How Police Corruption Actually Works (UK) | How Crime Works | Insider

My name is Alastair Morgan. My younger brother, Daniel, was murdered in 1987 and I have been fighting for justice ever since. Hello, I'm Neil Woods. I'm a former undercover cop. And part of what I do now is investigate

corruption

within the

police

. This is how

police

corruption

works

. Woods: We depend on our police for the rule of law, but often our police become corrupt. And what this means is that they are no longer acting in our best interests. They are acting according to someone else's interests or their own. There is no more important asset to organized

crime

than a corrupt cop, because that corrupt cop is useful in many ways.

Morgan: Criminals need corrupt agents. They want someone who can get rid of a statement or who can alter a surveillance record, or those little things. Corrupt police officers can also interfere with an investigation and cause a case to fail in court. To me, police corruption is anything that deviates from the oath to police the public without fear or favor. It's a pretty interesting little phrase, "without fear or favor," but it means you don't take bribes, right? Without favor, people who are important are not taken care of by excluding people who are less important or who are considered less important in our society. "Without fear or favor" is a good way to compress all that.

So a corrupt police officer can be put in his place by getting someone called clean skin. They have no prior convictions, are trained to join the police and remain an asset. And some of them will continue to be a dormant asset, where they are not at risk. Therefore, they are only used for particular types of corruption. Sometimes they are used to help manipulate a third party, which is another police officer, to help use information to blackmail them. Other information that is really useful to organized

crime

is information about someone's movements or where someone lives or a phone number or something like that.

The most sinister use of information like that is to target rivals. Organized crime always has rivals. Violence is never far away, because market control means a lot of money. And if someone is a threat to that, then violence is used and corrupt police are used to help facilitate that violence. That is something that constitutes a habitual use of corrupt assets. The most common form of corruption that I know of is what we call noble cause corruption. Now this is where the police do something corrupt, but they don't do it for their own financial gain, not because they are involved with organized crime, but because they want to catch the bad guy.

And they see that the system is against them, and if they changed the rules a little, they would have a better chance of getting a conviction. As an undercover cop, I saw myself fighting drugs and organized crime, but I'm guilty of some corruption for noble causes. These police officers approached me and told me that the objective of the operation was to commit robberies against elderly people. And she was doing very sinister things when she walked into his bedroom. He also turned out to be a drug dealer. So they sent me to legitimately investigate him and catch him for drug trafficking.

Now, a key part of the rules was that you were not to act as an agent provocateur, meaning that you were not to cause someone to commit a crime if they wouldn't have done it anyway, but you were also not to cause them to commit a more serious crime. . a more serious crime than the one they had committed. Now, this guy was not capable of weighing kilos. He just wasn't. But I convinced him. I said he needed increasing amounts. And he wouldn't have tried to supply even a kilo. He ended up adulterating an ounce down to a kilo.

So they presented it in kilos and they caught him with one kilo, but he had less than 1% purity. But he pleaded guilty to trafficking one kilo and received a substantially longer prison sentence. Now, that was bad of me, but it shows how easily one can become enthusiastic about the need to catch dangerous people as a police officer and how corruption for noble causes can creep into that. So I'm guilty of it too. Now, the problem is that it leaves the officer or officers exposed to manipulation and blackmail where they become puppets of organized crime. Now I know that I annoy a lot of police officers when I talk about corruption, because it's understandable.

Most of them are good people trying to do the best they can with some pretty bad laws,

actually

. But we have to understand the scope of this and we have to be clear-eyed about it. We have to be honest about this. It's the only way we have a chance of dealing with it. Sorry, you know, this narrative is something I've gone over many times. Daniel was my younger brother by a year. At the age of 37 he was murdered with an axe. So it was a cruel, brutal and savage attack. Within three weeks, I was convinced that, due to the events that took place, there had been police involvement in Daniel's murder, which was a terrifying prospect.

My brother expressed concern about police corruption about a month before he was murdered, which was the last time I saw him alive. And he said, "Oh, it's a bent copper." And he told me a name I can't remember. He got out of my head. And then he said, "Alastair, they're everywhere down here." I found out later, a year later in an investigation, that he believed that his partner and his sergeant. Fillery, from the murder squad, had been involved in a robbery. And he was thinking of turning to an outside force. And two days later, he was dead.

Sidney Fillery, who another witness had accused of involvement in the murder, had left the police and within a year was running my brother's company with Jonathan Rees. After years and years of investigations, some of which, in retrospect, I know were corrupt, a testing officer in the first investigation was disciplined or given advice. And I think that's the only pain anyone has ever suffered. In 2021, I made the decision to sue the Metropolitan Police. I do everything in consultation with my lawyer, who has supported me for decades and advised me, helped me keep my sanity in dealing with this, A, he said there are reasons, there are legal reasons to do it.

