‘Very few causes policing should be attached to,’ Met Commissioner says

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has launched a crackdown on his officers expressing support for causes while on duty.

Sir Mark Rowley said it is essential that officers are impartial while on duty, adding the only acceptable additions to uniforms are remembrance poppies, Help for Heroes wristbands and the police memorial badge.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “Wearing a poppy in the autumn is perfectly proper but there is not a lot that we should align to because the danger is that once you say ‘we are going to align ourselves to a cause because 90 per cent of the population support it’, what about the 10 per cent?

“Once you start having environmental and other subjects there are lots of people in the organisation who will personally support those causes and that is OK, but the Metropolitan Police explicitly supporting them is quite tricky.

“I’m fairly narrow minded on this. There are very few causes policing should be attached to.”

Sir Mark said officers “engaging with communities to understand what worries them is not woke”, but added: “Starting to align yourself to causes is not something policing should be doing.”

His comments come after it was reported that police officers at London Pride were told not to wear a badge commemorating officers killed in the line of duty because of concerns about its links to far-right groups in the US.