Concerned looks at the Copa Copaganda

Another toxic "rotten apple" is revealed but the British media will never truly demand that the orchard is uprooted.

Content warning: While I have avoided going into detail, this edition does touch on a case of rape and violence against women.

Previously: National Hate Service
The Daily Mail just proved British press rhetoric on the NHS hasn't changed in 40 years.

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Today’s Daily Mail splash screams:

As a police officer is revealed to be one of the UK’s worst serial rapists, Met probes 1600 claims of sexual and violent attacks by its own staff…

Just How Many More Monsters In Uniform

You have to travel just 16 pages into the paper to find Richard Littlejohn contributing a column that demands that police are ‘tougher’ on protestors:

The police approach to protesters seems to depend on whether they are acting in a good cause such as saving the polar bears, or demanding more ‘trans rights’.

If your demo is sufficiently ‘woke’, the Old Bill will give you a free pass, no matter how much misery you are causing.  

It’s less than two years since the Mail led with a picture of a protestor being held down by police as they violently broke up a vigil for Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and murdered by a serving Metropolitan police officer. Its headline was:

SHAMING OF THE MET

Today, Littlejohn writes:

… if UKIP supporters tried blocking the A2 in Kent to protest at illegal immigration, or Millwall fans occupied the pitch at, say, Forest Green Rovers, over a disputed VAR decision, the police would send in the heavy mob to start cracking heads straight away without bothering to consult the ‘serious disruption’ guidelines. 

He has to imagine scenarios and even then his objection is not the head cracking but that the wrong heads are being cracked.

The paper’s leader column writes of David Carrick — who has admitted 49 charges, including 24 rapes — that:

… he was not some loner who dwelt in the shadows of life. He was a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police.

How was such a twisted creature ever allowed into the force in the first place? And once in, why was he not weeded out sooner? Where was the vetting? 

Five pages later, the Mail runs a video still of armed police piling onto a suspect in north London this weekend above the headline:

Gun cops swoop on church attack shooting suspect

The copy breathlessly describes:

… three high-powered police cars boxing in the Nero hybrid vehicle, thought to be a taxi, before ten armed police swoop. 

The police can be heard shouting ‘get on the ground’ as they bring the 22-year-old suspect to the floor. 

It’s the ‘goodies’ getting a ‘baddy’ in the monochrome morality of The Daily Mail. That the Met has a history of getting the wrong man — most infamously in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes — and that Carrick was an armed officer won’t have been a consideration in writing this story. The front page and editorial condemning the Met might as well come from an alternate reality.

In 1980, the historian E.P. Thompson wrote in the journal Camerawork:

I have been admiring the new issue of stamps, a series on the British police… The occasion of this new issue is not made evident on the stamps. Of course, since our police are a matter for continuous celebration, year in, year out, in most of the media, there is no need for any particular occasion. But perhaps this series was designated to commemorate the inquest on the body of Mr Blair Peach. 

Dr Burton, the coroner at Blair Peach’s inquest, said that there were good reasons for not having a jury, ‘not least because it would present problems about its selection’ (Guardian, 12 October 1979). 

The problems in the ‘selection’ of a jury which may have come to his mind were perhaps those of finding a true verdict, in a sensitive case in which the police are involved, at a time when the minds of potential jurors are exposed to massive propaganda as to the superlative merits of the police, the alien habits of Asians, and the ‘strident hatred of the extreme left’ (Observer, 7 October 1979); and when the officer responsible for empanelling a coroner’s jury is an officer of the police. 

He writes later in the same article:

[Forrmer commissioner] Sir Robert Mark’s In The Office of Constable tells us that in 1973 the Metropolitan Police were under serious strain ‘having to deal with 72,750 burglaries, 2,680 robberies and 450 demonstrations’. Football crowds and traffic accidents go unmentioned. The point is the sequence: burglaries — robberies — demonstrations, and to associate in the readers’ minds popular democratic manifestations with crime. 

