Broken Yard is a riveting, eye-opening account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside Britain's most famous police force. The book charts Scotland Yard's fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public.
Barely a week goes by without the Metropolitan Police Service plunging into a new crisis. Steeped in ignominy and depleted in numbers, the Met is a shadow of its former self.
From the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard, Tom Harper examines the most notorious cases involving the Met over the past thirty years. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence.
As a top investigative reporter at the Sunday Times and The Independent, Tom Harper covered Scotland Yard for fifteen years, beginning not long after the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by Met police officers after being mistaken for a terror suspect in 2005.
Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard has been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash.
Twenty year-old 'Melodie', a recent convert to Islam, meets the leader of an Islamist brigade on Facebook. In 48 hours he has 'fallen in love' with her, calls her day and night, urges her to marry him, join him in Syria to enjoy a life of paradise - and join his jihad.Discover how ISIS entraps people such as the teenage girls from Bethnal GreenAnna Erelle is the undercover journalist behind 'Melodie'. Created to investigate the powerful propaganda weapons of Islamic State, "Melodie" is soon sucked in by Bilel, right-hand man of the infamous Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. An Iraqi for whose capture the US government has promised $10 million, al-Baghdadi is described by Time Magazine as the most dangerous man in the world and by himself as the caliph of Islamic State. Bilel shows off his jeep, his guns, his expensive watch. He boasts about the people he has just killed.With Bilel impatient for his future wife, "Melodie" embarks on her highly dangerous mission, which - at its ultimate stage - will go very wrong ... Enticed into this lethal online world like hundreds of other young people, including many young British girls and boys, Erelle's harrowing and gripping investigation helps us to understand the true face of terrorism.
