More than one dubious/angry message from a frontline cop re the mayor’s statement on GMP yesterday. I don’t think I’m pushing it in saying Ian Hopkins wasn’t terribly popular, but cops don’t seem inclined to let the mayor off the hook either

The general gist of the criticism being: either he knew how awful things were but didn’t do anything/say anything publicly about it (bad) or he didn’t know and should have asked sufficient qs to have found out (bad)

Fair to say, having covered the mayoralty since 2017, policing was never the thing the mayor has prioritised to go out and talk about (individual issues like the arena attack aside) until the back end of last year when the HMI report came out. Cops know that too.

Also trickiest aspect of the argument ‘the Chief Constable never told me anything and presided over bad decisions and a negative culture’ is the fact his contract was extended in summer 2019, by the mayor’s office, which called him ‘outstanding’. That one will come back to bite.

Anyway I’ll write something further on Monday. There’s some fairly hefty questions around policing scrutiny and oversight (which I’ve written about before, back in summer 2019) that need a bit more of an airing. But I’ve got some west wing to watch now and some tea to drink