… Last October, James Anderton, chief constable of Manchester, was asked what was the greatest threat to ‘law and order’ today. He reassured us that the threat to ‘law and order’ today comes from ‘seditionists’, interested groups who do not have the well-being of this country at heart, and who mean to ‘undermine democracy’. 

The undermining of democracy is certainly going on, and at an inflationary rate. And it is becoming clear from which quarter the wind is blowing. It is blowing from the quarters of the Association of Chief Police Officers, the police pressure group, and from the barracks of the law-and-order brigade. And conservatives of all parties, some of whom are proud to think of themselves as reactionaries, are all for tearing down the structures of the past, modernising the ‘machinery’ of government. 

They wish to push us into a managed society, whose managing director is money, and whose production manager is the police. They have got us halfway inside already. 

I quote that at length because Thompson could see the direction of travel just a year into Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and because we are on the next leg of the journey now as the current government claims to defend the right to protest while pursuing laws that make it functionally impossible.

A story — not the main one, which is an attack on teachers’ unions, but a small column — on the front page of The Times today is headlined Police missed nine chances to stop serial rapist in Met. Fiona Hamilton, the crime and security editor, and crime correspondent, David Woode, write:

The Metropolitan Police was plunged into further crisis last night after a firearms officer who worked in the same unit as Sarah Everard’s killer admitted to being one of Britain’s worst sex offenders. 

Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, said he was sickened by the revelations that the police had missed at least nine opportunities in ten years to stop David Carrick, who was repeatedly reported for criminal and predatory behaviour against women. 
Carrick, 48, was nicknamed “Bastard Dave” by colleagues… [he] was allowed to  continue working even after he was arrested for rape in July 2021, days after the abduction, rape and murder of Everard.  

On page 2 of yesterday’s Times, a story by the paper’s policy editor, Oliver Wright, explained Police will be given power to close down guerilla protests and quoted Rishi Sunak saying:

The police asked us for more clarity to crack down on these guerilla tactics and we have listened. 

Inside today’s edition, Fiona Hamilton writes:

While the scale of Carrick’s offending is unprecedented, little else about this case is new. It has all the ingredients of predatory police behaviour with which the public has become wearily familiar. Like dozens of other rogue officers whose wrongdoing has been exposed, obvious warning signs were ignored… yet again we have senior police promising that things will be different. But will anyone believe them? We’ve heard it all before. 

It’s powerful, emotive language but the word “unprecedented” comes straight from the Met’s statements on the case — Carrick’s crimes are very precedented — and the hard line taken by Hamilton in her analysis is not present in her paper’s stories about why the police simply must have more powers.

In his Camerawork essay, E.P. Thompson summed this state of affairs up nearly:

It is historically observable that police, as defenders of ‘law and order’ have a vested interest in the status quo, whether the status be capitalist or communist, and whether the quo be that of Somoza’s Nicaragua or of Rakosi’s Hungary: that is, the occupation is one which is supportive of statist and authoritarian ideologies. And, more simply, in whatever kind of society, the police will always have good reasons for pressing for more resources, more powers, and more pay. 

Hamilton writes that “there is little doubt the Met has upped its game in hunting rogue officers since the Couzens scandal, and particularly since Sir Mark Rowley took over the force in September”. But that’s the institutional line; when Dame Cressida Dick — who was in command during the operation that resulted in Jean Charles de Menezes's killing in 2005 — was appointed Met Commissioner in 2017, the same rhetoric of reform was parroted by the press. In fact, Rowley was one of the other contenders for the job then.

Deep in the copy of its report on Carrick today — the bottom of a column on page 4 — The Times says:

[Carrick’s] colleagues called him Bastard Dave. Assistant commissioner Barbara Gray said this was because he was “mean and cruel” and was not related to sexual behaviour. No colleagues complained about him, but Carrick attracted five complaints from the public between 2002 and 2008 about excessive force, inappropriate use of CS spray, and rudeness. 

