Policing, Politics and Prejudice – A Conversation with Neil Basu QPM

In this compelling and straight-talking episode, Philip sits down with Neil Basu QPM, one of the UK’s most respected and outspoken former senior police leaders.

Neil shares the lessons, frustrations, and hard truths from over 30 years in policing — from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry to counter-terrorism, leadership under political pressure, and the moral challenges of modern policing.

They discuss racism within the system, the dangers of disinformation, and the human cost of service. Neil also opens up about life after leaving the Met, his book Turmoil, and why courage and compassion are vital to real leadership.

🧭 Key Topics Covered

• Institutional Racism & Leadership Fear – Why acknowledging it is the only path to trust.
• Counter-Terrorism & Radicalisation – Lone actors, online grooming, and the threat from the far right.
• Politics & Policing – When public service collides with political convenience.
• The Human Cost of Service – How policing impacts families and communities.
• Leadership Lessons – Neil’s mantra: “Be quick, be competent, and be compassionate.”
• Life After the Met – From frontline leadership to mentoring, writing, and podcasting.

📚 About Neil Basu QPM

Neil Basu served as Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations at the Metropolitan Police, leading UK Counter-Terrorism Policing. Known for his integrity and willingness to challenge the status quo, he’s been at the heart of some of Britain’s most complex policing and national security operations.

He is the author of Turmoil: The Official Autobiography – 30 Years of Policing, Politics and Prejudice — a raw and insightful account of his career and the challenges of reforming British policing.

Neil also co-hosts the Crime Agents Podcast with crime journalist Andy Hughes, offering honest commentary and insight into crime, justice, and law enforcement today.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 2:11 Why Write Turmoil
• 5:14 Institutional Racism Defined And Denied
• 12:41 Over Policed, Under Protected Communities
• 18:05 Promotion, Bias, And Leadership Failures
• 28:24 Representation And The US Comparison
• 36:47 Enter Counterterrorism: Lone Actors Online
• 43:12 Post‑9/11 Fractures And Trust
• 50:12 The Rise Of Right‑Wing Terror Threat
• 57:08 Disinformation As A National Security Risk
• 1:04:22 Big Tech, Moderation, And Money
• 1:08:31 Palestine Action And Proscription

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to the Diffuse Podcast with host Philip Grindel, CEO and founder of Diffuse, a global threat and intelligence consultancy that blends psychology and intelligence to mitigate threats and risks to prominent people and brands.

SPEAKER_03: 0:16

So welcome to the Diffused Podcast. I'm Philip Grindel, founder of Diffuse Global, and author of the Personal Threat Management, The Practitioner's Guide to Keeping Clients Safer. This is the show where I sit down with people on the front line of security, politics, policing, and risk. And ask them perhaps difficult questions and share lessons that help us all understand threats and how to manage them. If you'd like more insight, subscribe not just to the podcast, but also to Diffuse News, our weekly newsletter, with analysis and practical advice on keeping clients and communities safer. You'll find the link in the show notes. So let's get on to today's conversation. And it's a real uh pleasure and honour for me because today I'm joined by someone who I've known for over 30 years, which makes us both feel very old. Um, Neil Basou Queen's Police Medal. And let me tell you, for those of you who don't know or maybe listening outside the UK, they don't just give those away. Uh Neil rose to the position of assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police. He led the UK's counter-terrorism policing and has been one of the most outspoken voices on racism, politics, and the future of policing. He's the author of Turmoil, 30 years of policing, Politics and Prejudice, a book I highly recommend. Whether you have experience of being uh an officer or not, he's also the host or j co-host, I suppose, of the Crime Agents podcast, where he continues to challenge thinking about crime and justice. In the conversation we're going to have, we're going to talk about subjects such as institutionalized racism, how politics fuels terrorism and lone actors, and what lessons Neil might want to pass on to the next generation of detectives and leaders, and what the future might hold for him personally. So, Neil, uh welcome. Thanks for doing this. Thirty years an awful long time, doesn't it? 30 years.

SPEAKER_01: 2:19

It does. I'm pleased you're not recording this in video.

SPEAKER_03: 2:21

No, well, yeah, let's look like I did then. Yeah. Well, it's very, it's very uh self-conscious of me because I'm that's I'm the reason I'm not doing it in video, so not you. So listen, you know, you've just written this wonderful book, and I think it is a wonderful book, and you and I have talked about it previously, um, because I said to you that my emotion of reading the book was one of sadness. Um and I don't necessarily mean that negatively as a you know, it was a miserable book or something. I just meant sad because as a white man or a white person, I had no idea of the experiences that you were going through, particularly when you get to the rank that you got to, and then you were still experiencing some of the issues that we can talk about and clearly was not conscious of some of the issues that some of my colleagues were going through. Um and sad because we both spent the majority of our working lives in an organization that I think it's fair to say is tainted and i you know the the role of commissioner, which which we'll talk about, is the most, I think, probably difficult role there is in in in even perhaps politics. But but it it I think it was an important book as well, and I hope people read it, and I hope people read it with an open mind, because I think people should read that book at the beginning of their service rather than at the end of their service, like I did. Um, but what was the motivation?

