Neil Basu on racism, riots and quitting the Met: ‘When policing is bad, it's the worst'

The Guardian

31-03-2025

Neil Basu is enjoying not being a police officer, he says. 'The vast majority of mornings, I wake up and go: 'Thank God I don't have to do that any more.' I sleep. I never used to sleep.' Before he quit two and a half years ago, Basu was assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police in London and the most senior minority ethnic police officer in Britain. For his final seven years in the job, he had to be on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. 'The only time I relaxed was when I was on a plane, until they brought in wifi,' he says. As officers aren't allowed alcohol while on duty, 'I've got an encyclopedic knowledge of zero-alcohol beers and I'm a rugby player; you can imagine how difficult that was.'
There is plenty more Basu doesn't miss about policing. After 30 years in the toughest areas of the job – kidnap, rape, murder, gang violence, counter-terrorism – he has seen things that would keep most of us awake at night. But as a British Asian man rising through the ranks of the Met, he also experienced first-hand the prejudice, politics, cultural malaise and stubborn reluctance to change policing – including the circumstances of his departure. He has a lot to get off his chest – a book's worth, in fact, although he describes his aptly titled memoir, Turmoil: 30 Years of Policing, Politics and Prejudice, less as a score-settling exercise and more as 'a letter from an angry lover'. 'I love policing,' he says. 'I love what it does for society. I love that, when it's done well, police officers are the best people on the planet. It's a shame that when it's done badly, they're the worst.'
Basu's career was bookended by the murder of Stephen Lawrence at the beginning and the Casey review at the end and his frustration at how little changed in between is palpable. Lawrence's racially motivated murder, in south-east London in 1993, was so badly handled that it culminated in the 1999 Macpherson report, which reached the damning conclusion that the Met was institutionally racist. Twenty-four years later, prompted by the murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer, Wayne Couzens, Lady Casey's review of the Met's culture found that it was still institutionally racist, as well as misogynistic and homophobic.
Basu 'agrees with every single word' of the Casey review, he says. He was one of the interviewees for it. Having read the initial draft, he urged Casey to tone it down, which she did. What was it like before? 'Utterly horrific,' he says. 'I was crying when I walked away [after reading it]. I thought I'd wasted 30 years of my life.'
Basu knew plenty about racism before he joined the Met, of course. His father was an India-born doctor who married a white Welsh nurse. The family's neighbours in the West Midlands wouldn't speak to them, he says: 'They would complain about the smell of curry coming from our house when we didn't even have a kitchen.' His parents didn't tell Basu and his two brothers the worst of their experiences as a mixed-race couple, just as Basu didn't tell them how he was regularly bullied and racially abused at school. He was born Anil Basu, but he anglicised his first name to fit in.
He was 'painfully shy' as a child, he says, but he was sporty, playing football, rugby and cricket. 'I grew up in a very macho culture. I was in boys' and men's sports teams all my life and my social life was very male-dominated.' His early career aspirations were similarly masculine: professional footballer ('I wasn't good enough'), soldier (until a car accident affected his fitness). Having studied economics, he became a banker. He was thinking of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street – this was Margaret Thatcher's 1980s – 'but I hated every single minute of it … I realised it was full of greedy, corrupt people doing a useless, valueless job'. He wanted to do something useful, like his parents. He also loved cop shows (and still does): Columbo, The Sweeney, Hill Street Blues, Inspector Morse. 'If you find a police officer telling you they don't watch police shows, I'll show you a liar,' he says.
When Basu decided to join the Met in 1992, at 24, 'lots of friends were going: 'What on earth are you doing?'' he says. 'My father carried to his grave the fact that he didn't want me to be a cop; my mother told me that last year.' The mantra in those days was Fifo: 'fit in or fuck off', he explains. He kept his head down and his mouth shut. He tolerated the perennial 'banter' about himself and other Black, brown and female officers ('I strongly believe banter is bullying,' he says). And he did not query the racial biases he saw in policing, even when they were applied to him. When he was off duty and out of uniform driving his old BMW, he would be pulled over routinely and searched by other officers. 'I don't feel like I was victimised, but I watched lots of other people be victimised and I didn't do enough to stop it,' he says.
If anything, Basu wonders if he was a beneficiary of 'positive discrimination'. In 1998, he was transferred from Brixton to New Scotland Yard to be part of the response team to the Macpherson report, despite being a relatively junior detective – his brown skin was now an asset, it seemed. 'The Met was trying to look for people of talent and promote them, legitimately, as part of positive action,' he says. 'I happen to think I was quite good at my job as well.'
Reforms did happen post-Macpherson: training in race relations and recognising hate crimes, recruiting more minority ethnic staff, improving family and witness liaison. He is proud of his work at Operation Trident, where he became a senior investigating officer in 2003, at just 35. Trident was initially focused on 'Black on Black' gangland homicides, which were rife in London. 'I dealt with a murder where a guy had stood on some other guy's brand new trainers in a nightclub queue and he went and got a gun and blew him away,' he says.
The investigation later expanded to take in all gun- and gang-related crime in the capital. It was a new approach to policing, he says. 'The whole purpose of Trident was to get the Black community to help us solve that problem for the Black community. So, for the first time, we're not delivering policing to you; we are doing it with you.' Despite some heavy-handed attempts to implicate grime music, the unit achieved success, removing guns and violent gang criminals from the communities they were harming. 'There's no way we could have done the kind of things we did – kicking people's doors in at two o'clock in the morning on all-Black estates – you don't get to do that and not cause a riot unless somebody is helping you in that community.'
