The Telegraph Welcome to the Daily Tea with me Kamal Ahmed And me Kamal Adomini Former top cop Neil Basu Welcome to the Daily Tea We ask everyone we interview this but would you like a cup of tea and how do you take it? Well I don't need a cup of tea but if I did I'd be taking Yorkshire tea very very strong Would you? Just a splash of milk But you don't want tea now because it is quite strong that pot It's probably because I've had about four pints of coffee this morning Well the second question we always ask our interviewees is If you could choose anyone alive or dead but it can't be a member of your family Who would you have a cup of tea with and why? And it can't be a member of my family no That's too obvious we decided I'm having a cup of tea while you think Well I mean there are hundreds of people and I would choose not friends or family I'm thinking could it be Robert Peel?
Any other thoughts? I think at this moment in time and I do know her I would probably choose Evette Cooper Would you? I want to continue our discussions on police reform Well we might be getting to what you would tell her over a couple of days We'll ask you what you would talk to her about later in the morning A little bit later indeed So Neil Basu we're here to talk about your new book Turmoil 30 Years of Policing Politics and Prejudice It's out now you joined the net in 1992 I did Feels like a moon ago doesn't it And you rose up the ranks to Detective Superintendent You're the only officer to have held the top three positions in counterterrorism policing You led the operational response to the 2017 terror attacks And then in 2018 succeeded Sir Mark Rowley to become the first agent to lead the UK's counterterror policing organisation That was in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings So I suppose the first question after three decades in force is how has policing changed? Well policing has changed dramatically So I think people particularly people like me who have been retired for a while often say it was much better in my day And we knew what we were doing on the streets and all that I don't believe that for a second I think I wouldn't have joined policing in the 70s or 80s I had to think very hard about joining it in the 90s I think policing in the mid-2020s is probably the best it's ever been You just wouldn't think that if you read the news Do you think we're unduly critical of the police?
I do and I think policing has to be transparent and deserves to be criticised when it gets something wrong And when it gets something wrong it often has huge consequences for the public And it needs to be discussed and it needs to be unpicked But alongside that the things that does incredibly well need to be examined and celebrated Because policing is probably the most important public institution you've got Without it you're just not safe and you won't feel safe And unfortunately the last five years largely brought about by incredibly bad policing The media coverage of policing has fallen off a cliff And people like me get maybe two, three of I'm really lucky five minutes So thank you for inviting me on this to try and bring some balance to that conversation And of course I've been one of policing's biggest critics particularly about race and policing So I know I've contributed to that as well But I like to think I've been deliberate in a more balanced way You say really bad mistakes over the past five years, what are those? Well the monstrous attacks by serving police officers on women So certainly, and I don't like using their names But they were serving police officers in the Metropolitan Police So Wayne Cousins murdered Sarah Everard and David Carrick as a serial rapist And I won't repeat their names again Are probably the two worst examples in modern history of two individuals Bringing policing and its entire reputation to the floor But doesn't that, I mean, isn't that sort of the point about the media's coverage Whether you blame the media or not The very fact that those people exist and were able to exist Some would say in plain sight in the police Completely destroys public trust So it's understandable that people believe that the police is not for them I think that's a completely valid argument I think the problem with policing is it's one of those professions Where you tend to catastrophize whatever the incident is These two particular horrific stories don't need catastrophizing They are catastrophes for the family For all of their friends and for everyone connected But we also tend to globalize So we tend to then see every police officer potentially having that as part of their character I mean, I work with thousands of police officers over my 30 years That's just not true So what I'd like chiefs to recognize is that What I'm saying is there are far fewer bad police officers Particularly at that monstrous end There are far fewer bad police officers than the media would have the public believe Trouble is there are far more than I think chief officers are willing to admit or to recognize And that's the big problem So if you want to lead, chief officers have to be much better At making sure that those people don't get into policing in the first place And if they do, they can't survive in plain sight Would you like to see more police officers on the street? Is that good for solving crime and good community relations? Do you know what?
It's not particularly good for solving crime Most criminologists would tell you that But it definitely has an effect And it has an effect principally because They are the route to trust and confidence from the public And if you have a public that trusts you and is confident in you They're more likely to give you intelligence Which is going to solve crime They're more likely to say what's going on in the neighborhood And who are the people you should be looking at They're more likely to obey the law And they'll certainly be more cooperative victims and witnesses In the criminal justice process All of those things help I've been a member of street or court policing Most confidence are the cops you see giving you a smile And seeing you every day on your streets And that's where it's most valuable Rather than thinking it's somehow going to turn crime downwards I mean, good prevention turns crime downwards And you could argue an officer in highly visible on every street corner would help But they'd have to be on every street corner That's not going to happen Is it better for the police to be loved or feared? I ask this because there's been a debate in recent years About whether it's a force or a service I would say, speaking personally That I grew up in fear of the police And getting in trouble with the police And yet these days There is a sense to which the Gen Zs sort of Don't take the police seriously enough, I would say I mean, again, this is one of those urban myths Youth never liked policing particularly When I was a university student and a school student The youth were not particularly enamoured by policing It is one of those huge figures of authority Just like the teachers were Just like politicians were Just like lawyers are And that whole deference to authority Has been collapsing for at least 40 years I mean, we're probably seeing it Pretty much close to its nadir now Not just for policing So I think getting the youth vote back Is incredibly important And you don't do that by fear You don't get people's trust and respect by fear One of the places we haven't worked hard enough Is in the young population in general So, you know, I would like to see more young people On independent advisory groups I would like to see policing being brought Before the youth parliament I would like to see us answering questions From young people on how we police them And in fact, the commission's just done A review of stop and search Which is probably the most iconic tool That policing uses That causes us a barrier and antagonism From the young community Particularly the young black community Do you think there should be more stop and search? No, I've always been an outspoken critic of stop and search Not least because I must be one of the very few chief constables Or chief constable equivalents in history Who has been stopped and searched As both a kid, an adolescent, and an adult Including at every airport I go through And I think people underestimate the effect That it has on you being stopped and searched Even if you're a practising police officer And I've been stopped and searched recently As a non-police officer these days Stop and search has been used very ineffectively As a blanket approach to what I call street suppression If it's used forensically In the right way In the right areas against the right people It's an incredibly important tool If you keep misusing it And at various times in our history Politicians have talked about Taking away the power for policing That would be a huge mistake as well But it's got to be used more effectively Would you be able to give us any more details Of the stop and search you just went through? What happened?
And why did they stop and search you? And what did you say to them? Well, at an airport They've got every right to pick people And stop and search them as they see fit So I would say probably the way I look Post 9-11 has been one of the drivers for that One of my best friends is a 6-foot-3 red-headed Irishman And we used to trade notes About how many times the two of us Have been stopped and searched in an airport And what's quite embarrassing about it Is I used to set the rules For targeting stop and search As airports as the head of counter-terrorism So it's slightly ironic But if you get stopped and searched Or your bags are searched And you are swabbed for bomb residue And that happens regularly You kind of think there must be something to that I'm very familiar with behavioural detection And what that means And suspicious behaviour And suspicious activity I wouldn't think someone with my background Is acting particularly suspiciously in an airport Although, I mean, the people stopping and searching Don't necessarily know your background history Who would you suggest that people at airports Would more aggressively stop and search In the aftermath, for instance, of 9-11? People where there's an intelligence report On that person Or people behaving suspiciously I think one of the worst things you can do Is stereotype We have this debate in counter-terrorism 80% of the terrorist threat And that's still true today Has been Salafist, Islamist, Jihadist terrorism And that does tend to be dominated by young Asian men So there is no doubt whatsoever That some measure of that Has to be used as part of your grounds for suspicion It's just the fact Because of the prevalence of that particular crime I'm not saying that isn't part of it Hence I set some rules-based targeting But it also depends on intelligence What flights you're using How you're behaving Where you're going to and from And whether or not we have any prior intelligence That is a much more intelligent way of doing it Other than randomly But there is something about doing random checks Which puts people who might be doing reconnaissance on alert Because they'll never know if they'll be chosen or not Can we talk a bit about knife crime?