And B, it's probably the only form of accountability you're going to get from these people. And I think responsibility is something I've wanted for 35 years. The UK police have one of the best records in the world for solving murders. The systems we have in place are incredible. They are like a well-oiled machine. I have been part of murder investigation teams myself several times and it is amazing how they work and how efficient they are. Traditionally in the UK, and certainly at the time of the Morgan murder, the murder detection rate, the percentage of murders that are solved in the UK, was 90%. 90%.

Those that are not solved are usually organized crime murders. It's shocking that it hasn't been resolved. Really shocking. It's pretty clear that the whole problem was police corruption. And it's pretty clear that it wasn't investigated properly because of police corruption. And then when investigations were launched, those investigations were inadequate, to the point that it is difficult not to conclude that corruption was preventing them from functioning properly. An informant is someone who provides information to the police, often referred to as CHIS, a covert human intelligence source, in the UK. Therefore, an informant will generally come into contact with the police when he is arrested for a crime.

Organized crime knows who within its ranks has just been captured. And they know that the police will approach them and ask them to act as informants. And then it becomes a kind of Machiavellian game about how that game plays out. Very often, informants are used to get rid of rivals. Because the market is so competitive, so competitive, that if you get rid of rivals, you can

actually

make more money. This is how the market

works

. Another way informants get involved with police is to get paid. And there are some informants who actually make a living doing this.

And informants can become very intelligent about the value, the financial value, of certain types of information. The problem is that most informants who present themselves that way and act that way also work for organized crime. All responsibility for the use of informants, CHIS, is internal. All of this. The designation of an informant must be authorized by senior officials. But there is nothing to indicate that these high officials are not corrupt, whether by corruption of noble causes or by outright corruption. And we know that some of them are. If a police officer wants to search someone's home, he gets a search warrant.

To obtain that search warrant, they have to go to a court clerk and show them that there is justification for doing so. The magistrate's clerk will then allow the police officer to appear before a magistrate, and the magistrate will either agree or not. If a CHIS or an undercover agent wants to come into his life and if that CHIS or that informant or an undercover agent wants to manipulate him into doing something different, then they can do it. It's the most intrusive thing the police can do. And there is no external control. They are police judging police.

And those informants who have the power to enter your life are usually criminals, because that is why they are useful. The UK police do not deal with complainants. My friend was in danger of death for trying to be a whistleblower. He was denouncing corruption and also racism. And his companions turned against him. He was bullied. Corrupt cops have a network of followers and friends, and will use and manipulate them to fight the prosecution. They will intimidate you. So there is a targeted response from those corrupt police officers. But there is also a culture in which police officers do not want to believe the same about their colleagues and are very suspicious of anyone who says something critical or suggests something bad to them.

They just won't believe it. This is someone they've been with. This is someone who has had your back. He is someone they have had to trust, with whom they have worked long night shifts. I mean, I know a police officer, former Met officer who came across serious corruption. He knew things. He was nervous about it. A man who later became a member of the Independent Police Complaints Commission said to my friend, the former police officer: "Well, I'll leave this. You can get the job you want." Bribery. Offering to say, you know, you'll get a promotion if you don't say any of this.

And he wouldn't do it. But it must be taken into account that there is also an institutional failure to admit it, because the police have a duty to maintain the public's trust. That means they don't publicize the extent of the corruption. And they don't want to find out. They don't want the public to think they are corrupt. He is one of the most energetic and hardworking police officers. And in his work he has faced organized crime, including transnational organized crime, but he had never feared for his life until he started denouncing corrupt police officers. He had to resort to witness protection from corrupt Met police officers.

The last defense the police can have against corruption is witness protection. When police fear that corruption means those people are not safe, then they place them in a witness protection program, which means they are given a false name and moved to a different location. And it's a really brutal thing to have to do it to someone. According to the rules of the system, you cannot have any contact, forever, with your friends, your family, your community, anyone you have ever met. And the reason this horrible system exists is because of how insidious and pervasive police corruption is.

But of course even that system becomes corrupted. I know someone who worked within the witness protection system. They told me that at least half of his team was corrupt and that no one was safe at all. The witness protection system database is completely isolated from other computer systems. They are not connected at all. So, in theory, they are already bombproof. But of course, any system is only as fallible as the humans who operate it. And gangsters don't corrupt computers. They corrupt the police. I myself took care of five protected witnesses. I was very aware of the fact that we had been told that Greater Manchester Police could not be trusted in this regard, so we took the view that we could not even necessarily trust the national witness protection system.