SPEAKER_01: 3:55

Well, I mean that is the great question, isn't it? There were probably three motivations. So I I worried when I wrote it that people would read it and think that I was criticizing policing. Now, let's be honest, I am criticizing policing, but I'm criticizing policing because I absolutely love it. I'm still in love with policing. I still have lots of friends and family in this game. It is very, very important to me that policing is the best it can possibly be. So writing the book was partly about describing some of the amazing policing that goes on, but how brutal the profession is and what it can do to you, you know, personally, physically, and mentally. And more importantly, what it can do to our families and the consequences of doing this job on behalf of people who are largely strangers to us, who we will put our lives and our personal lives on hold to help. And when policing is at its best, it is the very best thing in society. The trouble is when it's at its worst, it's monstrous. And I think I've you and I, I think, have earned the right to criticize policing because we've left a lot of blood and treasure on the ground along the way. And I think we've got not just the right, but a responsibility to do that. So that was part of the reason for writing the book. It is actually a love letter to policing, not a criticism. And the second part was this perennial issue. You know, I joined in 92 and in 1999 when the McPherson report came out uh into the uh murder of Stephen Lawrence and effectively our bungled investigation. And was it corrupt? Was it racist? Was it what were the reasons why we couldn't do a good job on murder when we were the great detectives from New Scotland Yard? I was a very young sergeant and I was propelled onto the Lawrence Inquiry team to look at an organization trying to defend itself initially and say there's nothing to see here. We did the best we could. I mean, I was a young sergeant, you know, I wasn't even yet given my detective sergeant, you know, I was a TDC to uniform sergeant trying to get back into the department. It didn't take me long to read that investigation to know that it was a bungled homicide investigation. It would be years before I'd run my own murder squad. So the fact that we were trying to defend it, ridiculous. And then when we realized it was indefensible, what were the reasons for it? And we knew we were going to get called institutionally racist. So we started looking at what the reasons might be for that, trying to get ahead of the game, like all police officers do. I think Louise Casey calls it defensiveness and denial. She's sort of right. We're desperately trying to protect our reputations. So our job was to find out if we are institutionally racist, why and what can we do about it? So to cut a long story short, the diagnosis of that was internally we didn't recruit, retain, or promote anyone of colour. And that is really resonant considering I finished my career as the most senior officer of colour in the United Kingdom, the fourth to reach that rank since 1829. So showing that that is probably quite a truism. Then when they make a mistake, they get the disproportionate way they are dealt with when they make mistakes, including all the way to misconduct. Um, but the way they're overrepresented in grievance or is dramatic. So that's the internal picture is not very healthy. Uh and Louise Casey drew out a lot of personal experience about how people had been treated. So I think she said 50% of black and Asian officers would detail some kind of racist behavior towards them or in their presence. Um, and about 33% of women were experiencing uh misogyny to them or in their presence. When I first read that, there was a little bit of me where I said, Oh, that's good. And do you know why? Because in our day, Phil, it would have been 100%. If you'd sponge, so it would have been 100%. So it's progress, it's just not very good progress for 2023 when she published. And then externally, when you spoke to the black community, there is only one community that has the least trust and confidence in policing, and it is the black community, specifically the Afro-Caribbean post-Windrush generation, because of the way we have over-policed and under-protected them. We never took their complaints as seriously as we would at a white person. Uh, and we started viewing all black people as potentially violent and potentially criminal because we didn't know any. Nobody spent any time with them. And I talk in the book about running an intelligence unit at Brixton, where the walls were entirely covered with the faces of young black men. And of course, I'd come from Battersea, where the walls were entirely covered with the faces of young black men. And if you're an urban inner city cop, that's what you saw every day. Now, a lot of people I joined with were white kids from villages outside of London. Nobody in London wanted to be a police officer. They knew it was too hard that they could get a job elsewhere. So a lot of kids were imported into London and they had not experienced people of colour in the in the very white communities they came from. And what they were told to do was go and police inner city estates. Uh, and I think some of them were terrified. Um the terrifying starts at the in the parade room for the briefing when they're just given a whole list of people. It makes them think, I think, that all black and Asian people are criminals. So over policing and underprotecting communities and that lack of trust and confidence is a vicious cycle where you know you try, you know, police officers doing their best who aren't racist, who are doing their best to do their job, don't realize that the person who's standing in front of them is utterly traumatized by generations of their family being treated badly by generations of police officers before that. They spark police officers not experienced enough to know how to diffuse that or to try and negotiate or come to some kind of um, you know, human agreement between the two, and it all goes horribly wrong, and that perpetuates again and again and again. And I hate to say it, but in 2025 that's still the same. So the book was trying to make the I'm tired of making the moral case for you know being anti-racist. I remember having an argument with one knighted chief constable who said, we can't use the term anti-racist because it's political. I said, if if anti-racism is a political term, we're all in terrible trouble, aren't we? Um what politics are you supporting if you think that's just a political term? Um, but you know, not being able to use the term that McPherson told us institutional racism means something to the black community. They trusted McPherson, they trusted that definition. And the fact that none of us seemed prepared to use it tells them that we are not serious about changing. So I'm trying to tell people in the book if you understood institutional racism and how it how it manifests itself in the way that we police, and you understood how the community felt about it, you would begin to realize how much more effective you would be if you admitted it, apologized for it, and then did something about it. You would get people more likely to obey the law, give you intelligence, be witnesses, come to court and support the criminal justice system. And rather melodramatic, I say, you know, most importantly, they might actually help one of us when we're getting our heads kicked in instead of standing there filming it and posting it, which is what they're currently doing. So I it sort of angers me that we can't see the benefit of recognizing that we have to change from this focus. Um, and I know why. So, chief constables, they're scared of the backlash from the majority of the front line who are white, all thinking they're being called racists. And they're scared of the media saying, Well, we told you you were racist and now you're admitting it. So they're scared of that backlash. It's actually in the minutes of a National Police Council's chief council's meeting in May 2022, which is online. You can look at it. It's a single line. We're worried about the backlash, so we're not going to say it. I'm amazed, you know, whoever wrote those minutes wasn't taken to task for not writing that down, so it was so obvious. That for me is a complete lack of leadership. You know, institutional racism isn't about the front line. It's not about individual officers on the front line. It's about the way the organization does business. And that is entirely down to its leadership. So it is a leadership problem. It is not a frontline problem. It is the culture, the tone, the standards you set, the laws you enforce, and the way you enforce them, and the way you train and develop people to do that. That's the problem. And I'm afraid leadership doesn't see it. And I try to make them see it in 2021 when I was on National Police Chiefs Council as Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations. It's a big voice, a loud voice in policing. I tried to say exactly what I've just said to you. I clearly wasn't very good at it because they voted to say, no, we're not going to say it. Thanks very much. And I decided to retire that day. It was a very sad day.

SPEAKER_03: 12:35

I'm not sure it's because of your voice. Um there's a couple of bits to pick out of that. One is I I mean, you and I served in Brixton at the same time. And I remember I transferred there voluntarily and was told I was mad. And uh I remember getting there, and I won't say who it was, but a very senior officer um said to me on my first day, um, welcome to Brixton. You need to understand it's us against them, pick a side. That said, I also remember, because in those days we used to walk the beat, um, being posted to walk the beat. And you know, I was I wasn't naive, I'd come from the military, but I I wasn't born and bred in London. And I I learnt terms and and words and things and phrases and cultural differences that I'd never heard of. Baby father, baby mother, all those sort of things, which which meant nothing to me until they were explained to me. I remember sitting in a uh you probably know that uh there was a there was a wonderful Rastafarian guy who lived who worked in that were at a shop in um in the marketplace. And I went and had a I went there and had a cup of coffee because it that was a call. And he explained to me all about Rastafarianism and Ethiopia and all this sort of stuff, which I knew nothing about. So I think if you I think if you were fortunate to walk the beat, you learnt a great deal because you had to dis talk to people on the estates and and despite what people think, not everyone in Brixton was black. Um although it's always paying for the most diverse areas of London.

SPEAKER_01: 14:00

Yeah, yeah. I was I was back there a couple of weeks ago in the wonderful Windrush Square, which looks so different from the way you and I remembered when we were young cops. Uh it's one of the most diverse streets in in Brixton, in London.

SPEAKER_03: 14:14

Yeah. So so I mean before we move before we sort of zone in on policing, uh I mean I I know I've asked this question before, but do you think the challenge is that the UK is institutionally racist?

SPEAKER_01: 14:28

Yeah, I mean I I the Tony Sewell report that Boris Johnson did after George Floyd to say, tell me whether the UK is still institutionally racist, which said we weren't. It said we were we still had problems with class and poverty. Um so I described that report as turned F because Tony's forward, Tony Sewell, who was the chair of the report and wrote the forward, the forward is dreadful. If you get past the forward and get into some of the chapters and some of the recommendations, particularly the chapter on policing, written by the brilliant Keith Fraser, who's the chair of the Youth Justice Board, an ex-police officer from the West Midlands, um, and they were all black, all the advisors on the board were black. That's got some very good recommendations and some very good, you know, it is a good historical trot through the reasons why um policing is still institutionally racist. So for the report to come out with the conclusion that Britain isn't institutionally racist, to me, as a police officer serving through the McPherson years and through 30 years was absolutely hilarious. It was just a way of knocking it into the long grass. But the interesting way of actually trying to remove racism by introducing class and poverty, Britain's always been institutionally classist and institutionally, you know, we we even have demographics based on your socioeconomic status depending on what job you do. I mean, we describe ourselves like that. I mean, we make ourselves institutional by doing that. So, yes, of course, class and poverty are hugely problematic. But do you not think class and poverty are absolutely dominated by people of color? Because and not because they chose to be working class or chose to be um poor, but because their circumstances through decades and decades of racism has left them there. So they are overrepresented in those two groups, and those two groups still are not getting on. In other words, this is not a meritocracy. We'd love it to be a meritocracy, it isn't. Uh, and I think I heard somebody quoting Idris Elba in the house saying the thing with talent exists everywhere. Opportunity does not. And if you look like me, or you look like Idris, or you're a woman, or you're neurodiverse, or you're LGBTQ, opportunities don't exist for you in the same way as they do if you're white, male, straight, middle class. And to say in 2025 that that's not true is laughably dense, in my view.

