According to The Evening Standard, the Metropolitan Police has been “convicted.” The inverted commas are not optional. They are the whole story.

A van owned by the Met was caught travelling at the supposedly apocalyptic speed of forty-nine miles per hour on the M6. The notice of intended prosecution was issued by Staffordshire Police. At this point, the British legal system normally swings into its familiar posture of quiet menace. Letters are sent. Deadlines are imposed. Failure to comply is treated not as an oversight, but as a trigger for accelerated prosecution. The citizen is expected to think himself a criminal even before any guilt has been established.

Except, of course, when the recipient is the police themselves.

In this case, the Met did not reply. It did not request clarification. It did not plead administrative error. It did not do what any solicitor would advise a private individual to do. They simply ignored the notice. Nothing happened for months. Eventually, the matter drifted into Walsall magistrates’ court, where the Metropolitan Police—named, absurdly, as a defendant—was “found guilty” in its absence of failing to identify the driver.

The sentence was a £1,000 fine, £120 in costs, and a £400 victim surcharge.

Pause here, because this is the point at which the farce becomes instructive. Who, exactly, has been punished? No officer was docked a day’s pay. No manager was disciplined. No department head was sacked. No pension was threatened. No promotion was delayed. No career was even momentarily inconvenienced. The Met, that is to say the taxpayer, was ordered to transfer money to another arm of the State. The transaction was accompanied by solemn legal language, so that it could be called “justice”.

It was later revealed, after some light prodding by The Evening Standard, that the original speeding ticket had been cancelled anyway, due to an “exemption”. The exemption is unexplained but entirely characteristic. Police exemptions are like royal prerogatives: they exist because they exist. No justification is required beyond the fact of power.

The prosecution for failing to identify the driver, however, was allowed to lumber on, because it would not have been—one imagines the phrase was used without irony—“appropriate” to halt it.

Appropriate to whom?

The same week the Met was ceremonially fined for ignoring a notice, more than 3,300 ordinary people across England and Wales were prosecuted for the identical offence. Last year alone, the Met itself brought 572 such prosecutions. It does so routinely. It does so mechanically. It does so with an air of offended righteousness. Letters are sent in bold type. Deadlines are enforced without mercy. Magistrates are invited to treat non-response as near-contempt of court.

There is no exemption for stress, confusion, illness, travel, or simple human error. The law, in these cases, is not a guide to conduct but a cudgel. Yet when the Met fails to respond to the very same notice, the result is administrative embarrassment, followed by a money shuffle, followed by silence.

This is not hypocrisy by accident. It is hypocrisy by design. The modern British police force does not see itself as a body of civilians charged with enforcing the law impartially. It sees itself as a moral caste. The law is something it uses, not something that binds it. Rules exist for the public, who are presumed to be dishonest and in need of constant supervision. The police, by contrast, regard themselves as the adult presence in the room. Their mistakes are contextual. Yours are culpable.

When they fail to respond to a legal notice, it is an oversight. When you do, it is an offence. When they exceed the speed limit, there will be an exemption. When you do, there is a presumption of guilt. When they are “convicted”, nothing happens. When you are convicted, the system is designed to hurt.

It is sometimes said, in defence of this arrangement, that organisations cannot be punished like individuals. This is true, but it misses the point. If the law cannot meaningfully punish a State agency, then prosecuting it is theatre. It exists only to preserve appearances. It allows the police to say that “no one is above the law” while ensuring that this proposition is never tested in practice.

The fine itself is not a penalty. It is a bookkeeping exercise. Money is taken from people who had nothing to do with the offence and reassigned within the public sector. To call this accountability is to drain the word of all meaning. What matters is not that the Met was “convicted”, but that no one within it was.

This episode also reveals something else, equally damning: incompetence. Earlier this year, the Met managed to prosecute itself when an officer was photographed driving above the limit. The Met did not even manage to prosecute itself properly. It failed to respond to a notice. It then failed to halt proceedings once the underlying offence had been cancelled. It allowed a case to proceed to court, not because justice demanded it, but because no one could be bothered to stop the machine. The same machine, one might add, that is ruthlessly efficient when directed at the public.

This is the great secret of British policing. It is not, at heart, efficient. It is selective. It is brutal where it can be, and lax where it would inconvenience itself. It mistakes power for virtue and process for legitimacy. The result is not order, but resentment.

The police like to imagine that their authority rests on public consent. In reality, it rests on fear and the absence of alternatives. Every incident like this chips away at the remaining illusion that the system is fair, or even rational. People notice. They notice that deadlines are sacred only when imposed on them. They notice that exemptions flow upwards. They notice that the law hardens as it descends.

This is why such episodes should not be dismissed as trivial. They are not about forty-nine miles per hour. They are about status. They are about who is expected to obey and who is expected to be indulged.

The Met’s van could have been travelling at twenty miles per hour. The principle would be the same. The police do not believe themselves to be subject to the law in the way the rest of us are. They believe themselves to be its its interpreters, and, when convenient, its beneficiaries. And they behave accordingly.

There is a certain humour in all this, and humour is often the last refuge of the oppressed. You can laugh at the spectacle of a police force “convicted” in its absence. You can enjoy the absurdity of a victim surcharge with no victim. You can observe, dryly, that the only people reliably punished by the criminal justice system are those without institutional cover.

But humour should not dull the lesson. Power that is not accountable does not correct itself. It does not grow modest with time. It grows accustomed to indulgence. The Metropolitan Police is not a rogue institution. It is a representative one. It behaves as it does because it can.

And it will continue to do so until the pretence that it is merely another subject of the law finally collapses under the weight of its own exceptions.

This matter is not ended, or should not be seen as ended. The public has been reminded, once again, that there is one law for them, and another for everyone else.

Related posts:

When the Police Visit About a Social Media Post: A Legal Guide for Citizens in Britain Trial by Jury and the Logic of Abolition

Powered by YARPP.