Charles Ehikioya

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT BENT COPS Daniel Morgan was a private investigator who was about to sell a newspaper story exposing police corruption. On 10 March 1987 he was found with an axe in his head in a pub car park in Sydenham. Should have been a straightforward case for any competent police force. Except the Metropolitan Police @metpoliceuk left the crime scene unsearched and unguarded, which is an odd way to run a murder investigation unless you already know who did it. Five separate police investigations followed over the next 24 years. All five collapsed. 67 people were arrested along the way, including 8 serving or former police officers. Nobody was ever convicted. Morgan's case also got tangled up with corrupt officers linked to the News of the World, the newspaper that later imploded in the phone hacking scandal. In 2013 the Home Secretary finally set up an independent panel to find out what actually happened. It took the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, chaired by Baroness Nuala O'Loan, 8 years to produce an answer, partly because the Met refused to give the panel access to its own case management system for 7 of those years ... ... The police obstructed the inquiry into how the police obstructed the investigation. The final report landed in June 2021, running to 1251 pages. Its conclusion was blunt. The Metropolitan Police was institutionally corrupt, more concerned with protecting its own image than solving the murder of a father of two. Then commissioner Cressida Dick was personally called out for the years of delay and obstruction. The Met's response hit every note of a corporate crisis playbook. It admitted corruption played a role in the failed original investigation, then in the same breath said it did not accept it was institutionally corrupt. A separate watchdog review the following year decided it would not use that label either. So the country ended up with a 1251 page report calling the force corrupt, followed by polite disagreement about the wording, while the murder stays unsolved 39 years on. The Morgan family fought for over three decades to get even this far. Not because Scotland Yard offered them the truth. Because they refused to accept anything less. This is what institutional accountability looks like when the institution under investigation gets to mark its own homework. If you have ever wondered why whistleblowers inside British policing keep getting ignored, start here. SOURCES @BBCNews @thetimes @SkyNews @guardian and others.