SPEAKER_03: 16:52

So within policing, I I remember when we had, and we probably still do them, when we had um focus groups, should we say, to to to assist people of colour getting promoted and and various other things. And of course, then the white officer says, Well, hang on a minute, you know, why aren't I getting opportunities like those? So how do we how do you as a leader then because I think part of the problem is communication or lack of? How do we how do we address those situations so that they are seen as being fair as opposed to this this kind of positive discrimination as being a negative thing?

SPEAKER_01: 17:31

Yeah. Well, there's one thing to say about that is it's not positive discrimination, it's positive action. Positive discrimination being illegal, so probably as a police force, it's probably a good idea not to do that. Um I've actually actively campaigned for positive discrimination for a time-limited period to increase the numbers of representation because you hit the nail on the head with your Brixton story. The reason, the reason that you started to learn about black culture and see black people differently is because you were on the beat and somebody invited you in for a cup of coffee and started telling you their life history. That is spending time with people and listening to them. That's what those positive action groups are largely about, you know. So the way I would do it is the trouble is I agreed with those positive action groups because they're mostly about raising people's confidence because they feel that they're not in the club, they feel excluded. So all the modern management speakers about inclusive leadership, and being inclusive means trying to listen to people of difference and not turn them into a clone of yourself, but listen to their different experiences, just like the Rasta in Brixton on that day. You're learning something by doing that. And it's you're you're beginning to realize, I hope, not the identity politics of difference, but actually the common humanity between you, that you both like music and you both like food and you both like dancing, and you can but you can have a laugh together, even though you're from completely different walks of life. That is the by the way, that's the most important skill about policing, isn't it? I mean, can you talk to a prince and a pauper? If you can't, you're in the wrong job. It's a people job. Uh, and you and I have had to talk to both. So it's you gotta know that.

SPEAKER_03: 19:06

Yeah, and when we first started out, you had to learn the you know the statement, which was without fear or favor.

SPEAKER_01: 19:11

Yes. And without fear or favor means something, but we've paid lip service to that. That's not really what people mean. It's the same way as saying I'm colourblind, I'll treat everyone equally, which normally means I'm treating everyone equally badly. Yes, with equal contempt. Yeah, and that is that is the wrong way to treat people anyway, because everyone everyone's an individual. You have to learn a bit about the person to treat them with respect, because their definition of respect or where they've been, the trauma they've suffered to get to that point, was my point earlier about cops not realizing the trauma that they're dealing with by the person who's confronting them, who may have been stopped 30 times that year before you've stopped them and are reacting. You're you're the straw that broke the camel's back, but you're having to deal with that. But if you go into that saying it's their fault, because that's the natural attitude of most police officers, is kind of I'm in charge here, you'll do as I say. Come down, it goes horribly wrong very quickly. Your positive action point is those positive action things, where I've lectured on those courses for people, I know what they're really about. They're not giving anyone an advantage that white officers think they're getting. I mean, I think white officers think they're getting all the answers to the questions for the next promotion board or for the next, I mean it's laughable. They'd be they're in those groups alongside their peers, because that's where they feel comfortable to talk, to try and raise their confidence levels, to give them the confidence to apply for promotion. Now, yes, they can get taught techniques, but those techniques are available to every officer. You can say that so you're blue in the face, and they still think there's some skullduggery. I was once investigated, or they almost opened an investigation into me and two of my senior colleagues, a white head of leadership and development, and two of us who were both um experienced uh ethnic minority superintendents. We did a positive action course for inspectors, and we got seven out of nine through the next chief inspector's board. They opened an investigation because somehow they thought we had cheated. I don't know how they thought we had cheated, but they thought we had cheated. And they quickly closed it down when they realized what a racist thing to do that was. We're just good at our jobs, and we, you know, we were good at we were good at developing the next generation of talent. But I would what I would do, and I've been lecturing on a leadership course for a police force this morning, they have opened the course up to everyone. And the course is actually very diverse. It's got police staff, police officers, uh, white, black, uh, inter, um, inter, I can't remember what they're what the management speak is for it now, but if you're a black female gay officer, you would, you know, the intersectionality of difference. It's all represented on this course because they opened the course up to everyone. So you immediately lose the but what they've done is they they're giving special priority to people who need it. So they're still effectively saying, yeah, we know because if we do that, the volume of numbers meets we'll end up with an entirely white male course. Yeah. So they have to pick and choose. But you are basically, they are development courses for people. They're not just for anybody who wants to go. I think one of the problems we had is we don't select well for promotion. We just allow anyone to apply. You're about to tell me your military history, please do, because it's important. But I I think we, in order to make it more diverse and fairer, we've somehow made it worse because we've opened it up to everyone. So we're not developing people who need to be developed. So that's that's my one thought about that. But the other one is the vast majority of people, this is about networking, staff associations, whether it's the Federation Superintendent Association or the Sikh Muslim Black Association, they're there to provide support to people who feel uncomfortable unless they're with their own kind. You know, it's why federation superintendents and chief officers are separated, because we feel like we're, you know, at various stages of our career, we feel we're in a different group. It's exactly the same for people with protective characteristics and they want to feel safe around people who feel safe who will help them develop. But in effect, what it is is it's a networking and mentoring group. If you're white, male, and straight, what kind of network mentoring group do you think you need in an organization that is 91% white, um, 70% male? You it's not gonna take you very long to find a group of like-minded people to study with or give you advice. The entire senior hierarchy is mostly male and white. You'll be able to get advice. You don't need a special group, would be my view.

SPEAKER_03: 23:33

Yeah. No, that you you mentioned the military, but the bit the bit I was gonna I think we've talked about it before, which is why you probably raised it. You know, in the in the military or my short time the military, you don't get to decide when you're gonna get promoted. You know, they identify those people who've got some leadership skills or might need some development and then propose that you go into a training uh cohort to be to be trained. I never understood the the police's perspective where anyone can effectively decide I'm gonna get I'm gonna go for promotion. And I know that there are people who say, Oh, yeah, but you have to get a senior officer to sign you off. When I first went with my sergeant, uh the senior officer that signed me off never even met me. Um for them it was just like a yeah, I'll I'll you know, tick a box and off you go.

SPEAKER_01: 24:19

So I you know I think you know we can move on to sort of see there's good and bad in both of those things, and it's typical of policing to go all the way one way because it's been accused of bias. Because if if you select people for promotion, the people who are doing the selecting are biased. Yeah. Because we all are, yeah, all human beings are biased, and you do promote in your own image. So basically, you I have a natural positive bias if I have someone of colour sitting in front of me. I have a natural positive bias if I have a Leeds United supporter sitting in front of me. I hate to declare that on your podcast. God, that's a shock. Or a British Alliance or a rugby player rather than a footballer. So I have these people sitting in front of me, and I know in my head, oh my god, I'm gonna like them because we're gonna have loads in common and we're gonna so you do end up even unconsciously selecting people who are just like you. So you have to get away from that as well. And that's the trouble with the military model where you decide. But if your model is so meritocratic that you can spot great leadership potential and great ability, and that you you can push people who don't want to be promoted into promotion, there's massive strength in that model as well. And there's strength in the model that makes it more equal of opportunity for people of difference. Somehow you've got to have a combination of what we've both just said. We don't have that. Policing just lets anyone go for it, regardless of and and then we have terrible mistakes in leadership who seem to get quite far. So we're clearly not very good at spotting, they're not very good at the job.

