The police have used a ‘wokescreen’ to cover their racism and misogyny

Where to start, with a police force where decent behaviour seems to be the exception rather than the norm? 

For a quarter of a century since the murder of Stephen Lawrence caused the Macpherson report to call the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ we’ve been comforting ourselves – in the manner of frightened children humming in the dark – with the Few Bad Apples theory. It’s just so silly to say that. There are bad apples in all professions, but a milkman doesn’t have the right to arrest people and strip-search them, last time I checked. As Doreen Lawrence said, ‘It is not, and has never been, a case of a few ‘bad apples’ within the Metropolitan police. It is rotten to the core.’

Is it a Met thing? I remember striking miners would talk about hating the Met much more than any other force, because they were the bully boys who’d be sent in to break up pickets when the local police had turned out not to be brutal enough.