“Hidden culture” of misogyny and racism in the Met? The BBC hasn’t had its fucking eyes open

On 1 October, BBC Panorama released undercover reporting detailing racist and misogynistic attitudes within the Met Police.

Rory Bibb, the Panorama reporter, spent seven months in the custody suite of Charing Cross police station as a designated detention officer. In that time, Bibb recorded a vast array of truly heinous and discriminatory remarks and actions from the officers around him. His sterling work resulted in the suspensions of eight bigot cops and one other staff member.

‘Hidden culture in the Met’, BBC?

This article isn’t about that. ‘Met police are institutionally racist’ is painfully true, but it’s not news. This article is about the BBC’s framing of its Met Police investigation. It’s about how it chooses to pretend that bigotry isn’t woven into every aspect of the Met – and the police force at large, for that matter.

It ran with the headline:

Unmasked: Secret BBC filming exposes hidden culture of misogyny and racism inside Met Police

First and foremost, you’d have to have been living under a rock to believe that the Met’s discrimination was ever “hidden”. That rock would probably be located in Henley-on-Thames, have six-to-eight bedrooms, and be accompanied by a nice summer rock at the end of the garden.

What could hide this?

As a quick recap:

• In 1970, a group of Black activists – the “Mangrove nine” – were tried for inciting a riot. They were protesting against repeated police raids of the Mangrove, a popular Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill. The judge acquitted them of most of the charges; the case marked the first judicial acknowledgement of racism in the Met.
• In 1993, Black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in cold blood. Six years later, the Macpherson Inquiry deemed the Met institutionally racist for its failures in handling Stephen’s case. His mother is still looking for justice to this day.
• In 2005, Met police shot dead a Brazilian man named Jean Charles de Menezes. They claimed to have mistaken him for a terrorist. No officers were prosecuted for his murder.
• During the 2020 Coronavirus lockdowns, Met police were more than twice as likely to fine Black people compared to white people.
• In 2021, a police officer kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. The subsequent Casey Review deemed the Met institutionally racist, homophobic and misogynistic.
• In 2022, the police inspectorate placed the Met into special measures, which ended at the beginning of this year. Commissioner Mark Rowley stated that the force was making “massive progress”.

So, there’s your “hidden culture”, as detailed in two full-scale official reviews.

‘Driven underground’

The BBC article on the Met Police went on to state:

The evidence of misogyny and racism challenges the Met’s promise to have tackled what it calls “toxic behaviours” after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer.

Panorama’s secret filming shows officers making sexualised comments to colleagues and sharing racist views about immigrants and Muslims.

This evidence reveals that, far from being driven out of the Met, racist and misogynistic attitudes have been driven underground.

OK, so the BBC isn’t actually saying that we’re exposing something new. Rather, the new evidence contradicts the Met’s claims to have reformed. Ok, carry on. Except, that phrasing – “driven underground”. That’s not actually true, is it?

The Met’s bigotry has only been driven underground if you have the luxury of never having to deal with an officer whilst you yourself are marginalised in any way. Its discrimination can only be considered hidden if we automatically discount the Met’s victims as credible witnesses.

The fact that there’s nothing “underground” about Met discrimination is borne out by Bibb’s own evidence. The article states:

When a female DDO questioned a decision to release on bail a man alleged to have raped his girlfriend, she pointed out he had also been accused of kicking the pregnant woman in the stomach.

[…]

In January this year, while the BBC’s undercover reporter was working in the station, Sgt McIlvenny was told he was being investigated for inappropriate comments he had allegedly made to a woman in custody.

The girlfriend whose rapist the cops allowed out on bail knows that police misogyny hasn’t been driven underground. The woman who received sexualised comments from an office knows that women aren’t safe in police custody.

Commonplace brutality in the Met – but shock to the BBC

The article detailed multiple instances of officers boasting about brutalising suspects. To give two examples:

PC Martin Borg, who enthusiastically described how he saw another officer, Sgt Steve Stamp, stomp on a suspect’s leg. PC Borg laughed when he described how he had offered to make a statement saying the suspect had tried to kick the sergeant first. […]

One officer described how, if suspects refuse to have their fingerprints taken, he could pull two of their fingers hard to snap the tendons.

Anyone on the receiving end of police violence knows that the Met will happily violate any rule it can get away with.

The racist bile spewed by the officers frankly doesn’t bear repeating here. However, anyone sat in the pub whilst the cops were chatting about how they’re treat brown people in their custody knows that the only thing “underground” about the Met’s racism is the depths they’ll happily sink to.

The BBC chose to end its article with a quote (shown here with the article’s framing):

The former chief constable, Ms Fish, said: “I’ve seen enough to say there is a highly toxic culture there of hyper-sexualised male behaviour, misogyny, racism, and gratuitous, unlawful violence.”

She said the Met leadership had never grasped “the significance, the scale and impact” of this culture. “It’s always been a rotten apple, not a rotten barrel,” she said.

How many times do we have to write this same fucking article? It’s not one bad apple. It’s not one bad barrel. Its root and branch, tree and orchard. The Met is bigoted because that is there core of its mission.

If the BBC can’t see that by now, it has closed its eyes and blocked its ears on purpose.

Featured image via the Canary