Many families affected by it And particularly black families Are crying out for What they would consider to be Firm action from the police And there's some criticism that The police are too worried about What might be described as community relations To really go into communities And to sort out knife crime Where it is in the majority A problem involving and affecting young black men Yeah well I made my name as a detective On a unicode operation Trident Which was set up in the late 90s And that was set up dealing with Black on black crime As it was It's now seen as a clumsy title But at the start in 1998 It was about the murder of a woman in front of her children By a black gang It was very clear that we had to do something And my point about this is It's very analogous to Knife crime in the black community today Where young black boys are generally speaking Both the victim and the perpetrator of the crime It was exactly the same for Operation Trident With gun related crime In the late 90s and early noughties And what was so very fundamentally different About that time Was some very brilliant people Like stood on the shoulders of the giants Who set up Operation Trident And they recognised they needed to work With the black community So you can't go in and police Using covert measures And using forceful techniques If the black community doesn't understand What you're doing Why you're doing it And is supporting you And you'll find some of the biggest critics Of policing in those days People who effectively grew up Like I did in the 70s and 80s With a lot of racism And a lot of police brutality Wanted to help the police during that time I benefited from it as a murder squad SIO Investigating multiple gangland homicides And the reason I was able to solve those Was because the black community helped me do it And they didn't help me because they were scared of me They helped me because they thought we were there To help them solve a problem in their midst That is what needs to happen now If you want to solve knife crime And I think some of the attitude That you're describing is people who think Oh you're very soft on crime And you're letting people off with a caution When they're carrying a knife And that wasn't my experience Of the people running knife crime in London While I was on the management board It was pretty hard edged There was a lot of stop and search There was a lot of pressure back from communities That we were hard edged about it But there was also some support And that support normally comes obviously From bereaved families Who would have anything to have their loved one back Has that been lost a bit since you retired Do you think That hard edge that we need Which Operation tried to prove that we needed I don't think so I mean you'd have to ask the commissioner I mean I've been out of front line policing For nearly three years So but it's certainly The objective of reducing serious violent crime in London Has always been at the top of the mayor's priorities It's always been at the top of every commissioner's priority Since I was in Blair's office in 2008 So that hasn't changed I think what has changed is the resourcing of policing Where it's vastly underfunded for what it needs to do And vastly over prioritised With a very high public expectation You might argue it's been the same Since Royal Appeal invented it in 1829 But the last 14 years of austerity Just like other public services That policing relies on to help keep people safe Have all been cut to the quick We're seeing some of the effect of that I think On knife crime Was it ever thus that you had teenagers Sort of wielding machetes and other zombie knives Or is that a more latter day invention And it could just be that This is more on the public consciousness Because we are seeing videos Whereas in the 1980s and so on we didn't And therefore we're seeing this crime Sort of playing out On our social media channels Which is quite a unique development That's a really good point So I could take up your entire podcast It will tell you that a lot of young people Carrying knives Not because they want to be perpetrators But because they're terrified of their own safety That's not good The reason they're terrified is 24-7, 365 days a year They can access that stuff and look at it And they really are looking at it So that has created a dramatic problem As has the sale and collection Of these unbelievable weapons Which could only possibly have ever been developed To kill things And I think all of the campaigns Particularly impressed with Idris Elba Because you have to have someone Of that kind of stature Saying things out loud For people to take any notice I mean we've been talking about this for decades But Idris Elba puts it on the front page Of every newspaper And every news channel to say Why are we banning these things Why is it legal to sell them That is a new phenomenon Can we just ask you about something That has been on the front pages Of the newspapers this week It's this story And you spoke earlier about How the police should be policing with consent It's this story about These six officers from Hertfordshire Police I wonder when this would come up Turning up at the door of parents Who had made complaints About their daughter's school On WhatsApp And indeed sent letters I believe to the Board of Governors And the headteacher Now if you look at the footage of that And these officers sort of Approaching the house from all angles A terrace house in Boreham Wood It seems rather disproportionate And the complaint of course Particularly in Hertfordshire Which is funny enough where I live On the local radio People were complaining Why was there this overzealous policing Basically of people's thoughts On WhatsApp When I found the police to report A burglary nobody's turned out When my shop has been raided by thieves Nobody's turned out I lost a bike The police couldn't be bothered To investigate it These sorts of stories I appreciate they might be few and far between They do erode faith in police don't they Thank you for saying they're few and far between But I would say that I go to dinner parties And some of my friends and their friends Will tell me policing were awful And some of them will tell me I just had an experience with policing And they were magic So that's the trouble with balance But when you look at that You're absolutely right Individual examples like that And the way they're portrayed Are going to be damaging confidence And I think people are right To say there's been a lot of This is hilarious coming from me Because I have a reputation Of being the super woke So-called over-counter-terrorism But there has been an overzealous attitude Towards some of what I would call Not in this instance But hate crime And the way it's recorded And the way it's delivered The previous Conservative administration Tried to tighten up the rules On how it was recorded And what we did about it I think people are forgetting Where it all came from Partly it comes from The appalling racist murder Of Stephen Lawrence And the botched investigation And our need to start Getting trust and confidence In the black community back And recording hate crime better And doing something about it To give justice to people It also came much later on From a very famous case In Leicestershire Of a woman who killed herself Of having murdered her daughter Having been subjected to Months and months Of appalling abuse and harassment Which might be seen As antisocial behaviour now But was simply ignored back then And if all of those incidents Had been recorded And the pattern of behaviour was seen Perhaps something could have been done earlier Now all of that Is a country mile away From six large police officers Standing up at your front door In the home can because you said something on WhatsApp. That doesn't look good. That is going to give the wrong impression. It's going to give a lot of ammunition to the kind of people who think, typical, police officers wasting their time when they should be doing something important.
This faces into the area of non-crime hate incidents. You know that our columnist, Alison Pearson, initially believed she was being accused of a non-crime hate incident. Actually, when the details became clear, it was a slightly different operation that Essex police were involved in. But it all came down to a tweet that she could not even remember.
