At the end of May, London Mayor Sadiq Khan established the London Policing Board (LPB), an entity he will lead to scrutinize and offer recommendations for improvements to the Metropolitan Police in the wake of the damning review that was produced by Baroness Louise Casey and published in March 2023. The explosive details in the Casey Review put a spotlight on the Met as being rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, and generally broad discrimination and corruption throughout the force. Baroness Casey gave the force 2 years to clean up its act, but some say that is two years too long. The Met is said to be too big to govern itself and should be slimmed down with several commands being distributed to other law enforcement entities, beginning with the Counter Terrorism Command (CTC) which would be transferred to the National Crime Agency (NCA), a notion which has received renewed attention in light of the Casey Review.

Currently, many CTC police are being reassigned to clean up the badly blighted Met. But, counter-terrorism is a national priority and officers must be able to focus on fighting terror – not monitoring the rogue behavior of officers outside their command. The transfer of the CTC to the NCA, while retaining a partnership with the Met Police on counter-terrorism, similar to the existing Organized Crime Partnership (OCP), will streamline the floundering Met Police by allowing them to focus on London policing, and will allow the NCA to engage in fighting terrorism and extremism on a national scale within their mandate as a the chief national law enforcement agency.

This event will explore the challenges the Met Police faces on the ground, the NCA’s success in the past 10 years since its founding including crime-fighting partnerships they have created demonstrating their readiness to absorb the CTC, and practical recommendations moving forward to assist the CTC to function to its best effect while the Met Police considers its next important steps.

Samuel Coates is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a former Government Special Adviser, and international consultant.

In the UK he was most recently Chief of Staff to Health Secretary Sajid Javid, having previously worked in the Treasury and Home Office – where he focused on expanding powers for countering terrorism and hostile state activity, and increasing resources for policing and Serious & Organised Crime.

Prior to that he was based in northern Iraq during the Counter-Daesh campaign, in Canada as Director of Strategic Communications to the Foreign Minister, and in Afghanistan as a British Army reservist. He also currently volunteers as a Special Constable with the Metropolitan Police.

This image is a property of Politico

Stefan Boscia is a U.K. trade reporter for POLITICO in London.

Prior to moving to POLITICO, Stefan was chief political correspondent at City A.M. Over three years, he broke a range of exclusives on economic policy, trade policy, Labour under Sir Keir Starmer and movements in the 2022 Tory leadership race. He has experience covering Covid-19, Brexit, the fall of two Prime Ministers, the 2019 General Election and the U.K.’s response to the Russo-Ukraine war.

This image is a property of The Guardian

Vikram Dodd is a police and crime correspondent at The Guardian.

Elizabeth Samson is an international lawyer and an Associate Research Fellow with the Henry Jackson society. Prior to joining HJS, Ms. Samson served as a policy and political consultant, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Washington DC based Hudson Institute and a Consulting Director at the White House Writers Group. Ms. Samson has authored several peer-reviewed legal publications on topics of comparative international law and humanitarian law. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Washington Times, and the New York Post.

Ms. Samson holds a Juris Doctor from Fordham Law School (NY-USA), an LL.M. in International & European Law from the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law, a B.A. in Political Science from Queens College, and a Certificate in Management from the Wharton School.

***

EVENT SUMMARY

The Henry Jackson Society was delighted to welcome Samuel Coates and Vikram Dodd to a panel discussion hosted by Associate Research Fellow Elizabeth Samson, titled: A New Path Forward for UK Counter Terrorism? Streamlining the Met Police in Light of the Casey Review. Elizabeth Samson opened the discussion by providing the audience with a brief introduction to the scope of the Casey Review before raising the proposal of stripping the Met Police of its counterterrorism duties, with responsibility being shifted to other law enforcement entities such as the National Crime Agency (NCA). Samuel Coates suggested that the Met Police was heavily disjointed resulting in the prioritisation of counterterrorism duties over more practical, local duties. However, he did not relate with the notion that counterterrorism duties should be transferred to the NCA, stating that British policing was more well suited to a policy of ‘evolution rather than revolution’ branding the proposed shift as a short-term solution to a systemic problem. Vikram Dodd also acknowledged the various difficulties facing the Met Police recently, citing failures in leadership culture as a primary motive behind this failure. He described British policing as a ‘law enforcement equivalent of the monarchy’ suggesting that whilst on paper the state of policing did not appear ‘particularly cogent’ it ‘somehow’ worked in the practice. Consequently, he did not agree with the notion of moving counterterrorism capabilities into the NCA, instead proposing a change in the landscape of the Met’s operations away from a politically influenced four-year electoral cycle towards a ‘more solid’, apolitical structure. Both speakers agreed that the current state of the Met police was unsustainable, however, they both proposed a longer-term, more coherent strategy rather than a radical shift in policy that would allow for the removal of the Met’s counterterrorism duties.

#HJSEvents