SPEAKER_03: 25:44

But but what does it say about policing, though, that we don't even trust ourselves so that the process becomes anonymous in case you know um corruption or whatever else comes into it? It doesn't speak well of political. I've also that speaks dreadfully of us as an organization, or I say us, them as an organization.

SPEAKER_01: 26:02

Yeah, it's an institutional corruption thing with a small C. So we've been sort of hijacked by HR and identity politics, and the this very sound very strange going from the super woke so-called head of counterterrorism. And I am super woke, and I want people to have equality of opportunity, but that doesn't mean equality, because you know, the human race doesn't work like that. It is quite Darwinian. You know, not everyone can be great at everything. People have to find their place, and leaders have to help people find their place. And sometimes that means not promoting them or moving them sideways or even firing them. You know, that's a hard role in leadership, but hiring and firing is what you do. You're absolutely right. What does it say about our leadership that we can't have those kind of conversations with people without being scared of being called racist, misogynistic? You know, you you are actually trying to create the very best people, regardless of who they are, to deliver the very best service for the most vulnerable people in society at the worst time of their lives. We should trust ourselves to be able to do that and to be able to create a, you know, a very diverse leadership culture because of it. But we don't, and we haven't been good at that. And I think it's largely because people of what I've just said, it isn't about malicious racists and sexists who just want to promote white men. It is about unconscious bias mostly, and mostly because we promote and we choose people we feel comfortable with. And we're all guilty of that. Every single human being, every psychologist, every you know, occupational uh psychologist expert who goes into these systems will tell you that's a problem. Well, there are ways around that. You have diverse selection boards. You know, and the trouble is you need a diverse leadership to have a diverse selection board. When I started, there weren't any, well, there were probably about two black or Asian sergeants in the Met who could have sat on a board for my, you know, to take me through the sergeant thing. So you have to get external people in to make the board diverse. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be chaired by a senior cop. It's when we stopped interviewing new recruits. You know, we didn't have any police officers interviewing new recruits, we did it by robot. Are we crazy? Do we not trust ourselves to recruit people or to understand the person standing in front of us could be a good police officer or not? So, in other words, we it's just exactly what I said. I I I hate to um quote Theresa May, I do it quite a lot, but she wrote a good book uh um on the abuse of power. And she describes policing that. She's not very fond of senior police officers. She's quite fond of policing, but she believe it or not, but and she was brilliant as Prime Minister when I was in national security. She was very good at the CT and the hostile states piece, Salisbury Poisonings, for instance. But she does talk about trying to tell the police to do to do something. They completely lack nuance. She'd uses stop and search as an example. I didn't mean not do any.

SPEAKER_03: 28:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:57

You can't, you know, because I'm telling you you're abusing the power, what you then do is you don't use your power. Yeah. It's very policing. We're very, you know, ironically, we're very black and white.

SPEAKER_03: 29:08

Well, we're quite militant, aren't we, as well, in that in that you know, police officers were although they can't take action as you know, they take action by their actions in terms of right, in that case, I've had a complaint. I've had a complaint for this, I won't be doing it ever again. And that's the end of it. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 29:22

It is a terrible cultural thing, but why should we be surprised? You know, we're our job is conflict management. Our job is not to be told what to do, it it's which is unusual because we're so military hierarchical. Yes, to do what you're told to do by your bosses, but not by the public. We're there to tell the public what to do. We are trained that way, and unfortunately, some people get it into their head that they're better than the public and they don't have to listen, and that's the problem. You know, our our cultural training of command and control, which came from the military, is not the right way to do business in the 21st century. But we're not training people in leadership terms or Or in new recruit terms, how to cope with that as a nuance. You know, it's either my way or the highway. I think we're still a bit like that.

SPEAKER_03: 30:08

So you know, the the the question I was going to ask you is my my understanding is that New York police in 2024 was about 60% ethnic minority. With, you know, and they've got their own diversity issues in terms of different diverse groups that we may not have in terms of Hispanic and all that. What were they doing that we didn't do? Why why were they able to achieve those sort of recruitment figures, which one would argue reflects New York in many ways, um that we weren't able to do? What what are they getting right and we're getting wrong then?

SPEAKER_01: 30:45

Well, in terms of representation, they were getting it right because they had aggressive positive action recruitment campaigns. So they reached out, and of course it's a it is, you know, it wasn't our day. It's actually, I know it doesn't feel like it. If you're a police officer, listen to this, please try and remember I'm talking 30 years ago. It was a well-paid profession and it was a very secure one. So there was a time in my career, about 10 years in, where we were the seventh best pre paid profession in the UK, a profession that starts with bankers and lawyers and doctors. So um the only rank that wasn't paid very well in the noughties was superintendents for the hours they did. And I feel sorry we had a lot of broken superintendents. We flogged them to death. But post the mid-70s, it was actually a well-paid profession that didn't require massive qualifications to join. In fact, if you passed the entrance exam, you didn't need any. So it was a way of getting out of poverty. It was a way of, you know, you could go one way or the other. You and I will have joined with cops who, regardless of what they looked like, could have been criminals, but chose to become cops. Some of them were. It was their choice to get out of their background. So there was a lot of that. There was a lot of positive action recruitment because of the um the sheer weight of the civil liberties movement in the 60s. So by then you end up getting a much more representative police force. That doesn't necessarily mean you get better at policing proportionately. So a lot of people would say is they made a they made great strides to make themselves more diverse. But the people that joined assimilated with what was a very white racist culture in the US. So in order to stay in the police force and not be bullied out of it, and if I can swear on your podcast, I used the term in my book, Fit In or Fuck Off, because I was raised in a white community, white schools, white town. You know, I learned very quickly how to survive in 1970s England as a white kid, as a mixed-race kid in a white community. Uh, and if you think about that when you join, I still hear black police officers today saying one of the hardest things for them is they do not like being hated by their own community for joining the job. Um, but when they get inside the police service, they don't want to be hated by their colleagues either. So they have to fit in. And one of my friends who's thank God has retired now, he spent a large part of his service effectively becoming racist to fit in with his racist colleagues, and then nearly had a breakdown when he left because he'd spent decades assimilating into a white culture. There are places in the States where cops have behaved badly towards their own community because the community doesn't like them for becoming cops, so they're immediately antagonistic. And of course, their internal culture was one of racism, so they've adapted to that. So it didn't cure the problems. You know, and my colleague who said to me, it's all very well for you, because I'm a proponent of representation. I think representation matters. And my colleague said to me, I think you're overplaying representation because it hasn't made any difference in the States. They've still got massive problems with racism. And I said, Well, that's true, but that is a very different cultural context. Because they imported their racism, because their the slave trade landed on their shores, and a lot of their black communities are descended from slaves and have proper racial trauma. Whereas we exported ours, so it's the Windrush generation who've come here, and the second and third generation who understand because they've heard it from their grandparents. They haven't been living with it every day, right up a. I mean, I I was born, the year I was born, they were still lynching people in the United States. So that is a kind of to tell a British person that they go, what? That can't be, that can't be right. You can't possibly be serious. Yeah, that's what they were doing. And then I can talk people, all these youngsters on the call I was on this morning, who weren't, you know, weren't born until the noughties, some of them, you know, telling them what 1970s and 80s England was like is kind of, you know, go and watch a documentary. It wasn't fun if you looked like me. You think you're having it hard now. Um and I think they are. I think we're going back to me feeling like I did then, if we're not careful in society. But the, you know, the USA, very, very different, very different culture. It doesn't work by assimilating. You have to remember your difference. Remember you're there to advocate for policing, but also to bridge the gap between your community and policing. Um and you're you have to win your community on side as well as your colleagues. You know that is a tough ask for a black or a brown police officer. It's a tough ask for a woman these days with the violence against women and girls in the post-cousin era, saying, why would I want to join an organization that has those levels of misogyny, or could have seen people like cousins and and the serial rapist David Carrick in plain sight, turning up every day with a badge? How can I join an organization like that? But representation matters, it will never get any different if those people are in the minority in the organization. Their voices will not be heard, you know, people they won't be noticed, they won't stand up, people won't support them. You have to have representation. We used to talk about post-mcpherson. If we get to 10% ethnic minority standing in the natural momentum will mean we'll get more and more. That was such a low bar. You know, it's 17% now, and it's still, you can walk onto release anywhere in London and not see a black or a brown face still. That's 17%. And London's 46% as a population. So you're way off the way the population looks. So representation does matter, but not representation of it involves just being the same as what's gone before. That's uh that's the mistake the US has made in some counties, in some states. There's 18,700 police forces, so it's hard to it's hard to generalize.

