Trying to turn a 19th Century property-protection force, organised like the army, into a 21st Century organisation, modelled on a corporation, is a mug’s game.

The Metropolitan Police are in trouble again. A new report calls for reform and accountability. For managament to credibly identify and remove bad apples and institute new, up-to-date norms in the force.
The pressure, since Scarman in 1981 and, in particular, since the bleak low point of the Macpherson report in 1999, has been for London’s police force to politely conform to the evolving contemporary meritocratic model of a public organisation. Crisis after crisis has left the Met exposed to the demands of a new generation of public administrators and legislators – literate in human rights, identity, trauma, representation and the whole spectrum of contemporary liberal politics. And the force has lost its immunity, can no longer claim to be above it all, aloof from the to-and-fro of social change. Change is being forced on the Met – and on the police more widely.
But the Met cannot be reformed in this way. The Met cannot, in any meaningful way, conform. It cannot be governed via the 21st Century disciplinary logic of the HR department or by the change management consultants or by the diversity trainers. You cannot translate a rigid hierarchy of rank (with uniforms and real weapons) into an agile, transparent, socially-liberal corporate structure. Sergeants and Inspectors and Commissioners with pips on their shoulders and braid on their hats cannot become modern, first-name managers – much as they try.
There is no inclusive model for a police force – only inclusive gestures. Likewise there’s no ‘lean-in’ remedy for the exclusion and marginalisation – the misogyny, racism and straightforward numbing brutality – of conventional policing. Station coppers – working class men and women organised into increasingly militarised groups, equipped like Robocop, besieged by a disapproving and disdainful middle-class media and by increasingly alien management orthodoxies imported from Californian corporations – cannot be ‘re-educated’ or transformed to our liking.
The awful, depressing, repetitive grinding of the machinery as well-meaning leaders try to adapt policing to the practices of a contemporary capitalist economy – and a society governed by precarity and anxiety – to the norms of the Professional Managerial Class, to the fantasies of the social and media elite, is harrowing.
And the result, a kind of Frankenstein force that tries pointlessly to blend ‘enlightened’ liberal management practices with the essentially Victorian structures of a police force whose ingrained functions are protecting property, disciplining the urban poor and administering the bureaucracies of control, is a ghastly, mutant instrument that cannot but fail.
A utopian prescription for desperate times
What we ought to do now is give up trying to squash the police into our ‘woke’ (sorry!) social model, stop trying to create a hybrid nurture-discipline machine that somehow mercilessly grinds the faces of crims and respects diversity and wellbeing and mental health week.
We should civilianise the police force. Dismantle the rank-based structure, dissolve the out-of-date geographic organisation and the weak, antagonistic links with local government, dump the chain of command and move ownership and control of the police into our communities, into our town halls and community centres.
To democratise policing, put communities in direct control – not at arms-length via pointless, supine police commissioners but via routine and fine-grained democratic control. Popular sovereignty and community autonomy. Policing policies designed by those policed. Policing belongs in the domain of the demos, not of the rulers; management and accountability should be local and broad-based. We’re not defunding the police (a ridiculous, pretentious idea), we’re democratising the police.
And if this sounds a bit like a people’s militia, or a soviet or a neighbourhood committee. Sure, that’s what it is. It’s democratically accountable, community-owned policing. It’s a ridiculous, utopian demand, of course. And it’s much more likely that the outcome of this fresh crisis will be to cement the malign hegemony of the HR department and the consultant. But if there’s ever been a moment when something like this could be tried, when disbanding and reforming the Plod of old on democratic lines might be feasible, when ordinary people and the social elites might be ready to accept something radical, it’s probably now, right?