And there's been a big debate about non-crime hate incidents since then. I can hear what you're saying. Camilla, you and I have discussed this. This might have come from a good place, i.e., as you say, the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
But surely it is now time, given how non-crime hate incidents are now being used for journalists, columnists on national newspapers about tweets. It's gone too far. Surely it's time to stop non-crime hate incidents. Yeah, I think if there was ever a time not to be overzealous and make a mistake, it would be with a national journalist.
So that really doesn't help. And I think the debate is one that should be had. And there's a brilliant, if you've read it, Theresa May's book, I think it was called Absolute Power, there's a great line in there about policing. It says, I could never get policing to do anything proportionately.
They're always at one end of the spectrum. If you tell them to do X, they'll always do X plus. Tell them to do Y, they'll do Y plus. And I think there is a big problem in trying to get 135,000 police officers to do something in a standard way.
Now, during the implementation of things like non-crime hate incident policy, and I sat on the College of Policing Board that writes that kind of authorised professional practice and policy, you will get plenty of police officers, even if it's only a fraction of 1%, taking that too far and making mistakes. And if it is such a high-profile case as it was with Alison, that is going to cause tremendous problems. And you said it before, this is my point about globalisation. You start thinking that every police officer thinks like that, and every police officer would have made that decision.
That's just not the case. There's a lot of discretion. But just to be clear, you're saying review, but not abandon. I think ceasing it would be a terribly retrograde step.
And anyone who has got a protected characteristic who has been abused publicly or privately because of it, and then doesn't have that treated seriously, that it's not recorded when they say they've been a victim, and then it's not investigated, which is what used to happen before this policy came in, pre-McPherson report, would be horrified if we suddenly stopped doing anything about it at all. But of course, there are levels. And sometimes police officers make mistakes. Sometimes they're overzealous.
Sometimes they're motivated by their own personal need to be seen as the person who's helping that particular cause. Of course they make mistakes. They're human beings. You have to look behind the badge.
Neil, we want to get on to asking you about your work in counter-terrorism. And before we do that, I just wanted to pick up on something you said about you being woke. There's quite a lot of quotes associated with you being woke. You said at one point, Are you alert to issues of racial and social justice?
Yes, I am. And if that is the definition of woke, I'll wear it as a bumper sticker every day of the week. I wish I'd said it as passionately as you did. Well, I'm just hoping to recreate the magic of the original quote.
I think that was the Cathy was not on channel for. I do absolutely feel that way, because I feel the entire term has been taken over by the culture or misused. So it was originally developed in the 30s. It's part of the black civil rights movement in America.
It was largely because black people were being asked to recognise that they were being over-policed and under-protected. So wake up, be alert to the fact that social and racial justice are things you should stand up for. Of course I'm behind that. I mean, I happen to think that if you're any police officer who carries a badge, ought to be behind that too.
But that's not what woke means today to anybody. It has been completely bastardised. All right. But you have been criticised in the past for being a bit too political.
For instance, your criticism of former Home Secretary Sue Ella Rapperman. You likened her comments on immigration to Enoch Powell's famous rivers of blood speech. You said her language was inexplicable and horrific. You've also been very critical of another former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, on her accusation that such a thing as two-tier policing exists.
Yeah, I understand why both of those comments. The advantage I had then, of course, is I wasn't a serving assistant commissioner. So you were able to say it afterwards, but you felt it at the time? I think the party that stands up most for free speech is the Conservatives, so I think they'd be perfectly fine with me exercising my free speech to make that comment.
But do you think one of the reasons... I mean, you retired, and we're going to get on to asking you what you're going to do next, but did you become a bit too political and a bit too outspoken? Even if you made these comments afterwards? When I was working.
Yeah, when you were working, you were sort of like wearing your wokery, literally, as a bumpership. Or a badge of honour, perhaps? It's certainly a badge of honour. I mean, the book's called Turmoil, because I joined a profession that most people saw as racist and corrupt in the early 90s, and it's been quite a difficult thing to be a part of that profession and to love it so much.
This is a love letter to policing. I just wrote a bit. It's from an angry lover, because I don't think we've done enough to turn the dial, and I think that's obvious. You only have to look at every report.
I can go back to McPherson, because that was so key to my formative years as a police officer, but you could go back to Dame Louise Casey's report in 2023 and find the same thing. So the turmoil is, are you willing to just stand there and fit in and take it, or should you have done something about it or said something about it? I dislike the fact that trying to create an anti-racist police force, trying to create an anti-racist counter-terrorism force across the country, was considered to be a political act. I don't consider anti-racism political.