SPEAKER_03: 36:34

So that's a good segue then, because that that let's let's let's move from from kind of looking at policing to looking at what you know when what your sort of end of your career was about, which was around countering terrorism. And I suspect some of these issues that we're talking about are very much involved with the state of our country and the threat from internal terrorism.

SPEAKER_01: 36:59

Um totally.

SPEAKER_03: 37:01

And so that it's it's a good kind of segue to say, okay, well, you know, yep, the police haven't got it right and and there's lots of work to do there. And I do think the concept of saying we're institutionally racist and then explaining making sure that people know what it means, I think is a critical step forward. Um whether that happens or not, who knows. But when we look at when we look at terrorism in the UK and your experience of that, what what is it? You know, where where what was your kind of first um initiation of terrorism?

SPEAKER_01: 37:32

Oh, it's really interesting, actually. My uh not my first initiation of terrorism per se. Uh well, no, yeah. Okay, so I I joined as Daxo, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations, all the protective security commands. So royalty and specialist protection, guarding parliament and diplomatic community, aviation, policing. Um you know all this very well. But for your listeners, it's a very specific protective security job. It's not about uh hunting and catching terrorists. That's the detective side of the job. I actually get into terrorism after 23 years and being one of the Met's most experienced detectives, and I'm given this effectively uniform protective security job. But of course, what happens is when the people, when my counterpart, the senior national coordinator for Pursue, is working with MI5 to catch a terrorist, they brief me on what they're doing because I might have to stand up security all around the country, tell chief constables you need more armed patrols here, you need more visibility there, you need to close down an airport or a train station or stop that event happening. I need to be in a position to be able to do that. And within a couple of weeks of literally I get the job, and I'm still trying to read what contest is as a the government's strategy on counterterrorism, because I've come from organized crime, I've come from a completely different world. So I land there and I'm looking at this. Uh I get a phone call from the deputy senior national coordinator to say, we need to brief you in on something. And it's a 13-year-old boy in Lancashire who's in his bedroom on his laptop, and he has been communicating with an 18-year-old in Australia, and they are planning an atrocity at the Anzac Day Parade in Australia. That's my first experience of. So these two um Islamist jihadis who are teenage boys who are communicating. The 18-year-old doesn't know that the person who is inciting him to commit this gross act of murder and mayhem is 13 because they're communicating online. This was a very early introduction into what has now become the norm: radicalization online, very young people, very young, often lone actors, not terrorist cells, that people think about when they think Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, they think of groups of people being well-trained, well-funded, combat veterans from the war, parachuted back into their home countries with their old passports to commit atrocities. You end up with this. And it was a very, this was April 2015, so it was very early on. And then when I got the job of senior national coordinator, and I'm chasing terrorists, within four days, I'm very unlucky, aren't I? It was called Dot to Death on Trident. There's a every time I was on call, there was a murder. So maybe the way to cure terrorism is not to give me a job in terrorism. But four days into that job, a boy tries to set a bomb off on the Jubilee line. My wife just got out of the train before it. So she was on the train that had just disembarked. The train that pulled in behind, a bomb went off. Now he got his chemistry wrong, so it didn't fully detonate. Thank God. The second person to do that, um, this was October 2016. And uh we were hunting this boy for 25 hours. We caught him within 25 hours. We thought that that was quite a result. We got lots of pats on the back for doing it. We should have caught him much earlier. There are reasons why we didn't catch him much earlier. But for a while, we thought we're clearly looking for a black or Asian Islamist extremist. And when the CCTV crew come back to us and they've been through every frame of every piece of CCTV on every part of the network where this boy could have gone. And this is about seven or eight hours later, the screen flashes up in front of us, and we've been tracking a particular um black terrorist, about black Muslim terrorist, and we think it's him. And by bizarre coincidence, his pattern of movement around London seems to echo what would have happened by the bomber, but he's completely unrelated. And what comes up on the screen is a white ginger head kid from Devon and Cornwall, who's a Muslim convert, who's got neurodiverse problems, and is uh and is uh uh an undergraduate studying chemistry. Not very well, thank God. So you you basically stereotyping sometimes doesn't help, you know, it is the cause that but these were these were very early kind of understandings in that this is much more complicated than you think. It's not Al-Qaeda versus the West, which is what Osama bin Laden wanted and created with 9-11. And post-9-11, I I was working in anti-corruption at the time as an SIA, and I was working with MI5 on anti-corruption in the Met. We were chasing very bad cops, uh, and they were helping me do that. And of course, I was sitting in a room in Jubilee House when the Twin Towers came down, and literally all of our pages went off at the same time around the table. And I never saw MI5 again until nearly two decades later when I end up in counterterrorism. I end up working with them because all of a sudden they were post-Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, they were trying to find work, to be frank. So they wanted to do public sector corruption, were helping out policing with its own corruption at the time in the 90s. And uh all of a sudden, they're four times their size and completely committed to the ISIS threat. Now, where why do I go here? The day after 9-11, I'm a senior police officer trying to get to New Scotland Yard. I'm walking up Stratton Ground towards the old Scotland Yard. You you know it very well. There are now armed guards at the front for obvious reasons, and that armed police officer challenged me. Because I I when I left my house, it was cold, it was wet, and I had a long overcoat on. When I get to London, it's hot, I'm sweating. I basically look like an Arab. I'm clean shaven, I look like an Arab, I'm sweating, I'm walking up to New Scotland. I didn't blame him for challenging me at all. But if he got his decision making wrong that day, I could have been shot. And I knew how it felt to get on any public transport, to look a cop in the eye who didn't know I was a serving cop, and to have a very careful conversation because I started to feel very different overnight. You look at the rise of hate crime in the United Kingdom and every Western country on the back of 9-11. Osama bin Laden would have been delighted. He had created the fracture that he needed in communities to say, I told you all those people were against us. Now come and support my cause. And he went from about 400 people to about 400,000 to probably many millions now overnight that spread throughout the world. And we didn't understand that. We didn't have a counter-narrative to say, no, we're not like that. We're liberal democracy, we believe in integration and cohesion. And, you know, people didn't believe that. We've just talked about the over-policing and underprotected black community post-Windrush. It was easier for bin Laden to get his message of splitting the community through. And of course, our national security community was mostly white men as well. So they didn't really understand what they were dealing with. John Brennan, Barack Obama's national security advisor on counterterrorism, said it best. He said, we must create the diverse leadership that our values require and our mission demands. It's a hell of a statement. I wish I'd said it. And he was talking about the US intelligence community, which was the brightest in the world. They're all Ivy League, the best graduates that they could possibly get. Incredibly bright, but utterly white. And they are the people who collectively failed to spot the threat of Osama bin Laden, basically one brown man in a cave. So you would think when we have this massive worldwide global war on terror, we'd be hiring Muslim experts, analysts, detectives, police officers, we'd be hiring them hand over fist so we could get an angle, we would understand the problem, we'd be able to interdict the problem, even from undercover, undercover online, whatever. You'd think we'd be doing that, wouldn't you, at a relentless pace. Were we doing that? No, we weren't. So I end up, you know, 14 years later, so where we have a Muslim contact unit, there's a handful of people who are basically sidelined and not listened to. We used to have faith officers on every borough, they're being removed. So yeah, prevent officers on every borough were being diluted. We're going the wrong way. So we don't have that diversity. And at the same time, um, five years earlier, we had missed the fact that Brexit was the biggest news story in the UK. And the referendum and the split in our communities that that caused between Remainers and Leavers. And it didn't matter what side of the argument you were on, but there was a very racist element to the Brexit, the Leavers campaign. You know, UKIP became very dominant. UKIP came out of the British National Party, which came out of the National Front. So there is a very strong extreme right-wing element to the supporters of that party. By no means all of them. Same today with the reform. By no means all of the people who support reform are racist. But they do attract that because it's a xenophobic national white picture. So that was happening at the same time. We've completely failed to stop that because people were saying, well, that's not a problem in our country. We're the UK, we're incredibly tolerant. We fought the Nazis. We're not like that. Oh no, we have those in our midst. And of course, they were being massively um, you know, Islamist terrorist attacks gave them the reason for being the racist they were. So they started looking at everyone who was brown as a Muslim and every Muslim as a terrorist. So that became so anti-hate crime, and sorry, anti-Muslim hate crime went through the roof. Uh the right wing started to rise, people started getting more extreme until we started getting proper terrorist groups who were white nationalist supremacists. And that is the split that continues today. So my successes today, four years after I've retired, I spent from 2017 to 2021, trying to convince the government and MI5 to take this seriously. Two brilliant leaders, Andrew Parker, the ex-DG of MI5, and Ken McCallum, the current leader, both absolutely agreed. But convincing the ground floor staff at MI5 that right-wing terrorism was a problem in this country was hard. Convincing the government, Boris Johnson's administration, that right-wing terrorism was a problem, unbelievably hard. Convincing the right wing media, impossible. You know, why are you taking your eye off the ball, Bassi? You're letting Islamists get away with it while you're hunting these right wing. And never said that. 80% of the problem was still the Islamist threat created by Osama bin Laden, reinforced with the schism with Islamic State, even more extreme. We don't like Al-Qaeda, they're not brutal enough, we're going to be worse. That was still 80% of our work. But instead of the 5% when I joined, we're now at 20% of right wing threat. In other words, our communities are fractured, they're divided, they're fighting each other. And the reality of that, the worst case scenario, is people want to kill each other, and that's what we were trying to prevent. And uh not understanding the growth of right-wing terrorism and not understanding how bad the anti-Muslim hatred had got, and now feed into that Gaza and not realizing how bad the anti-Semitism had got, we are because we don't understand race and how that feeds into how effective we are as a law enforcement or national security agency. We're always behind the curve instead of ahead of it.

