• THE front-page headlines of your last edition and the previous one clearly raise questions about the state of public trust in the Metropolitan Police Service in the city of Westminster, (Exposed: the racist cops of West End, February 4).

The Independent Office for Police Conduct report concerning officers at Charing Cross police station asks some serious questions about the culture in our local police stations.

As it is one of the few police stations left in the city of Westminster – after Boris Johnson closed many of them while Mayor of London – where residents can still go to a front desk, it is critically important.

So hearing that the canteen culture from the 1970s and 1980s has not changed at all explains a lot about the state of policing of our city and, of course, central London.

This comes so soon after the killing of Yasmin Chkaifi. She was a victim of violence on the streets of Maida Vale after the MPS had failed to arrest her assailant – even when a stalking protection order had been breached and she notified the police that she feared for her life at the very beginning of the new year.

The only decent thing to come out of this episode for the MPS is that they eventually released the young man who attempted to stop her assailant with his car when she was being attacked.

But the lack of response to the initial cries for assistance will just add to women’s concerns about the police handling of such cases.

A pattern has unfortunately been replicated across London with Sarah Everard murdered by a policeman last summer and the overreaction of the police at her vigil along with the murders of four Barking lads where the investigation was very slow to pick up on the pattern of killings, all reinforcing misogyny and homophobic allegations against the Metropolitan police.

Doreen, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, has stated this is all taking us back to the days before the Macpherson report in response to the killing of her son Stephen in south east London in 1993.

So, in hindsight, the present Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis’s contract should not have been extended by two years last summer.

MURAD QURESHI
@MuradQureshiLDN
www.muradqureshi.com