I think it's something we should be doing, and particularly if your job is to police everybody. Reading into your career before this interview, one quote, just building on what Camino has said, is that you were too awoke for the top job. Do you think that was true in the end, that you were seen as too much trouble politically to get the commissioner's job? Oh, undoubtedly.
I mean, there were political lobby briefings to that very point, and plenty of broadsheet and tabloid headlines to that effect, so almost certainly that was true. Did you get on well with Cressida Dick? Do you think she was unfair interested in the end? Yes.
So I think Cressida, my oldest mentor and ally in policing, I've known her since 2003, you'll read in the book How We Met on a Peace March in Halston when I was a murder squad SO for Trident and she was the commander in charge of it. I'd have walked on hockholes for her from that day forward, and I frequently did. So yes, she was an ally. Did I think she was well treated at the end?
It was a bit like Ian Blair. At the time when the net figures, all the things that you were being assessed against were going in the right direction, you still get fired. There's lots of senior leaders who get taken down by a series of unfortunate events. I think both of the leaders I've described fell victim to a series of unfortunate events where their time became probably untenable in the eyes of politicians and the press.
In other words, a head has to roll. Mark Roney came in after Cressida Dick saying that he was going to clean up the force and get rid of lots of people who had basically been on long-term sick or long-term investigations still being paid by the force for year after year after year. Since then, a lot of his critics have said he simply hasn't managed to do what he said he would do day one, and the officers have not been pushed out of the force for bad apples, so to speak. Do you think that he has achieved what he said he was going to achieve on day one?
So clean up the force of the types of people you were describing at the beginning of the podcast, particularly around the hatred and disgraceful treatment of women. I think he's trying incredibly hard to do that. Has he done enough? No.
But I think he would tell you that. Has he been able to do enough? No. And he would definitely tell you that, because he said it very publicly.
He doesn't have the tools, because of police regulations and the law, to do what he said he would do. I think he thought he would get that help quicker. I think he's going to get that help. I think the regulation and the law are going to be changed, so he's much more capable of getting rid of these appalling police officers.
And by the way, I think this is where I fall out with some of my fellow chiefs. I think it's going to be a leading team since I was 11 years old. If I count my first cricket team and I did lose that first match, it still stings. Probably about 20% of every team is lazy, incompetent, corrupt, or prejudiced.
Sometimes all four of those things. If you're a leader, you're a supervisor, you think you are in charge, you should be trying to have proved, on the balance of probabilities, that these people are corrupt or prejudiced. They should be fired. Lots of things prevent him from just making that clinical decision.
You know, the process, the effectively quasi-judicial process that he is involved in has made that very difficult. But he has certainly reinforced professional standards. He's put more officers into professional standards. He's trying really hard.
I think he's proving how difficult it is and how resistant the culture is to change. EQ Bank is here to help you make bank. Let that sink in. It's a bank built to make you money, not just take your money.
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Neil, let's move on to talking about your leadership in counterterrorism. Looking from the outside in, I would imagine dealing with atrocities like 7-7, the London Bridge attack, Westminster, Manchester Arena bombing. These must be such difficult cases to not only deal with just as an officer on ground level, but actually to be in charge of a team trying to get to the root of what's happened. Yeah, I mean, I didn't deal with 7-7.
I was on Operation Dryden dealing with gangland murder at the time. But 7-7 was a huge wake-up call for London. And when 2017 happened, that was probably the longest period of sustained threat this country's faced since the heights of the IRA troubles. And I didn't say that.
Andrew Parker, who was there at MI5 at the time, said it. You know, it was incredibly difficult. And if you're, I mean, I used to say, well, I was Marley's deputy at that time. And I used to say, my job description is four pages long, but I can crystallise it in one sentence.
Work with MI5 and stop terrorist attacks. And if you don't stop them, you can't think about that. But as a failure every single day, during the same time we were there, we stopped 29 attacks. We arrested over 600 terrorists.
Never had before in Iowa's break. We charged most of them. I never thought about that for a single day. I only thought about it when I was writing this book.
What I always thought about was the dead and the bereaved and the 36 people who died in the night of 2017 on my watch, including two police officers and the over 1,000 people who were physically and psychologically scarred for life. And you go to bed every night thinking about that. Do you think that there is still the same threat from Islamic extremists as there was almost a decade ago? Oh, I know.
I know there is. So I'm not privy to any sensitive briefing, but my professional experience would tell me that the same volume of threat is still there. Is it increasing? It probably wasn't until October the 7th.
So I think the Iranians and their proxy Hamas did a very good job of preventing any kind of peace initiative in the Middle East. And I think the response to it has been so overwhelming, a bit like 9-11, that it has created a whole new generation of radicalized extremists who will be prepared to attack, I'm afraid. My successors in counterterrorism policing will be very busy for a very long time to come. And of course, what goes with that threat is its horrible counterpart, the extreme right wing threat, which is also growing.
