like the London bombings of July 7, 2005, says Brian Paddick, a former senior police officer who ran for London mayor earlier this year and is known for his sharp criticism of his former employers. But the police are less successful at securing public trust — the basis of policing by consent. Londoners feel that nobody has been held properly to account, says Paddick: "If you can't trust the police in times of crisis, then who can you turn to?"

All Things to All Men
Blair says the Met has learned the lessons of Stockwell. But a former counterterrorism investigator from France suggests it has not addressed its structural problems. "The Metropolitan Police has always struck me as iconic of English society," the French investigator says. "It merges absolute professionalism, discipline and hard, careful work with a kind of organization that creates disorganization. Services aren't sufficiently interconnected."

That may be inevitable in any such large organization. With some 31,500 officers, 14,000 administrators and more than 4,000 police community service officers serving a population of 7.5 million, the Met has never been bigger — a factor Blair says has been pivotal in achieving the recent reductions in crime. Its nearest equivalent, the NYPD, has some 38,000 officers to police New York City's population of 8.2 million. The numbers are close, but Blair says his officers have to do more and cover more ground than their American colleagues: "Our disadvantage is that we've got twice the geographic area and we've got some other functions as well . . . We're a combination of the NYPD and part of the U.S. secret service and part of the FBI."

While terrorism attracts most attention, the Met is also responsible for more routine police work, much of which is handled by 32 borough forces. These include Borough Commander Dann's 700 officers in Hackney, a northeast London area of such economic, cultural and ethnic diversity that it throws up just about all the challenges big-city police are ever likely to face: murders, street and domestic violence, burglaries, drugs, teenage gangs and immigrant populations reliving distant conflicts on Britain's streets. Hackney police are distributed across several stations and, as Dann explains with the help of a complex diagram, into different "business groups" and areas of expertise, divided again into uniformed and nonuniformed officers. "It sometimes can be detrimental to some of our responses when we work within these portfolios," says Dann. "Terrorists are actually engaged in serious criminality as well. So there is that crossover that takes place and there's often debate around which unit is responsible." It's also hard to set priorities. Former cop Paddick observes: "The police need to remain focused on what they're supposed to be there for, which is about making London safer."

Red-Tape Blues
It doesn't help that police morale is low countrywide after the government imposed a below-inflation pay deal on them; in May, officers voted to lobby the government for the right to strike, an entitlement they lost in 1919. They also complain that targets set by politicians encourage a statistics-driven culture in which minor offenses are followed up to inflate detection rates. Every incident, no matter how trivial, enmeshes cops in red tape when they could be out on the beat.

In London, those woes have been compounded by a series of squabbles and scandals. The Met's Assistant Commissioner, Andy Hayman, resigned last December after press stories about his expenses and his friendship with a member of the IPCC during the Stockwell investigation, all of which Hayman dismissed in a statement as "leaks and unfounded accusations."

Now the Met's most senior Asian officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, responsible for security for the 2012 Olympics, is in mediation with the Met over what he characterizes as racial discrimination; if these talks fail, he has threatened to take his employers to a tribunal. In a 2007 autobiography, Not One of Us, Ali Dizaei, a high-flying Iranian-born policeman who was the subject of a 
 $6 million corruption investigation by the Met and was eventually exonerated and reinstated, depicts a force that still falls far short of its own pledge to end the "institutional racism" uncovered by an inquiry into the failed investigation of the 1993 murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.

"Twenty per cent of [our] last academy class was foreign-born," says the NYPD official. "Scotland Yard is pretty much still lily white. They have a different reputation within the population as a result." In Hackney, where about 20% of the population is black and there are large Asian and Turkish communities, only 11% of officers come from ethnic minorities. That's better than the Met as a whole, where minorities account for just 8.3% of police. But, says Dann, "we have independent advisers who are community representatives: Jewish, Turkish, black, faith, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender."

The Met will need all of that knowledge, and more, to fix deep-rooted societal problems such as knife crime — which involves a disproportionate number of black kids, among both victims and perpetrators. Ultimately, the phenomenon is linked to poverty and social breakdown. "Policing is like being on a river bank next to a fast-flowing stream," says Blair. "You have the choice of pulling them out of the water or going upstream to find out who's throwing them in. There's a lot of debate about where is the limit of the police mandate, because we could go very far upstream."

Hackney and the rest of the Met have already paddled quite far upstream by pouring additional resources into community policing. "They call us 'tea drinkers,' " says Police Sergeant Andy Port, on patrol with Police Constable Pete Ward in one of the rougher reaches of Hackney. The nickname refers to the amount of time officers working for the Met's Safer Neighborhood Teams spend chatting with locals over cups of tea.

The tea drinkers are symbols of the Met's impressive breadth. The pace of their work is more sedate than the high-octane life of colleagues in rapid-response units or on big investigations. Still, the job has its excitements. Today, Port and Ward find a stash of heroin and crack cocaine in an old shoe on a ledge above the elevator in a tenement block. Next stop is a friendly call at a café called Cyber Juices. The proprietress welcomes the cops. "Whatever you're doing, you're doing a good job," she says. "I have to give you props for that." Such enthusiasm routinely greets emissaries of Scotland Yard when they travel abroad. The question that will preoccupy Blair during his remaining time at the Met is how to rekindle enthusiasm for the organization on its home turf — and within its own ranks.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley and Jeff Israely/Paris and Amanda Ripley/Washington