Book Review: ‘Bent Coppers’ by Graeme McLagan

ISBN: 978-0-7528-5902-6 Publication date 2003.

I purchased this book by Graham McLagan a former BBC investigative journalist from a charity bookstall in a Tescos, I bought it in part because I was intrigued by it and as it wasn’t going to cost me much to give it a go so I had a punt on it. Another reason was because the book covered a time period in policing that I was interested in. It was a time when the police were transitioning from an entity with minimal oversight to today when the police are under considerable oversight from the public, politicians, mainstream media and now alternative media. It was a period when the police were, in my view, going from being in parts the like the Wild West, to something a little bit less wild. What also interested me as I got into the book were the mentioning in it of the names of some of the villains that I was familiar with from my court reporting days/media days.

The time period that this book covers, which is roughly the 1990’s through to the early 2000’s is a time when the public might have had good grounds to think that police corruption was a thing of the distant past following former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Robert Mark’s purge of corrupt officers in the 1970’s. Sir Robert, who famously once said that a good police force ‘caught more criminals than they employed’, made immense efforts to root out the corruption that had plagued the Metropolitan Police. This corruption had been a massive problem for the force going right back to the fifties and sixties, with corruption being a particular problem in London’s Soho where proprietors of brothels, strip clubs, drinking clubs and the establishments selling erotic magazines under the counter would bribe officers to look the other way and not enforce the law against such activities.

Although Sir Robert was very very successful in changing the culture in the Met so that corruption was minimised and it’s fair to say it was Sir Robert’s great achievement of his time heading the Met, but the corruption didn’t go away completely and as the book tells corruption did come back. The return of the more serious degrees of police corruption and in particular corruption in specialist police units such as the South East Regional Crime Squad and Flying Squad is what is the meat and potatoes of this book.

This book is laden with stories of the web of corrupt cops that existed in the above-mentioned parts and other sections of the Met, the corrupt dealings that detectives had with grasses and the specialist and highly secretive ‘ghost squad’ of honest officers that the Met set up in order to catch their corrupt police brethren. The book takes into the murky worlds of drug dealers, armed robbers and high rolling fraudsters many as rich as Croesus and the corrupt cops that they had on their payroll.

This is a fascinating and gripping book that was written by a proper old school journalist who worked for the BBC back when the BBC was something that Britons could be rightly proud of, unlike the BBC of today. Mr McLagan certainly knows how to tell a complex story with multitudes of twists, turns and characters and keep you wanting to turn to the next page.

Mr McLagan is absolutely brilliant with the details of this story, not just with his telling of each individual incidence of group corruption that the Ghost Squad worked on that were found in the Met’s specialist units but also what he called ‘Lone Ranger’ corrupt officers. The Met’s problem at the time was not only with large groups of corrupt officers all on the take and all covering for each other, but also individual officers who, because of relationship connections to criminals or being in financial difficulty, became vulnerable to accepting corrupt approaches from criminals and associates of criminals. The book explains not only how the large groups of corrupt officers were dealt with but also how the Met set up stings to catch the ‘Lone Ranger’ corrupt police staff both uniformed and civilian. Mr McLagan’s book wasn’t published early enough to cover in depth the much later political corruption of the Met by way of the injection of identity politics following on from the Stephen Lawrence murder nor the overcorrection that the fallout from the Lawrence case caused. However it does touch on some of the cases in the late 90’s and early 2000’s where officers who were, if not completely corrupt, had behaved questionably and had subsequently tried to divert attention away from their behaviour by claiming ‘racism’.

The book also goes into some detail about what the Met has done to stop the corruption that Sir Robert Mark and the Ghost Squad tackled from coming back. It tells of the extreme efforts that the Met’s management started to use in order to better vet new recruits and monitor officers for any potential for corrupt wrongdoing. Cybersecurity has also improved and suspect access by corrupt or potentially corrupt officers to police computer systems is now much more likely to be picked up by cybersecurity experts employed or contracted by the Met. I don’t believe that police corruption can be entirely removed from police forces as there will always be wrong’uns in uniform who might be tempted by extra money from criminals, but the Met have made it much much harder for such corrupt officers to operate.

If you can pick up a copy of this book whether new or second hand then I’d say go for it. You will not be disappointed by it.