One of the reactions to the October 7th atrocity has been marches in London. There's been lots of complaints, particularly from Jewish people living in London, that they are intimidatory, that the police have not been strong enough on policing those marches, that they are allowed to happen with monotonous regularity, meaning that many people feel unsafe in central London around the marches. How will they police those demonstrations? I'm on record having talked about police demonstrations.
I thought Mark Rowley did a fantastic job policing those demonstrations. It's typical of being a commissioner on police that public order is the one thing that's guaranteed to put you on the front page of every newspaper and potentially cost you your job. And of course, like all policing and public order, when you say have they been strong enough, my history of 30 years in the police is, when the police are strong, they're talked about as though they were fascists. And when they are weak, they are talked about as two-tier policing.
That's part of the argument for two-tier policing is we're weak on minorities, black community, BLM, but we're very strong on far-right protests. We're very weak on Palestinian, but we'd be very strong on EDL. None of that is true. I know all the senior public order commanders in the Met.
I know how they try and police. I've known the 30-year history of policing public order, which 20 years ago became what we call community-based public order policing, where we recognize that people have the right to protest as long as they do it lawfully and peacefully. They're two really important words. I do think at one point we may have lost track of lawfully, but I think the whole criminal justice system has.
So one of the problems the Met has in every chief council around the country is that you have to allow a certain amount of unlawful activity before they breach a threshold. So you have to allow a certain amount of disruption, a certain amount of obstruction. People are not going to get convicted for a minor disruption or a minor obstruction. What's happened with the Palestinian protests is they've happened for so long at such weight that they have now tipped that threshold into too disruptive, too obstructive, and therefore the police has had to react harder to that.
The day they did, I could have written the headline for you. Look at the police, heavy-handed. If you're on the left, they're heavy-handed now. If you're on the right, we should have been even more brutal.
It's called the Thin Blue Line for a reason. You stand between two warring parties and you're trying to keep the peace, and unfortunately policing will never get the right kind of coverage for that incredibly difficult thing. Has there been too much fear among the police, though, of alienating particularly the Muslim community? If we look at the Pakistani rape gangs, one criticism that was made of the forces involved, particularly in northern towns, it was a degree of squeamishness, not wanting to upset community relations.
We interviewed a grooming survivor actually on the DUT who said the police at the time were completely afraid with what was going on, didn't want to step in, didn't want to appear racist. Well, I think that's also an example of appalling policing. So if I take the political correctness argument to one side for a moment, it was just an example of appalling policing. It wasn't just about racism.
It was failing to treat white working-class girls who were incredibly vulnerable as a series of victims of horrific crimes. So that is just very bad policing. The political correctness argument is also true, and I don't think it was just the police. I think every agency looked at the issue, went through the lens of, we'll be seen as racist, we'll be called out for being racist.
I think everyone recognises now what a fundamental mistake that was, particularly for those victims. So, you know, I thought it should be with them and what happened to them, and they'll be living with it for the rest of their lives. That is my example of political correctness gone mad, woke, being not the kind of woke I agree with at all, taking it to an extreme degree. But it is also an example of something incredibly important, which I think is fear in policing, that if you lose control of the streets, you're going to lose your job.
If you don't have the trust and confidence of a community and you do something that is seen by that community as wrong, and the most extreme example of this is when a young black man dies in police custody. Every senior police officer is sitting on the edge of their seats thinking there is going to be a protest, followed by a right, and we have seen that in the past. And that's because the immediate assumption of that community is not the benefit of their waitful investigation into the police brutality or police murder their loved one. Now, I think there's been a lot of fear in the way we police minority communities thinking the result will be that.
This is what I was trying to say earlier on, and this is my problem with policing not really understanding race. You need the trust and confidence of communities. That doesn't mean you turn a blind eye to serious crime in those communities. It means you get the trust and confidence of the vast majority of law-abiding members of that community to police with them to stop the problems inside their community.
And if you don't have that, you get what we have seen in the past in this country. But isn't it also officers perhaps living in fear of criticism by people like you who have claimed that the police force is institutionally racist? They then thought to themselves, I'm a white copper operating in Rochdale. I do not want to be accused of being racist.
So actually, when it comes to this quite tricky subject of Pakistani men grooming white working class girls, do you know what? I might sit this one out because I don't want to be criticised by the likes of Neil Basu or anyone else. Well, that might be true. So, and I think a large part of that is what I saw as a sergeant in 1999, where we didn't explain institutional racism to the front line of policing.
By the way, we have never tried to explain it since. We just tried to sweep under the carpet. And when I left my career, it was largely on the back of chief principals not wanting to admit it again, even though exactly the same conditions exist as existed in 1999. That didn't mean I meant go and blurt it out to 150,000 cops and make them all feel like they're being called racers.