But in 2011, five years after Basu had left the unit, Trident officers shot and killed Mark Duggan – a mixed-race man – in north London under contested circumstances (the Met said it had intelligence that Duggan was armed and dangerous; Duggan's defenders have said that a gun found seven metres away from his body was not his). It provoked riots across the country. Trust in policing was back on a downward trajectory, which would continue for the next decade, culminating in the Casey review.
Where did it all go wrong? Basu cites two factors. The first is terrorism. After 9/11, in 2001, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London, in 2005, the threat of Islamist terrorism overshadowed all other concerns. 'Anybody who started speaking about equality while you were facing that as the big trauma in policing was seen as a bit nuts,' he says. Suspicions of brown-skinned people were effectively re-legitimised – in politics, in the media and in policing. Then, in 2010, came the coalition government's austerity programme. The Met had to make £769m of savings between March 2011 and March 2015, which translated to cutting more than 3,000 jobs.
As the 2020s approached, Basu's relationship with the Met was deteriorating. He was now assistant commissioner and head of counter-terrorism, but, having stayed silent for so long, he felt the need to speak up about the culture wars around him: Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, the backlash to Black Lives Matter. As he puts it in his book, 'it was time to stop fitting in, but now I had no intention of fucking off'.
The Guardian might well have cost him his job, he jokes. In 2019, a month after Boris Johnson became prime minister, Basu gave an interview about Brexit's impact on counter-terrorism. Almost as an aside, he commented that Johnson would not be recruited into policing today, on account of his past comments calling Black people 'picaninnies' and comparing women in burqas to letterboxes. 'I felt really strongly that this was a chance, finally, to say something important about race and racism in society, and particularly about police and racism.'
He continued to speak up. In June 2020, Basu wrote a column in this paper expressing solidarity with protests in the US and the UK over the police killing of George Floyd, arguing that 'we need to listen to our communities, and our people, and focus on what we in the UK can do better'. By contrast, the Sewell report, the Johnson government's response to the Floyd protests, released in March 2021, claimed that 'we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities' – a conclusion that was disputed and condemned by many, Basu included.
That month, Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens. Shortly after, David Carrick was exposed as a serial rapist. Both were serving Met officers. Basu never met either man, he says, but 'it doesn't make you feel any better that they were in your police force and in one of your commands'.
As Basu became more outspoken, his position became less tenable. 'I was creating a bed of nails for myself, which was going to hurt me,' he says. When Cressida Dick, whom he considers an ally, stood down as Met commissioner in 2022, Basu was tipped to succeed her, but he had made enemies. He doubts Johnson bore a personal grudge, 'but I think the people around him would have said: 'How can you let that man get away with things like that?'' One MP reportedly considered him 'too woke' for the top job. At the same time, the Met was being blamed for failing to prevent recent terrorist incidents in the capital, such as the fatal 2017 attacks at Westminster Bridge and London Bridge.
Basu felt as if he was being singled out. 'My own bosses were talking to me in a way that they'd never talked to me before,' he says. He felt he was being gaslit. 'I was told I was being tired and irritable, like 'Maybe you need a break' … It felt like I was being edged out of my job.'
Basu never wanted to be commissioner, he says, but he acknowledges: 'It's really hard to know whether that's true or whether that is a good way of avoiding ever having to face that question.' Despite the change of government, he doubts it could happen now, even if he wanted it. He has become too politicised, he says, added to which his memoir has surely burned what bridges remained. 'The only reason I'd do it is to be the first ethnic minority commissioner of the Metropolitan police. But I don't believe that would change policing any more than having the first female, openly gay commissioner [Dick] changed policing, or Barack Obama changed the United States … It's a nice story for a day and then it's five years of my life that me and my family will never get back.'
He only realised how much the job had taken its toll after he left the force. He has been married twice and feels guilt over how little time he has spent with his three sons, who are now in their 20s. Being commissioner would take away even more. 'I served 10 commissioners, including two acting commissioners. The only one I saw get away with their reputation and their health intact was John Stevens [commissioner from 2000 to 2005, now Lord Stevens]. That is not a good advert for that job.'
He occasionally misses 'being in the room where it happens', especially when he watches a good crime drama on television. 'My wife hates it, because I'll go through the entire thing correcting all of the procedural flaws.'
Despite the bitterness, regrets and reverses, Basu is proud of the progress policing, and Britain, have made in matters of race. 'It might have been too slow for a lot of people, but it was going in the right direction. I was confident my children would have a different experience to me. I was confident that I'd had a better experience than my parents.' When it comes down to it, he says: 'I'd rather be living here as a mixed-race person than in any other single country I can think of.'
Turmoil: 30 Years of Policing, Politics and Prejudice by Neil Basu is published on 10 April by Aurum (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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