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

Totally! But would it be fair for a journalist to pose as a nurse, take a young nurse to the pub, tell that nurse she thinks that all the elderly patients are taking up too many beds, and then secretly record her response after 4 wines and put the recording, alongside her identity on a BBC documentary about toxic culture at the NHS? I just don’t think the identity of the nurse would be relevant to the documentary.

If you google, there's been quite a lot going wrong with Met officers that have been fired, jailed.., it's not just Cousins. I hear what you're saying, but Cousins was the one that made people sit up and take notice for a change.

It's not just that either, we only get to hear a few imo. Am sure there are other officers who look out for their own, cover up and also cases that don't get to go to court because of the CPS decisions.

Exactly. It's never one bad apple. How many officers was Wayne Couzens in that WA group with? Or those officers who posted the photos they illegally took of the murdered sisters in a London park and posted online. The recruit's covertly filmed in the other Panorama I posted about before.

One bad apple I can excuse but there are barrowfulls of the fuckers in the met.

Do they? How do you know that? The bad apples are generally exposed, as in the Panarama program, but that reflects a minority. There’s approx 170k in the police force in the UK, and I would imagine the vast majority are decent, without evidence to say otherwise.

Because you see them convicted in the news.
Because we've just seen quite a lot of them and this is just one police station out of many, made by a reporter who never quite got their trust.

Now, how do you know that it isn't the case?

I'm not at all condoning the culture in the police force, but I think most of us could be made to look pretty bad if a selection of things we'd said in private were aired.

absolutely unbelievable shit from the animals featured . You may as well have stuck the average football yob element of clubs like Millwall on the job If I can say the women officers based there came out very well and the reporter made it clear their were some very good officers too It wasn’t just the mysogeny or the racism or the violence it was the totally hypersexualised sleazy banter that was bandied around whilst being on the job . I’m not a particularly woke person but this was way beyond that it was totally awful and I think yes it needs to be out there My brother in law was quite high up in the police at one point and since he has left the police he’s a much nicer person far more able to not see stuff just in black and white If anyone watches this and think heads shouldn’t roll then your values are to me way off Personally I would go further and I think several on this documentary should be prosecuted and lose their pension too which we are all paying for

https://news.sky.com/story/six-of-the-worst-scandals-the-metropolitan-police-has-faced-in-recent-years-as-pressure-grows-on-force-12839492 .

I hear you, but I think it's safe to say that no selective stuff was aired just for good TV. This was pretty cut and dry imo.

Wow OP .. just give up and stop defending them. You’re literally the only one here who thinks this way. What is wrong with you? Are you one of those featured? Are you like them? 🤔 I can’t think of any other reason why you’d think they didn’t deserve this. They were fucking vile creatures.

Did you even watch it??

They were in public places at all times. At the pub, in their workplace (a public building). If they worked for mi5 and popped to the pub expecting to privately chat about the latest insurgents winding them up or how they’d like to extra-judiciarily interrogate their least favoured hackers I’m sure they’d be set right about where is/isn’t a private place fairly promptly…

YABU - they deserve to be publicly shamed.

Men like that don’t give a shit. I don’t think they need or want your sympathy b

How do you tackle the problem unless you expose it? These officers have unique power over people - often very vulnerable people - and we have to hold them to the highest standards of behaviour and integrity. I absolutely think the undercover filming and exposure is the only way to throw light on a subject that has been swept under the carpet and glossed over as a 'few bad apples' for decades.

Just leaving this here for the next time a dismissal of Wayne Couzens being a "one off" pops up,

Met Police officer David Carrick, who admitted 49 charges - including 24 counts of rape - against 12 women, was unmasked as one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders.

I think you're probably right but I also think my point stands.

I wasn't singling out Muslims btw. It was being discussed on another thread and seemed a relevant example. It's a very interesting dynamic because people are extremely wary of discussing the latter and you're much more likely to be called a racist than engaged with.

But the facts are there that 1200 sexual assaults were perpetrated in a single evening and there have been numerous smaller scale group assaults (plus many in the middle east where it's common).

I mean, the number of sexual assaults committed on that one night probably outnumbers sexual assaults perpetrated by Met officers in the last decade.

Will watching it invalidate my point?

It's not the same thing. Police officers are doing a job that carries a lot of responsibility and where they deal with lots of vulnerable victims of crime. Saying the organisational culture of that institution is toxic isn't the same as racial profiling.

Also, yes that was one officer, but it prompted loads of investigatory work that exposed really deep problems with misogyny and racism.

Did he say anything?
Are they still friends.

Oh and the idea the BBC is left wing? This is the place that Farage is given a free pass and is part of the furniture - it may have been in the past but anyone in news a bit more to the left or actually wants free reign to challenge has left - it is overseen by a right winger put in by the Tory’s ( personally I would have got rid by now and had someone a bit more neutral and a proper news person but hey ho) Farage has already stated he would get rid of many controls in the police. No doubt these ‘black shirt’ thugs would be his idea of good policing and proper red blooded banter!!

Yes.

Yeah I see that side to it too and perhaps this is the only way to do that. Part of me thinks that revealing their identities almost reduces the impact though - as the focus will be on the individuals rather than what is really the problem which is the culture. I would have also preferred to see more stats linking it to the wider context - complaint handling, sexual violence prosecution percentages etc. Maybe they did cover that - the documentary actually cut off halfway through and switched to a sound guy standing in the studio when I was watching it - was very strange!

I used to be friends with the wife of a MET office, quite high up from what I remember. She was horrifically abused by him, physical, emotional and sexual. Nothing surprises me anymore, exposure is the only way to get the police to look at what is happening here!

You know how many young men of different ethnic backgrounds just happened to die of “natural
causes”
according to the met? And now you feel
sorry for the guys who freely air their racist views in public?