And by the way, I think that is massively underestimating the intelligence of our workforce. But of course, you should spend some time and effort explaining what the problem is. And actually, the institutional, that's the one word the commissioner won't use. But he has used systemic.
So he recognises that it isn't just a bunch of individual racists. And there is a systemic problem in policing that is overpolicing minority communities. He's recognised that. He's doing something better.
But nobody wants to use that word because basically police officers of my generation remember what it felt like to have that word used and it not be explained to us. So a lot of my colleagues thought they were being called individually racist. And I think you're right to say if it is done badly, you could definitely have that effect. Even the failings that you said.
there were around the lack of investigation into the child rape gangs by the majority of times Pakistani men do you think now there should be a full national inquiry to learn the lesson something the government has said it will not do it's still sticking with what a lot of critics say a much weaker local inquiry short answer is yes so i think it is a mistake not to have one i'm conflicted by that because so many public inquiries become elongated very messy incredibly expensive and by the time they deliver any kind of conclusion you know it's gone out of people's minds but rotherham for me is a bit like hellsborough i don't think we'll ever go out of people's minds so until you uncover the actual truth and you lay it bare it will always be there so i think for that reason this is one of those occasions where i think yes this really should happen can we talk about the south port murders again we don't want to repeat this man's name more than once but do you consider axel reader cabana to be a terrorist no and i said that very clearly at the time so i would consider him to be as a monster who wanted to terrorize that's very different from being a terrorist so it's a bit of an arcane point for the public because all they see is a mass atrocity and fear and terror so they think well that's just terrorism isn't it terrorism is a very political crime you have to read the full definition in the 2000 act of the terrorist act about what it actually is but it requires an ideology it requires a reason for committing the act which is usually the overthrow of a policy or a government if we go down the lines of looking at everyone who has a reason in their own heads to commit violence and make that terrorism you're going to overwhelm the counter-terrorism machine in this country when they are looking at a huge volume of actual terrorists who are ideologically driven and determined to kill so i think jonathan hall the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation agrees with me that this is not terrorism and has published his report and the review he was asked to do but he also i agree with him when he says there needs to be a system whereby these individuals once they are spotted if they are not considered terrorists are still dealt with in a similar way but by non-counter-terrorism and mi5 has prevent failed in total or on this case well not necessarily on this case because as you say he is not considered a terrorist so prevent is not there to capture people of this type but kimira and i have reported on many different occasions in the relatively young life of the daily podcast where somebody who was on prevent's radar you know what these cases are went on to murder and maim and lots of people criticize prevent as a system and say that it is now failed it needs to be closed down something else needs to be restarted i just wondered where you were i utterly disagree and i spent my six and half years in counter-terrorism arguing that prevent was the most important pillar of the government strategy i wish at the time that successive administrations had stood up to support their own strategy i think at the time it was introduced it was introduced so badly and clumsily and mistakes were made that it did look exactly as we were being accused of something that was targeting the muslim community and was fascistic in its response and it wasn't supposed to be that at all i know the person who devised it at the end of the day it was a pre-criminal entirely voluntary system whereas if you thought you had a problem or somebody close to you thought you had a problem you could be referred into and get some help and hopefully dissuade you from it now in the time that it's been established i don't know how many thousands of people have been through the prevent system through the full process of channel if even one percent of those was dissuaded from becoming a terrorist or committing a terrorist attack then prevent has paid for itself many many times over now does that mean that prevent is a foolproof system it's no more foolproof than the entire counter-terrorism machine we've had terrorist attacks we will continue to have terrorist attacks they're much harder to stop and see and stop than they've ever been before but so is somebody who is potentially being radicalized it's very hard to know whether or not that person is deceiving you is lying or is perfectly helped by you but in later years decides to go back on that path all of those things have happened to us all of them and it doesn't certainly doesn't mean that the system is foolproof but because a handful of cases have resulted in terrorist attacks to dismiss an entire strategy that's had thousands of people would be a fundamental mistake in my opinion how worried are you though about the online extremism that young people are exposed to we've obviously got the case of the south court murderer who was downloading all sorts of different things online via al-qaeda manual and all the rest of it we've had a huge dialogue about the netflix series adolescence and the premise of that is a young boy basically being radicalized by the incel movement to kill a female classmate do you worry about what young people are exposed to and do you think the government tech giants and others should be doing more the last time i was in the telegraph offices was in 2020 explaining to your editor what the incel movement was i said very publicly that would make the situation you just described worse this is an i told you so moment a really disturbing percentage of counterterrorism cases are early teenagers now i watched adolescence over the weekend it's utterly brilliant compelling and totally disturbing as a father of three thought i mean you'd be terrified as a parent now you ask what i think of the social media and the online experience 100% of the cases i dealt with in counterterrorism had online either downloading radicalizing