It's official. The Metropolitan Police is a racist institution. It's also misogynistic

and homophobic, and as a result, its officers quote, can no longer presume that they have

the permission of the people of London to police them. That's according to this week's

landmark report commissioned by the Met from Baroness Louise Casey following the kidnap

rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021. Casey is unequivocal in her report. Public

consent is broken, she says. In a squarming response, so marked roly, the forces commissioner

since September accepted this was the case, but refused to describe the problem as institutional,

instead blaming bad apples or toxic individuals. Perhaps no amount of reports, resignations

or unconscious bias workshops can ever be enough to change the police. Perhaps the problem

goes deeper into policing itself and the extraordinary powers that officers wield in the line of duty.

In fact, police power is virtually limitless. Rather than upholding the law of the land,

officers spend the vast majority of their time fabricating the social order. Or at

least, that's what Professor Mark Niochlius told James Butler on Nov. FM back in April 2021.

In the wake of the Casey report, we're reposting that conversation as a primer on the dizzying

scope of police power that Everard's killing, as well as the pandemic, brought into sharp

relief and the economic underpinnings of the call for abolition.

Blue devils, blood-seeking vermin, blue bottle force, a little band of tyrant

a plague of blue locusts. Those were just some of the epithets in the radical press that

greeted attempts to establish a new police force for the north of England back in the 1840s,

understood as thinly disguised soldiers and hated for their work in suppressing workers'

organisation and their encroachment on liberties like free association and simple enjoyment of

life outside of work. There is a long but forgotten tradition of skepticism and hostilities,

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