Sir Mark Rowley becomes leader of the Metropolitan police knowing its problems are so severe, with public confidence so low, that failure to reform may make him the last commissioner of the force as we know it.
Already there is renewed talk of taking away the Met’s status as the national lead for counter-terrorism so that it can better focus on serving London’s communities.
The only other low point that challenges the current crisis is the aftermath of the Macpherson report in 1999, which found that institutional racism within the Met had helped the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to escape justice.
But now, more than two decades on, so many promises of reform have been made and gone unfulfilled. Everyone from London’s communities to a Conservative home secretary, a Labour mayor, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary see the Met as falling short – or simply failing.
The only people who see a less than bleak picture are parts of the Met’s current leadership. Thus, among Rowley’s first tasks will be rebuilding the top team and, as his statement on his appointment stresses, rebuilding policing by consent.
When he first applied to be Britain’s top officer, in 2017, Rowley was crestfallen at losing out to Cressida Dick. He left the Met in 2018, after 31 years in policing, and went travelling in south Asia for several months, returning with his usual police chief clipped haircut having grown longer, and sporting something that looked like a goatee.
Back from his travels and working in the private sector, he watched in dismay as the Met under Dick lurched from self-inflicted crisis to predictable disaster. He soon knew he would try to be commissioner again when the chance came.
Chris Sims, a friend of Rowley’s for two decades and a former chief constable of the West Midlands, said: “He has had a chance to step away. He is both an insider and informed outsider. He is a very intelligent, lateral thinker, and innovative.”
After gaining a maths degree at Cambridge, Rowley became an officer in his home city of Birmingham, where early in his career he was savagely beaten by a group of football hooligans. He rose through the West Midlands force before becoming chief of Surrey – so unlike Dick at the time of her appointment, he has run a force before.
Ordinarily it would be obvious that the new commissioner’s first task will be to raise the Met out of the humiliating status of being in special measures. But it will be one of several urgent priorities that are foreseeable.
Key confidence measures have fallen by at least 10 percentage points over the last five years, an astonishing collapse for a major institution. Rowley’s commissionership will live and die by these quarterly attitudes of public trust and confidence.
Hence the stress in Rowley’s statement on restoring working with communities. Every new Met commissioner starts by vowing to cut crime but ends up having to deal with issues about the force’s legitimacy. More than his predecessors, Rowley will have to do both – and at pace.
Some of his thinking on tackling crime come in a foreword he wrote in 2021 for a Policy Exchange report on knife crime in London. He backed stop and search but stressed that the Met needed other tactics alongside it to tackle violence, and that it could learn from elsewhere.
Rowley, who spent most of his career outside the Met, wrote: “The Met appears to adopt a highly suppressive approach yet puts fewer resources and less effort into community policing and pro-active prosecution of drugs gangs.”
In his years running counter-terrorism he dealt regularly with politicians. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, knows him from that time, and especially the ordeal that was the 2017 wave of attacks.
But the Met commissioner is the only police chief answering to two bosses – the London mayor and home secretary. Dick came across as annoyed by questions from politicians. Rowley accepts they are part of the system, but he will not be a pushover, says Sims. “He will not always say what is comfortable to the politicians.”
During his last time in the Met he had lows, such as backing the use of water cannon, but his time running counter-terrorism boosted his standing.
When he had to deliver bad news, he is reputed to have developed a catchphrase for his staff: “Get me the commissioner, the home secretary and some chocolate please, but not necessarily in that order.”
However he can, for however long he lasts, Rowley will need to hold on to any sense of perspective he can.