use of social media to radicalize others or to be influenced by 100% we have no idea the scale and i do because i was my profession but the scale the volume and the timing of the stuff that our youngsters are seeing is extraordinary and it has is having a much more widespread effect even my point earlier on about terrorizing youngsters and wanting to protect themselves by arming themselves but for those who have got problems and those problems might be grievance or disenfranchisement or mental health or it just might be that they are and this is rare in my experience genuinely evil this is giving them some methodology and some ways to commit it and i think until somebody does something about it we're in terrible trouble the great thing about things like adolescence is making everyone think about it and talk about it but i remember the six major technology companies all telling the heads of counterterrorism the five last countries that they wouldn't meet us to discuss how they might help us stop this problem that was way back in 2018 it's only the fact that governments and legislators have got involved things like the online safety act that has made those companies set up and take notice it'll only be when advertisers refuse to advertise on those platforms will they really take notice and the unfortunate thing is they're the only people who can cure it they're the only people with the budget's big enough and the brain's big enough to do something about this given the failures of the tech platforms to act in a way that many of us agree with you on is it time to ban smartphones for under 16s oh i would i do that in harvey and i think it's in harfordshire there's a town where the problem is is peer pressure you know you want to send your child to school where everyone's got a smartphone and they haven't i mean the bullying and the fear of missing out and the mental health trauma that will come from that i think every parent in modern age would recognize so sending them to a school where no one's like that well that's got legs and i can't remember where it is but i heard that a number of schools in an education area got together and agreed that with the parents the trouble is experiencing what i've experienced you tend to be a bit extreme so i would say yes but i would say that actually having a big debate in parliament this is not for police officers or former police officers to make strident comments on it's a societal issue and society has to debate these things no we're running out of time quick question why did you not take that top job to be in charge of the government's new border control force i advised on the creation of it so i think it's absolutely the right thing to do i think martin here is a fantastic appointment the job itself is a bit like a white hall civil servants job to manage ministers of state and to create a cross white hall response to a significant issue it's absolutely the right thing to do i wasn't interested in doing that i was interested in being a person who enforces the law and smashes the gangs so i hope they've been advertising director general of the national crime agency which i've applied for before i would have applied for that job but the inability of governments of wherever you to control our borders as many votes to see it it's incredible failure isn't it and what would you do about that i think i'm sitting in today while there's a border security which originally i thought i was going to be invited to and have a conversation so i would say probably exactly what you're saying one of the biggest causes of right-wing and i'm talking about extreme right-wing i'm not talking about right-wing politics or right-wing media i'm talking about this sentiment and so we've discussed southport is a failure to control immigration or to have any kind of sensible conversation my city is a son of an immigrant who helped build a national health service incredibly proud of that in order to prevent the narrative the false narrative taking hold that somehow immigration is the problem you do have to recognize that it's gone too far too fast and you have to do something about it now i don't really think i have to tell her that i think she knows that i think she knows it very clearly and she's made some very bold very strong statements about policing immigration that could easily have come from a conservative administration i would ask her to reconsider the national identification card scheme i think david blanket tried to introduce some of the black government was widely vilified but if you want to look strong and you want to help law enforcement that would be a massive that would be the only thing i think of that she isn't currently thinking of i.e. cards for everyone yeah the idea that it's a smart revolution you know if you've got a passport 80 percent of this country has a passport if you've got a driving license if you've got a bank card if you've got a we're used to biometric identification for living our entire lives not least because you're all sitting here with smartphones you're used to that and you give that data away freely if a government wants to enforce the law and particularly know who's in its country and who's out of its country it needs that and i think public sentiment towards that given that it might be a strong point about border security would be pro whereas when david blanket tried to introduce it it was very much antagonistic towards that final question you mentioned you're a father of three would you encourage any of your children to join the police force today um yes so if i could just say what i started well i almost started with this is a love letter to policing i love policing i worked with thousands of police officers who i have no doubt whatsoever are the very best of us in society you hear that that great cliche all the time they're always running forward into danger when everyone else is running away they really are and by the way it's complicated because sometimes people you don't want in the police force are still prepared to run into danger and they are so it is more complicated but the vast majority of people doing that job are tremendous people and some of them have become my closest friends and always will be i wasn't bright enough to be a doctor or a nurse like my mother and father but there are very few jobs in public service more rewarding than bringing justice to a victim of crime or keeping peace in communities very few that i can think of i'll never have that purpose again Neil Bussu your new book turmoil 30 years of policing politics and prejudice is available now thank you so much for joining us on the daily thanks for your honesty and for your experience great interview thank you so much thank you we'll be back on monday 5pm