SPEAKER_03: 49:06

And so now when we've got people, if we believe what we read, such as Musk, who um may be funding or certainly supporting some of our far right groups, and we get um the divisions we have in the country, where are we from in your perspective, from a from a threat perspective?

SPEAKER_01: 49:28

In a in a very, very dangerous place. So I I remember listening to uh Jeremy Fleming's a friend of mine who used to run GCHQ um and he uh retired a few years ago. And the year he was retiring, he was the guest editor on the Radio for Today program. And uh I think it was Amul Rajin asked him, What's what keeps you up at night? What is the thing that really keeps you up at night? And he said something that I I felt exactly the same way as him. It is the thing that keeps us up at night. And he said, disinformation. He said that everyone's worried about you know cyber turning off a nuclear power station, turning off the grid and stuff. The most insidious threat to our country is the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theory, and the fact that we all now believe it. We're all getting our sources, not from the BBC, you know, who are still, in my view, pretty much the only place you can go to for some kind of factual authority. We've undermined the BBC, we've called them all woke, we don't believe what they say. We're going to TikTok and some influencer on TikTok or the CESPIT formerly known as Twitter X. We're going there and getting our truth from that. Uh, and people believe it and they replicate it, and we've seen how quickly it spreads. So, Southport, the viral communication saying it's an asylum seeker, burn the asylum seekers, the millions and millions of retweets on that. Um, that's the place we're in now. So the fracture in society that was caused before social media and the internet really took off, you know, 30 years ago when you, I mean, you and I were joking about our technological ability trying to set up this podcast. I mean, my God, I mean, 30 years ago, I didn't own a mobile phone, well, 35 years ago, I remember getting the first mobile phone from a phone shop in Clapton Junction. It was the first mobile phone shop in Clapton, you know, in Battersea. And they were offering a special deal for serving police officers. That's, you know, 1992. It doesn't seem that long ago. But the technology now, 24-7, 365 days a year, to look at crap and believe it and to have it seared into your brain, is causing a massive problem. It's radicalizing people in days, not weeks or months, in days. So you literally, some of the most vulnerable people in society, unsupervised, unprotected from this stuff, are with big tech seemingly powerless. They would say they're powerless. They're not doing enough to help moderate or remove content, or actually, we need a conversation as a society whether we're going to give vulnerable people access to this stuff. You know, the debate about whether under-16-year-olds have smartphones. You know, I'm quite a liberal person. I don't like the idea of censorship, but the the stuff that's on there, the bullying, the trolling, the suicide stuff, the kind of the misogyny, the porn, the um the violence that's on there, even before you get to counterterrorism. You know, I mean, it's horrific. And it's available to anybody who's got enough money to buy a smartphone and log on. I mean, that's the danger.

SPEAKER_03: 52:40

And the challenge, of course, is that you know, many of the kind of figureheads of these communities are in it for money. You know, they're not, they're not necessarily, you know, you know, I mean, I I'm not going to name names, but there are certain people that I know that you know everyone gets very excited about, and I used to be saying to people, they don't pose any threat. They're only in it for the money. And the kind of celebrity status of it. It's the ones you're not hearing about you need to worry about. But but we have got this culture.

SPEAKER_01: 53:04

I I I would add to that though, they uh some of them are uh have got more money than they'll ever ever be able to spend. They are in it for power. Oh no, I don't I don't mean it's also no, I'm I'm not necessarily talking well, let's be honest. I am talking about a billionaire set in the world that doesn't need any more money, but does need control over politics and media and the way society thinks. And you're absolutely right. So they can flog us more stuff. Now that they are they're not going to take corporate social responsibility. The one time in my counter-terrorism career when uh big business stood up and took notice and started to say, oh God, um, we should probably do something about this, was after Manchester Arena when the headline, I think it was in the sun, called him the Amazon bomber. Amazon went nuts because, of course, their advertisers were going, what on earth? And we're not advertising on your platform. Uh it happened with um uh Facebook as well, when Coca-Cola and Glatso Smith Klein, two massive global. I mean, they spend billions on advertising a year. So this is this is where Facebook makes its money. So we're not putting adverts on because we found our adverts next to adverts for extreme terrorist organizations, white supremacists and Islamists. You've put our advert next to some a link to that. So we're not advertising on your platform. God, did they get good at moderation and taking stuff down that that day?

SPEAKER_03: 54:28

So let me ask you a couple of different questions then. So so let's think about you know Palestine Action. Do you think they should be a prescribed organization?

