British policing rests on a promise: the police act with the consent of the public, because the public believes they act lawfully, fairly and accountably. When that belief goes, the model itself is in trouble — and successive official reviews say it is going.
The founding idea of British policing is that the police are the public and the public are the police: officers are citizens in uniform, exercising powers the ordinary person lends them on the understanding that those powers will be used lawfully and without fear or favour.
Consent is not unconditional. It depends on people being able to see that when the police get it wrong, something happens. Strip out the accountability and you are left with power exercised over a public that no longer believes it can hold that power to account. That is not policing by consent. It is policing despite its absence.
In 1999, the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police and set out dozens of recommendations to rebuild trust with Black and minority communities.
In March 2023, the Casey Review — commissioned after the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer — reported that the same force was failing the public and its own people, and found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia. More than two decades separate the two reports; the through-line between them is the problem. When two landmark reviews, a generation apart, describe the same failures, the question is not whether individual officers erred but whether the institution ever changed.
The Reports & news page links to both reviews and to other official inquiries so you can read the findings for yourself, rather than take ours.
Confidence in the police is not evenly distributed. Official reviews and community experience point the same way: Black and minority communities, in particular, report lower trust and greater reason for it — from stop and search to use of force to how complaints are handled. This is the part of the bargain that has frayed most, and the part successive reforms promised to fix.
Our contention is simple and testable: if the reforms had worked, people would be able to point to accountability that bites. Where they cannot — where an interference with someone's home, liberty or property is met with "the officers acted professionally" and no examination of whether it was lawful — the trust gap is not a feeling. It is a measurement of a system not doing its job.
Consent withdrawn is not consent restored by reassuranceTrust is not rebuilt by campaigns telling people to feel confident. It is rebuilt when the system answers the questions put to it: by what power; under which section; was it referred; was the outcome reasonable and proportionate. Every unanswered question is a small withdrawal from the same account. Enough of them, and consent is overdrawn.