Can Mark Rowley successfully reform the Met Police?

The awful news that two police officers were stabbed in London this morning is an example of the challenges facing the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley. As I say in the Times today, he must deal with low morale in the Met, a lack of public confidence in the force and a rising sense of lawlessness.

David Spencer, a former Met officer who is now at Policy Exchange, has written an interesting report on what Rowley can do to turn things around. Its main argument is that the attempt by the Met to create a ‘strategic centre’ has failed and it needs to return to neighbourhood policing as the most effective way of cutting crime and restoring public confidence. Until four years ago, all 32 London boroughs had a chief superintendent in charge of local policing. But since 2018 these chief superintendents are in charge of huge swathes of territory made up of between two and four boroughs.

For example, one of these new basic command units covers Harrow, Barnet and Brent — almost a million people. Another deals with Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham, which together have a population larger than Liverpool’s.

But as the area covered by superintendents expanded, their discretion over how to police their patches contracted. This change has coincided with an 18-point drop in the number of Londoners saying the police do a good job in their area.

The obvious answer is to restore the old 32-borough model. Chief superintendents should be encouraged to make their own decisions about what would work best in their area. London is hardly a city suited to a one-size-fits-all model of policing. The career prospects of officers should be measured against how effective they are at both tackling crime and restoring public confidence in the force.

A more localised approach should concentrate the Met’s efforts on the crimes that bother people most. This should mean a crackdown on anti-social behaviour and other forms of crime often dismissed as low-level. The Met currently records almost no offences when anti-social behaviour is reported, so risks being institutionally blind to the activities that make life miserable for many.