The point of that most clichéd and abused of policing metaphors, the ‘bad apple’, is not to dismiss the ‘one-off’ bad cop for unfairly tarnishing the reputation of the force, but to highlight the risk of the rotten few corrupting the entire barrel.
Louise Casey’s report—commissioned in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder—into Britain’s largest police force is commendably clear. ‘If a plane fell out of the sky tomorrow, a whole industry would stop and ask itself why,’ reflects Baroness Casey. By contrast, she writes, the Met prefers to ‘pretend that their own perpetrators of unconscionable crimes were just “bad apples”, or not police officers at all. So… I have asked myself time and again, if these crimes cannot prompt that self-reflection and reform, then what will it take?’
Broken trust
To offer a single snapshot from her 363-page report, one in