SPEAKER_01: 54:38

I don't know, because I'm retired. So in so let me clarify this. Palestine Action has been prescribed by the Home Secretary, the Home Secretary before last and endorsed by this one, so Ivet Cooper, then Shabana Mahmood, on the basis of intelligence they have been shown that says Palestine Action have uh conspired, planned, or instigated terrorist attacks. The stuff we've seen as members of the public and has been reported on doesn't look like it hits that threshold. You know, although you could argue that managing to trespass on a military base and attack planes that are designed to defend the citizens of this country in a way that would disable that plane definitely reaches that threshold. It does, technically, but we'd probably say that's not like committing a mass atrocity. Or but somewhere in the intelligence case, there must be something that has crossed a bar, crossed the Rubicon for the Home Secretary to say, no, the people who run this organization are dangerous people. We don't know that yet because the trials haven't happened and we haven't, nothing's come out. In fact, Yvette Cooper was on the record as saying, you need to wait for the trials, then you'll see. I hope that's true because it's gonna be terrible if those trials take place and we see that these are basically saboteurs, criminal damage, low-level hooligans, thuggish, but actually the criminal law was perfectly capable of dealing with them. They didn't need to be dealt with with counterterrorism. And the reason they're gonna be in a terrible place, if that's true, is because the poor old Metropolitan police have had to haul 90-year-olds off the front line with a placard. Now, most of those people don't know what they're doing. I I sort of said when I was interviewed on the road when it started, if only they'd just taken action off their sign and said, I support Palestine, that would have been perfectly fine. You can support Palestine and not support Palestine action, you can support Palestine and not support Hamas. You can support Israelis and Jews and not support Netanyahu and uh um uh and his particular right-wing acolytes. You know, you two things can be right at the same time. But actually, just because you're feeling a bit pissed off with the government, to go out and get yourself arrested by doing something you know is going to be arrested because you think that's gonna overturn the law, it's very hard for police officers who have to do it. And my view is they did it very respectfully. I mean, there isn't a kind of, I think there's been some good reportage back saying, actually, the police are in a terrible position. It's the thin blue line, they've got to enforce the law. What choice have they got? But they've tried to do it as nicely as you possibly can when you're arresting someone in their 80s and 90s. Mark Ray doesn't like the look of this any more than I do, but he has to do it. And policing can't absolve themselves entirely because counter-terrorism policing must have been in those conversations about the prescription. But counter-terrorism policing, as you and I know, is a very small part of policing. Every chief constable who relies on the counterterrorism policing head and the organization to take those decisions for them, it has to react to those decisions. So policing's not entirely innocent, but it's counter-terrorism policing alongside MI5, alongside the Home Office who should have who should have the accountability for justifying that decision. We haven't seen it. So my answer, I go back to my first answer. I don't know whether they should have been prescribed or not. They do. I hope they've made the right decision.

SPEAKER_03: 58:01

Presumably, if there is intelligence that that exists, that doesn't mean we're going to see it or hear about it. It may well be secret and therefore not disclosable in the public domain.

SPEAKER_01: 58:12

Yeah, and that is the catch-22 for any government that's dealing with secret information. It doesn't mean that it can't be disclosed ex parte or Navoidia to a high court judge. It doesn't mean a special advocate acting for Palestine action can't be, you know, who's security cleared can't be shown why they've been prescribed. Um it doesn't mean that and they did try and do this. So Privy Council was briefed on the reason that Palestine, they're complaining now, saying they weren't given enough of a briefing. But it was an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, which means the whips must have whipped everyone to say no vote for it. And they would have been whipped because their leaders, the Liberal Democrats, uh the Conservatives, would have seen enough intelligence to say we're going to vote with this. So they can all, because it's politically convenient now to say what a stupid decision, they were all part of it. So our entire democracy has been part of making this decision. There will be some, if it turns out to have been the wrong decision, I'm absolutely positive there will have been some honorable exceptions who did not, who were privy to any kind of briefing and who didn't agree with it. And they're probably green. That's what I say. But I mean, other otherwise, you know, I mean, there's a bit of me that says, you know, there's a reason why we keep things secret in the national community, uh, national security community, and it's normally because the compromise of the methodology will mean that tactically we're unable to prevent any plot again because that tactic is ruined for us. Or someone is going to die. They are the two reasons we absolutely keep things secret. If we ever keep things secret, and this has happened in the past in centuries of tradition in every liberal democracy in the world, if we keep things secret because we're afraid they're embarrassing or that we have done something wrong. And I'll say Abu Ghraib here for the Americans, then that is indefensible, shameful, and people should get, well, deselected, not elected, or fired on the back of it. And the people who committed those acts should be in prison. You know, so if you're keeping things secret because you've made a terrible decision and you're now embarrassed by the decision, you shouldn't, nobody should, you know, defend that in any way, shape, or form. And I certainly wouldn't. If you're keeping things secret because you're trying to defend methodology that will keep us all safe, or protect somebody's life who has worked on our behalf to keep us all safe, then that's why we keep things secret. And I'm I'm sorry, the vast majority of the public, but we have to do that. We have to do it in law enforcement, we have to do it in national security.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:44

So conscious the time, a couple of quick ones then. So you became what I would say is the most senior detective, certainly the met probably in the UK. That's that's what I always thought AXO was. Um what would your advice be to a young detective now starting out their career? What's your kind of mantra around how to be a good detective?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:05

Um I say this, I used to say this, and people think I was being glib about it. I can show you a good detective from the way they deal with their first shoplifting. Now that had resonance when we actually dealt with shoplifters. I think the problem now is we don't. So um look, there's only there's a couple of really important things. Being a good detective is being a good police officer. All police officers are investigators. Just because some of them wear suits and some of them wear a uniform, every police officer should be a good investigator, which means you have to be nosy as hell. You and I, the first thing we were taught before we were taught any law is assume nothing, believe no one, check everything. That's an important mantra. The difficulty is, is if you're not careful, it makes you very cynical because you never believe anyone else ever again. So it can harden you, but it is an important mantra. And when you're investigating a crime, we have this thing about, you know, we were told to believe the victims, and we get this terrible miscarriage of justice with Operation Midland and Carl Beach because the National Police Chiefs Council stupidly put out a dictate saying we will believe all victims. No detect your job as a detective is to record exactly what the victim tells you and then investigate whether it's true or false. Not just believe them. Um and obviously the same thing with suspects. Assume nothing, believe no one, check everything. That's the basic pantra of being a detective. Whether you're dealing with a simple theft or whether you're dealing with terrorism. The other thing is be competent. You know, uh continuous professional development, learning your trade, learning the law, learning the points to prove, understanding how to deal with people, being a people person, you know, the greatest detective that mentored me was fantastic. He um let's be honest, you have some right scum in front of you, don't you? Some of the lowest of the low. They might have terrible backstories, and I think we should all understand that most people aren't born evil, they they're made evil. But when they come in front of us, they're generally speaking, they've done something awful. And he treated them like a friend. And many of them pleaded guilty or confessed to him in an interview. Uh, he would always give them a cigarette, he'd take them out in the cage, give them a bit of fresh air, cigarette, get them a coffee, treat them like a human being. If you treat people like human beings with a bit of common humanity, they might remember they were once humanity themselves and they might actually start to interact with you. So being a people person really counts as a detective. And this is my most important mantra for whether you're a uniform officer or a detective, be quick, be competent, and be compassionate. The quick thing is, is don't sit around twiddling your thumbs, managing, you say, I'm really busy, I've got 20 cases, when actually 17 of those you're not doing anything with. You know, you you are there to get victims justice. They don't expect to work, justice delayed is justice denied, is the great cliche. Do not sit around on your ass. You know, be a proactive detective. The competence I've already described, if you don't know how to do your job, you really don't want to be in high-risk positions as a detective. And for me, the most important thing is the compassionate thing. So, in the same way that you should treat a perpetrator as a human being because you're trying to, you're, you're trying to make sure that they save us all a lot of time and effort by confessing or uh, you know, or you manage to get them to trap themselves because they start talking to you. You're an expert in this. I know you're an expert interviewer. You know how to get people to talk. It's not generally by shouting at them or repeating the same question hundreds of times. That is not the best way, you know, any more than torture works. It doesn't. You know, you know, our national security community found that out in America. Being compassionate is about the victim. You are there for one reason only as a police officer, and that is to get justice for that person who, I don't care whether they're rich or poor, uh, intelligent or thick, uh, black or white, it doesn't matter. That person has just been through a terrible experience. And your job is to make them feel safe again and try and help them get some sense of justice. Even if you can't investigate the person, the fact that you care about them is the most important thing you can do. Um, and so many police officers get so hardened because of the nature of the job. They forget that for you, it's it's the tenth time that week you've dealt with a traumatized victim. It's probably the one and only time they're going to be traumatized, and they'll be talking about the way you dealt with them for the rest of their lives. To everyone they ever meet, it will be their story. What story do you want them to tell?

