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I like the Met - and I don't mean that with a trace of sarcasm. On the whole it does a good job of policing a vast, tough, often anarchic city. It does it - by and large - without firearms, and it does it - by and large - with the consent of the citizens. This is why I take its cock-ups so very seriously.
In the wake of the murder on our road 10 days ago, I encountered good cops and not-so-good ones. One of the murder squad detectives assigned to the case I knew from before, when he was in the local CID, and, to be frank, you couldn't meet a more likeable, honest man. But I also rubbed up against jobsworths who wouldn't tell me a thing about the investigation - and were surly with it.
I've heard about worse: the uniformed coppers who jeered at a disabled man who lives nearby, and the ones who told a friend that the victim of the killing on my street, Freddie Moody, had crack cocaine on him - as if that made his killing more palatable.
There are deeper anxieties too; living in Stockwell, where Jean Charles de Menezes was shot by armed police in 2005, I'm always alive to the possible abuses of the Met's firepower.
An interview with the neighbour of barrister Mark Saunders, shot dead in May after a stand-off with police at his Chelsea home, suggests that there should be some pretty stiff questioning of the officers involved, both at the inquest and the mandatory Independent Police Complaints Commission hearing. If one witness to the shooting is to be believed, one of the shooters made a throat-cutting gesture to a colleague after Mr Saunders died.
Officers serving in tactical support units can give evidence to these hearings anonymously, and there's a widely held view in London that the armed police, as a whole, have threatened to strike if there is ever a charge of unlawful killing levelled at one of their number.
Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair needs to address this perception urgently - as he should have after the De Menezes killing. Instead, he himself is embroiled in a scandal involving a pal's company being awarded a £3 million contract by his own police force. Blair said he did nothing wrong, or rather: "The only Impact Plus contract I was associated with as the senior responsible owner of the C3i programme followed appropriate procurement processes."
And perhaps that's the nub of the problem: most of the time the Met tries to convince us that it has the olde worlde probity of Dixon of Dock Green, but the truth is that some - and I stress, some - officers act more with the ruthless careerism I'd associate with TV cop show The Wire. Meanwhile, the commissioner sounds like a middle-management wonk with more jargon than sense. It's time for you - and your officers - to talk straight, Sir Ian.
