Broken Yard

Broken Yard is a riveting, eye-opening account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside Britain’s most famous police force. The book charts Scotland Yard’s fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public. Barely a week goes by without the Metropolitan Police Service plunging into a new crisis. Steeped in ignominy and depleted in numbers, the Met is a shadow of its former self. From the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard, Tom Harper examines the most notorious cases involving the Met over the past thirty years. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence. As a top investigative reporter at the Sunday Times and The Independent, Tom Harper covered Scotland Yard for fifteen years, beginning not long after the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by Met police officers after being mistaken for a terror suspect in 2005. Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard has been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash.