The long arm of police corruption

Are all institutions basically corrupt? If company directors snaffle pencils from the stationery cupboard for their own use, are they corrupt? Is there a sliding scale of corruption, from ‘whatever’, through to ‘well I wouldn’t do it myself’, all the way to ‘summon the rozzers’? And does it matter what the organisation is? Is it worse to steal from your employer if you work for Nestlé or for Oxfam? Are some small corruptions are basically all right?

Of course if we accept the small corruptions, the bigger ones creep in at the edges. And once they’ve entered an organisation’s culture, it is well nigh impossible to root them out. In essence, Tom Harper’s book is a thoroughly depressing account of the Metropolitan Police’s corruptibility. It’s an organisation that matters, whether you like it or not, and one whose employees have at various stages passed beyond pilfering the store cupboard to turning a blind eye to murder, actively assisting violent criminals and stealing many thousands of pounds of public money.

There’s a peculiarly British sort of corruption that explains all kinds of odd things: the Libor exchange rate, hedge funds and of course the extraordinary number of old Etonians in public life.