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:33

So, my final question, Neil, is what's next for you? You know, you've had this glittering career. You're someone that I think people who know you, we're not gonna we're gonna ignore those that don't know you and just kind of think they do, but people who know you know that you've never really changed. You're the same person I remember was a as your young sergeant at Brixton. You haven't changed the person, you were always fair and decent and all those qualities. I'm exactly the same weight as well. Although the weight is all in a different place. Yeah, well, I I wasn't gonna go to that point, but anyway, you know, but but uh but what's next for you?

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:07

You you know, how do you follow up a career that you've Oh, I was asked that question this morning by all these youngsters saying, you know, what uh how do you cope from going from what you did to effectively nothing the next day? And the answer is really badly. I mean, I I I don't think I'll ever have the same sense of purpose I had as a cop. I love somebody told me it isn't Mark Twain who said it, but somebody said there are two important moments in your life, the day you're born and the day you find out why. I love that expression. And I found out my why when I became a cop. And of course, I I didn't find that in the first year I was a cop. I found it, but I did find out in my early years. So I spent a good 26, 27 years of my life doing, I think, a most amazing job. You know, we are the line between chaos, you know, and uh and order. I mean, there is there is no public service like it. Every right that you have depends on you feeling safe stepping one step outside of your front door. And that's down to us in a civil society. Having that sense of purpose and then going to what do I do tomorrow was incredibly difficult. Uh, and also having a very senior job where people did listen to you. So, you know, prime ministers listen to you, home secretaries listen to you, um, other chief constables listen to you. I mean, they didn't always do what you said, but they did listen, um, even for a moment. And of course, we've talked about the the one thing I said they didn't listen to and how that affected me. So, but the point is somebody was listening. When nobody's listening, it's it can be a very lonely place. So you have to go and find some other sense of focus or purpose. I I was a workaholic, so I had abandoned my family, my friends, all of my hobbies. Um, I'm not a man of faith, but if I had been, I would have abandoned the church to make sure that I did the job for you know for the victim. I would have done, I know I would have done. Um, so I'm getting back to family, friends, and fitness. I do a lot of that. And I still eventually people, because I didn't advertise my retirement and I don't advertise what I do now, people find out that you're kind of on the shelf. And it's I've been gratified by the fact that people like you actually want to still speak to me. So occasionally I do I give advice, you know, politically and to the private and public sectors on matters of law enforcement, national security, diversity, and leadership. And sometimes they pay me for it, Phil, unbelievably. Um, not you, I've noticed.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:30

No, no, I've got all of your listeners. I couldn't afford to, let's be honest.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:34

Well, I'm I'm doing it because we go back a very long way indeed. And uh and and some and I still mentor and coach a lot of people for nothing. I I'm not an executive coach and mentor like Lotsburg. I wasn't interested in that. I'd rather mentor and coach much more junior officers or officers who are trying to make the leap between being operational and being a chief, rather than chiefs themselves. There's much more reward in people who are at a at a turning point in their lives talking to them. And I do all of that for free, and I love that. That is a kind of watching people grow and develop, you know, people that I led on the strategic command course who are now becoming assistant deputy and chief constables is a is a wonderful thing, you know. So I do a bit of that. I obviously wrote the book, but the book is you know, I'd love it if your listeners brought it uh and read it, because I think it is an important, I'm proud of it. It was an important thing to write. And then um, unbelievably, a few months ago, somebody offered me a podcast every week, like you, and once a week I get to still talk about law and order, crime and criminal justice, with a co-host who, Andy Hughes, who's the LBC crime correspondent, who's a 20-year crime journalist who really knows what he's talking about, um, and who I think is a spectacularly fun Geordie as well. So it's brought a bit of levity to my life whilst allowing me to still talk about the only thing I really know about, which is Law and Order. I'm enjoying that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:00

Well, it's a great podcast, and we we'll make sure that both your book, which I would absolutely encourage people to read or to listen to, whichever format you choose, because I think it is um a book full of important messages from someone that has started in the trenches and and dug their way out and got up to the very senior levels. And you know, people make assumptions that at your level everything's rosy and and easy, and you know, but actually you know, politics gets involved and ego egos and everything else. So I think it's a really important book, particularly if you are in policing, but but just if you're interested in policing, I suppose. Um and your your podcast, uh crime agents, is is fabulous. It's a really I think it's a great way for people who want to get behind or get it want to get some facts or some context between some of the headlines.

unknown: 1:10:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:53

Someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:55

Yeah. There's some nuance. We know we talked earlier on, you have six seconds of people's attention, and people want you on the radio for two minutes to describe something. They're just trying to fill two minutes. They're not interested in what you're saying. This was an opportunity for me to say things that I thought were really important, and particularly about balance in law enforcement. We hear way too much about how bad law enforcement is, not enough about how brilliant it can be sometimes. And we don't really understand the pressures on law enforcement, and it's an opportunity to talk about that in more detail. And of course, people can ask us questions as well. It is it's a sort of liberating thing for me, but I think it's an important, I I do, I don't mean this kind of as an up myself comment. I think it's quite an important public service at a time when our communities are quite fractured. You know, it's we're trying to say something about how important this profession is.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:42

Yeah, and so much of what happens is context and and and so when you see it in a snapshot in a paper or social media on the news, et cetera, it can be misconstrued. To have someone like you that says, either yes, they're wrong, and actually I don't, you know, don't think that's right what they did, or actually this is what's really going on, I think it was actually really important.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:02

Yeah, we don't shy away from the criticism either, but because we're experts in our field, we can criticize in a way that actually has some understanding and some learning behind it rather than just a cheap headline that's tomorrow's fish and chip paper. And thank you for mentioning the book as well. I for your listeners, I did record the audio book myself, and my wife's best friend said it's a fantastic way to send her to sleep. She loves money. And she meant it as a compliment, but everybody was laughing because they they they knew what they meant. Well, they they've you've heard this podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:32

If they've listened to it for the podcast for the the last hour or so, then that they'll know what your voice sounds like and they'll hopefully enjoy it, go buy it or download it. But Neil, thank you so much for this. I know it's taken us a while to get together. Really informative, and um uh and you know, thank you so much, really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:48

It's a real privilege being asked to speak, Phil. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:54

Thank you for listening to the Diffuse Podcast with host Philip Brendell, CEO and founder of Diffuse. Please rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platforms.