That’s just tossed away as another detail rather than as a deeply telling indicator of the culture of the police. He was promoted to carry a firearm.

The origin of the term ‘copaganda’ to mean propagandistic portrayals of police in the media, both through the news and in fictional portrayals, is murky. But E.P. Thompson is quoted on its Wikipedia page, with a quote from his introduction to the State Research Bulletin’s pamphlet The Secret State (1979):

The bureaucratic statism towards which Labour politicians increasingly drifted carried with it a rhetoric in which the state in all its aspects was seen as a public good… 

[T]he dividing line between welfare state and police state became obscure

In today’s Sun — front page headline MONSTER OF THE MET — the leader column illustrates how even when criticising the police, the right-wing newspapers absolutely must not critique the existence of the institution, only the execution of it and the behaviour of an ever-expanding barrel of “bad apples”:

When the murdering gun cop Wayne Couzens was handed a whole life term in 2021, we predicted he was far from a lone bad apple. Even we did not imagine that just 16 months later on another Met officer would be outed as one of the most sadistic predatory rapists ever known. 

The Sun expects credit for “predicting” that Couzens would not be a one-off. That’s the same paper which peddled a confected story about a “nuke plot” “smashed” by “terror cops” just last week; the same paper that yesterday cheered that “cops will be able to speedily tackle climate protestors” and chuckled that Greta Thunberg had been “forcibly removed by cops” in Germany. The same paper that employs Rod Liddle — a man cautioned for punching his pregnant girlfriend, who wrote that he could not become a teacher because he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids” — and has misogyny running right through it pretends it’s the voice of moral outrage about abusers.

Like The Daily Mail, The Sun quickly returns to copaganda just pages after its outrage at the Met, with a story headlined Teen’s 122mph in new £200k car reliant on social media posts by Warwickshire Police’s Operational Patrol Unit. Two pages later, it also runs the story about armed police arresting a suspect in north London this week with the headline Drive-By Cop Squad Swoop. A witness is quoted as saying:

They didn’t take their weapons off the car for a second — they were super-focused. It was like something out of a movie scene. 

Oh my. Swoon.

Others swerve the direct copaganda in favour of exploiting the survivors in this case to push their usual arguments. Sonia Sodha of The Observer (who placed 10th in the 22 worst columns of 2022) tweeted:

One of familiar lessons of awful David Carrick case is that sex offenders often seek the statuses, positions and professions that open door to abusing women & children more easily. Why those who argue “rapists don’t need to pretend to be something they’re not to rape” are wrong.

Carrick did not pretend to be a police officer; he was a police officer. The case is not about trans people and to insert them into the debate about a rapist police officer is the most bad faith of bad faith positions. Carrick exploited his position; he never pretended to have a warrant card any more than Couzens did.

The idea that Carrick was not a “proper” policeman is also enabled by news reports that, following his dismissal from the Met at a hearing this morning, refer to him as “a former police officer” or like several radio bulletins I heard today:

A serial rapist who worked as a police officer. 

Carrick was a police officer when he committed those crimes and his status now is irrelevant. The same media metamorphosis occurred when Wayne Couzens became “a former police officer” rather than “a serving police officer”.

A BBC News website headline today called Carrick:

The serial rapist and abuser in a police uniform.

The crocodile tears and outraged demands of today’s editorials will last, at best, a week. The name Carrick will be slotted next to Couzens to be recalled the next time an officer is found to have committed horrific crimes. The Met will talk of lessons learned and its political masters will offer ‘tough’ words but the rot will be ignored when there are heads to crack and the cops are calling for more powers.

The system cannot be seen as monstrous for long, so the monsters that escape onto the front pages have to be aberrations and errors. It would do to admit that policing is a tempting habitat for abusers and its structures and procedures offer plenty of chances to indulge their desires. They just wandered in from the wastelands; they weren’t invited and encouraged.

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Thanks to John Hill for reading today’s draft.

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