Abolishing the Metropolitan Police: My blueprint for a civilised London

I am proud to be the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

But I am also ashamed of the institution that I lead.

For a police officer, I have an unusual background, and this background makes me determines to reform how our city is policed.

I decided to enter the police after my PhD in Post-Colonial Restorative Social Work from the Culture War Faculty at the University of Hackney.

During my studies I encountered a revolutionary concept that changed everything I thought I knew about law and order:

Crime is a social construction.

These five words changed my life.

I immediately realised that if crime itself is socially constructed, then the police — whose job is to deal with crime — are also socially constructed.

And if something is socially constructed, the first duty of a modern public servant is to dismantle it.

This simple five-letter phrase, “Crime is a social construct” is so fundamentally powerful that my first act as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was to put posters up with this phrase all over London’s police stations.