He was the most senior Asian officer in British policing, tipped for the top job of Met commissioner. But then came Black Lives Matter and the murder of Sarah Everard – and he couldn’t stay silent any more
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.”
