To feel a bit bad for the met police on bbc panorama undercover

[Bloodyscarymary]

Just watching the BBC Panorama doco “Undercover in the Police” and I can’t help feeling a bit uneasy.

Yes, the behaviour shown is awful and they should lose their jobs, but having their faces, names and secretly recorded conversations, sometimes even off duty over a pint broadcast feels like a bit of a violation of privacy.

I honestly would have thought secret filming like that couldn’t even be made public, but clearly it’s legal or the BBC wouldn’t air it.

I’m not excusing what was said at all. The culture clearly needs to change. But is it fair to single out these particular officers when the problem is obviously widespread?

I also felt some of the more junior officers had just absorbed the culture around them, and at times the journalist might have been nudging them into certain topics. A few of the comments even felt like dark humour or going along with pub chat. Still unacceptable, but if you secretly recorded doctors or other professions that probably use a lot of dark humour to get through it, I’m sure you’d hear things that would seem really callous to an outsider.

Absolutely they should be fired/reprimanded, but do they deserve complete public exposure like this? AIBU to feel uncomfortable about it?

YABU they deserve everything that’s coming their way

YANBU it’s too much personal exposure when the real problem is the Met culture not these individual cops

Interestingly I see it differently. I don’t think it’s as simple as removing the horrible people makes the organisation OK. It’s institutionally racist and sexist; it is that which needs tackling.

I am going back nearly thirty years here but two school friends of mine joined the police. They were really nice boys at school. I hope they have stayed so and become really nice men, but the problem with a corrupt institution is that it corrupts and changes everybody. Winterbourne is a good example of this.

These are public servants!! We pay for them to have our safety and best interests at heart. Of course racism, misogyny, violence, abuse and corruption should be exposed FFS!!!

I don’t think anyone’s arguing it shouldn’t be, just that it should be exposed in an institutional sense rather than an individual one.

Otherwise new recruits will join the police and in ten years will be just as unpleasant and dangerous as these individuals, irrespective of whether or not they were when they started.

It needs tackling as a package. Tossing out the active bad apples is a start. Once you see that you can’t behave that way in a job, you’re either going to toe the line, get out of the job or be kicked out.

This

Like priests!

Indeed but how are they going to be found without undercover reporters? That’s the heart of the issue. Because if anyone thinks ‘BBC have shown bad men, bad men have been shown the door’ they are unfortunately misguided and naive.

The reportage was very clear that it is sergeants' duty to maintain the discipline and the standards of the force, the group, the cohort (call it what you will) who are directly answerable to them.

I'd particularly target sergeants therefore. Leadership failure is screaming out from this report.

But each individual has his or her own conscience all the same, and all of them are sworn officers, who pledged to protect the citizens and uphold the law, so they're all culpable. All should be named and shamed and stripped of their jobs (and pensions imo).

How else are you supposed to conduct undercover reporting? Ridiculous. Of course you need to pretend to be “in” otherwise you’ll get nothing. He barely even chuckled at anything they said.

Glad you didn’t suffer them saying it in front of you. Sadly they probably didn’t say it to your face but saved it til you were out the office/ they were in the pub and it was just the ‘lads’.

I think the fact that these people can say and do these things DOES expose that it is institutional. If it wasn't institutional they wouldn't get away with it or be so open about it. It may be a culture of "no one cares" rather than its permitted or encouraged but there is something rotten there.

and we think that means they will have the book thrown at them? It doesn’t. It means the ones the BBC exposed will in all probability be dismissed; the ones it didn’t expose won’t be, all will carry on until next time.

Exposing the individuals takes that point away, though (I do agree with what you are saying, though.)

I have only seen the coverage of this story on the news, @Bloodyscarymary, and frankly that was bad enough - I can’t imagine how much more dreadful stuff was on the full Panorama programme.

I have no sympathy for the officers involved - if they weren’t displaying horrific attitudes and saying racist, sexist, misogynistic and violent things, they wouldn't have been outed by the hidden camera footage.

I hope this sends a message to anyone else in the police force, who shares these vile attitudes, that it is utterly unacceptable, and they need to change, if they don’t want to risk their jobs. And the heads of all the police forces in the UK need to do everything necessary to root out any officer who shares these Met officers’ (lack of) standards.

no I don't think it does. I think that the people ARE the culture, they make the culture.

But they aren’t going to deal with ‘the people’; just the ones who happened to be caught on camera, so to speak.

I’ve no idea what you’re trying to say or push here, but the fact is, if these officers are all sacked then that’s a start right there.

But but but unless people are eg caught on camera and its made public, nothing gets done to anybody. Stuff like this gets fixed because there is public pressure to do so and public pressure comes from publicity. I refer you to the Post Office scandal.

I’m not sure how to otherwise say it, sorry. I’m saying that it’s a pointless task, exposing a minority of officers in this way. It’s akin to swatting a few flies when you have an infestation. It needs tackling further up.

I suppose I question whether it will be ‘fixed’ @godmum56 . This way makes it really easy for the Met to sack these officers and carry on as if nothing happened, they give their line ‘racism etc is not tolerated’ and all stays the same.

It’s been what, thirty three years since Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the Met are STILL racist.

And I’m not exactly disagreeing with you either @godmum56 , so sorry if it seems that way. Things have to become embarrassing for the institution concerned before they do anything (there was an article about this in the Observer the other day.) But this particular method lets those up high slime out squeaky clean far too easily for my liking.

@Pigeonenglish I think you’ve isolated the wider issue quite well, exposing identities and focusing on individuals is all very well to get dramatic tv and maybe prove a point, but it doesn’t really delve into WHY the culture is so bad or suggest any ways to improve it, other than “let’s all say how disgusting we think these men are”.

A documentary that actually looked into why so many police officers at the met are this way would be more helpful.

Is it that they attract “bad apples” in the first place? Is it that somehow they promote “bad apples” more frequently which impacts the whole culture, is there something in the performance management that tends to see these types rise to the top that could be changed?

Or is it that most police officers do start their job full of good intentions and it’s just being on the coal face of the very worst and weird of society day after day that grinds them down and makes them start to see people as stereotypes/become callous?

Is it a combination of all three?

If police officers start out “good” and become bad apples due to the job - what can be done to support their mental health/outlook on people in an ongoing way so that they stay good and hopeful about their impact on society?

If the force is attracting sociopaths and promoting sociopaths - what can be changed recruitment and promotion wise to block those kinds of hires in the first place or change what is valued so they aren’t promoted.

I can’t see how catching out a few officers and publicly ruining their lives will solve anything.

I was disgusted and shocked to the core. I am a senior police officer (not MET) of 17 years service, line managing a high number of PCs and Sergeants and I can genuinely say I have never heard ANYTHING even a fraction as inappropriate as what ive just seen on that programme. Its made me really sad. We work SO hard in incredibly challenging circumstances and facing pressures that most people cant even begin to fathom and its embarrassing to share a career with people like that.

This was in relation to the white offenders they'd dealt with. Ethnicity didn't come in to some of the comments. It isn't racist assumptions, this is about the people committing the crimes. The guy who they stripped was a white, potential rapist, the men he was talking about were guilty of multiple rapes. He saud for foreigners doing the same, deport them. The British guys were getting shot. I watched it again this morning They treated all races overly violently. They are thugs with power.

An excellent, timely contribution

Which force?