Burdizzo said:
ABATTBQ11 said:
They're not necessarily singled out. What the Met is requiring is for officers to declare if they're a part of any, "hierarchical organisation that requires members to support and protect each other," which the Freemasons fit.
Quote:
Plenty of Brits believe, but have never shown, that Freemason relationships extend beyond the lodge and unduly influence promotions and investigations. There may be some truth to that, but it may just be a case of cultural corruption and coincidental membership by many cops
I'm sorry. What?
The Met is requiring officers to disclose membership in organizations that have a hierarchy and ask members to support and protect each other. The Freemasons fit that somewhat loose definition.
Many Brits believe that lodge members show a level of favoritism to each other that reaches corruption and that the secretive nature of Freemasonry and lodges is used for corrupt networking activities. The general belief about Freemasonry is not necessarily that they are secretly running things like the Stonecutters, but that membership in Masonic lodges is an outside conduit for corruption and networking, though this is exceedingly difficult to prove because of the fact you have to rely on the watchers to watch themselves and the secret nature of Freemasonry itself. Also, it's important to remember that the lodges there may be very different than the lodges here, much like how international business units of the same parent company may have vastly different corporate cultures and practices as influenced by the local culture.
A lot of it centers around Jonathan Rees, who is a Freemason and the prime suspect in the Daniel Morgan murder mentioned previously. 10 of the officers in the Morgan murder investigation were Freemasons asking with Rees, and some of them would meet frequently with him during the investigation. One of these investigators would eventually become a business partner or Rees in their PI firm.
Rees has long been suspected of using his ties within Masonic lodges to build a network of corrupt cops that have helped him to illegally obtain private information from case files, back records, and illegal wiretaps. He was actually convicted in 2000 and served time in prison for this. The role of his Freemasonry in his dealings is somewhat circumstantial, but there is apparently some pretty strong correlation and overlap. Now, whether the corruption of the cops involved is a result of Freemasonry or they used membership in Freemason lodges as a networking tool is up for debate.
Regardless, the Met has long had a lot of issues with corruption. There was a huge phone hacking/wiretapping scandal that stretched from the 90's to the 2010's (and is probably still an issue). British tabloid media is big business there, and cops with access to personal private data are a big source of information. The issue has been investigated and revisited multiple times, with plenty of fanfare and arrests. However, British police, prosecutors, and courts have seemingly approached it like a time bomb and often taken only somewhat token action. In some cases, investigatory scopes have been suspiciously limited, victims have not been notified, prosecutions have not been pursued, court records of evidence presented have been surreptitiously sealed and labeled not in the public interest, etc. Basically, they either don't want to know the extent of the rot within their justice institutions, or they already know because they're a part of it. Neither are good. The whole thing is kind of fascinating, and it would take a book to really explain the full scope and impact.
