Taken in the round, the police do a very good job. They put themselves in harm's way and deal with that part of society that most people only want to see on prime time television - and even then, preferably in middle class suburbia.
But saints they ain't, as their abject failure to investigate the News International hacking scandal has shown. Anybody who saw former Met commissioner-turned-Murdoch columnist Andy Hayman before the Home Affairs Select Committee will be wondering if Life On Mars was maybe a fly-on-the-wall documentary. By my calculation, former assistant commissioner Yates spent more time lunching with NI executives than he did wondering whether or not to reopen the investigation into the NI hacking scandal and then, well, then there's the bribes.
This is when I smelled a rat. As far back as March 2003, Rebekah Brooks was casually chucking out the fact that NI was paying police officers. What the what?? Paying Met police officers? And everybody was OK with that? Murdoch was OK with that? Parliament was OK with that? The Met was OK with that?
Then consider what these payments have turned out to be for. The heads-up on celebrity arrests, obtaining royal security details, tracking down the exact location of celebrities, and god knows what else.
When the Met didn't snap into action immediately to ask who the hell on its payroll was taking backhanders off NI I knew corruption was not only present - it was tolerated. Any employer - and I've been one - will tell you that the very idea that one of their employees was receiving cash bungs off anybody would result in a short firing and a long investigation. But from the Met? Nothing. And I wasn't blaming complacency.
So, clearly the Met cannot be trusted to police its own. So who does that leave?
Consider the net that snared Al Capone. Elliot Ness, impeded by corrupt police officers, did his utmost to indict Chicago's infamous gangster on racketeering charges but he was only finally brought to book for - of all things - tax evasion. Frank J. Wilson, Chief of the United States Secret Service, got him on the charges nobody escapes: undeclared income.
Fast forward to London 2011. The way this writer of Secret Service thrillers sees it is that it's time to charge those bent coppers with tax evasion. Paper bags of cash being picked up near NI's Wapping HQ? Well, that's undeclared income every day of the week and twice on Sundays (you know, the day the News of the World used to come out). If the Met won't root out corruption it's time for the Inland Revenue to step forward and do it for them. At least this way the UK tax payer will see its cut of the bribes.
The vast majority of police officers do their job in good faith and deserve the support and respect of society. But without trust they become nothing but a shadowy arm of the security services. The Met's attitude to outright corruption in its ranks is, at it's kindest, complacency, at its worst a manifestation of that corruption.
The Met have had their chance to clean up their act. Time to send in Frank J. Wilson.