And we handled our witnesses very carefully for a long time outside of that system. The Met, or Metropolitan Police, is the police force of Greater London. So the whole city of London. The Met operates differently to any other police force in the UK. It has several centralized responsibilities that other police forces do not have. Thus, for example, they are in charge of terrorist investigations. They also have the National Crime Agency in London, so they work more closely with the National Crime Agency. ANDThey also have other core responsibilities. The Met has a lot of bad press. They get the most attention for anything that goes wrong, and people want to criticize the Met.

But I have to say that in this case the Met has the biggest corruption problem in the UK. He does it. I mean, it's not surprising. It is by far the largest police service. There is more organized crime concentrated in London. There was an internal investigation, an operation called Operation Tiberio in the Metropolitan Police, many years ago, and it showed the extent of police corruption. And most of those corrupt cops were manipulated and corrupted by the informant system. Now part of the answer to that, although there has never been a public response from the Met, is that the report has never really been addressed, one response to that was the idea that you can defend against corruption by limiting the number of years that a font manager can work on that function.

And in most current law enforcement sources across the country it is limited to five years. And this was seen as a way to help prevent this corruption that was this development over time, this corruption over time that was occurring. But the only thing that has happened is that the network has actually spread further to organized crime. It has given them more opportunities and more people to come into contact with. It goes completely against the Met. And I do know that that corruption still exists. I have to make something very clear about corruption. At least 99% of corruption within the police is caused by money from the illicit drug market.

There is not enough value in any other crime to cause the type of corruption that exists. The underground economy with drugs, etc., is enormous. And the amount of money that these drug barons have running around and bribing, their tentacles reach all levels of the judiciary, the police and politicians. So that amount of money creates corruption. I have had very personal experiences and have come across this corruption. I was put under a lot of pressure to get intelligence and uncover a particular gang called The Bestwood Cartel, who were at war with everyone in Nottingham at the time.

There were daily shootings. And he had already been in that operation for four and a half months. He had just made a really significant breakthrough. I managed to buy some drugs from one of Colin Gunn's lieutenants. The next day, we had been working long hours and two of my backup team got sick. And so I was introduced to two new police officers who had not been involved in that operation before. I met the first one, shook his hand, had no problem with him. The second I shook his hand and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

This guy was just wrong. So I went to the operation's senior investigative officer and said, "Look, boss, I can't let this cop know what I'm doing. I just can't. I don't trust him. I won't be able to relax." And he said, "Okay." I didn't think much more about it. But then 12 months later, when Colin Gunn was actually defeated, it turned out that this cop I had taken offense to, a guy called Charlie Fletcher, was an employee of Colin Gunn. As I say, he was an employee, but he was paid to join the police. And she was paid £2,000 a month on top of his police salary, plus bonuses for good information.

When they caught him, he had been in the police force for seven years. When I was introduced, I knew he was undercover. And he came very, very close to finding out exactly what he was doing. Now, at the beginning of that operation involving that corrupt police officer, Colin Gunn was letting everyone on the streets know that if he ever caught an undercover police officer, he would be taken off the street and tortured to death. . So those were the risks we were working with. The largest sums of money, black money that circulates out there, come from the drug world.

And that is a very important influence on police corruption. I think it has been for a long time. My opinion is that drugs are a public health problem. They should not be criminalized. And that the supply should pass into the hands of the State to deprive organized crime of the financing to corrupt. I think our drug policy is completely crazy. I know I upset a lot of British police officers by talking about corruption in this country, but we still have at least the right to be the best police in the world. We make. There is much to be proud of in the UK, in our police, but we have the same problem as the rest of the world: organized crime controls the drug supply.

In that we have things in common with all the other police services in the world. There is really nothing we can do against police corruption while power is in the hands of organized crime. We can try to modify our systems here and there. We can try to increase our investigation, but it won't really make any difference, because it comes down to the fact that organized crime is rich, and it is rich because it controls the drug supply. And as long as that continues, police corruption will not only be inevitable, it will be omnipresent. Producer: So, in the police corruption that was happening and that you witnessed, why?

Why was that happening? Well, I think there were drugs involved in that too. I suspect, strongly, that there was police involvement with drugs in that. Yes, corruption and racism are two elements of the same thing. How widespread it is, I really don't know. I think you'd have to ask someone else about that. My name is Sayce Holmes-Lewis. The Metropolitan Police first assaulted me when he was 14 years old. Since then, I have been arrested more than 30 times. This is how police racism works.