(CNN) -- When he became the Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police in 1972, Robert Mark told his new subordinates: "The basic test of a decent police force is that it catches more criminals than it employs."
Mark later said he was astonished by the arrogance and institutionalized wrongdoing he found when he arrived at the Met, as it's commonly known. And he launched an anti-corruption drive that led to the "early retirement" or reassignment of dozens of officers.
The British public began to reassess a police force often lauded as among the world's finest: incorruptible, the "people's friend." The London "bobby" was celebrated in British films, walking his beat in size 12 boots with no more than a truncheon, engaging with locals and escorting villains to the "station."
Scotland Yard, the Met's fabled headquarters, had been an inspiration to Arthur Conan Doyle and Monty Python's Flying Circus alike. The elite Flying Squad was nicknamed "The Sweeney" (Cockney rhyming slang: Flying Squad/Sweeney Todd) which became the title of a long-running TV series about the unit.
Founded in 1829 on the initiative of then Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (hence the colloquial term "bobby" for a policeman), the Metropolitan Police originally comprised 895 constables for a population of more than two million.
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Both the Met and the size of London have expanded exponentially since. And so has the complexity of policing -- extending to terrorism, complex fraud cases, cyber-crime and international drug syndicates where Chechens, Jamaicans and others feud over London turf.
In the 1960s, specialist units like the Flying Squad, that tackled armed robbery, and the Vice Squad became influential -- units with great autonomy and to some critics too little scrutiny. For some officers, the temptation to cut corners, tampering with evidence, taking bribes from underworld figures, became irresistible.
In 1977, the then head of the Flying Squad, Chief Superintendent Ken Drury, was jailed along with 12 other Scotland Yard detectives, for accepting bribes. One fellow officer said of Drury that he was also expert at "falsifying or manipulating alibi statements" and "the repeated harassment of witnesses until we had got what we wanted from them." It also transpired that the head of the obscene publications squad had been extracting protection money from Soho pornographers.
Then came "Operation Countryman" -- a six-year inquiry carried out by an external police force into police corruption in London. The man who led it complained of resistance at the highest levels within the Met. Of the few criminal prosecutions launched, even fewer were successful.
Despite the creation of a sizeable anti-corruption unit within the Met, further scandals emerged in the 1990s, with serving and retired detectives accused of links with organized crime and drug dealers. Some had offshore bank accounts containing six-figure sums.
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The Metropolitan Police's handling of civil unrest, racial issues and terrorism has also come under the microscope.
In 1979 and the early 1980s, when there were a number of riots and violent protests in London, police conduct was widely criticized. In one protest by the Anti-Nazi League, a young New Zealander, Blair Peach, was hit by a cosh carried by a member of the Met's "Special Patrol Group" and died. It was 30 years before the Met published its conclusion that Peach was killed by a police officer, but that other police officers in the same unit had refused to cooperate with the inquiry by lying to investigators. The officer responsible was never identified.
At the same time, evidence emerged of racism in the Met, which had few recruits from ethnic minorities. After riots in south London in 1981, a public inquiry found disproportionate and indiscriminate use of "stop and search" powers by the police against black people. An inquiry into the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993 found the force suffered from "institutional racism" and that detectives had made little effort to apprehend the white youths suspected of killing Lawrence in an unprovoked attack.
In 2005, a 27-year old Brazilian -- Jean Charles de Menezes -- was shot dead at an underground station in London after being mistaken by police for Hussain Osman, one of four would-be suicide bombers. An inquest recorded an "open verdict" -- in effect not absolving the police, and the Met made a compensation payment of $160,000 to the victim's family.
The truth is, we've all been in this together.
--British PM David Cameron
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To its critics, the shooting illustrated a changing culture in the Met, one where aggression and a resort to firearms had trumped community policing and restraint. That perception was reinforced by the death of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who was hit by an officer with a baton during protests at the G20 summit in 2009. A poll taken shortly afterwards showed 59% of people felt the police had used an unacceptable level of violence at the London protests.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched three investigations into incidents during the summit.
The Met's defenders point out that crime rates in the capital have fallen, that London has been free of terrorism since 2005 and that its specialist units have rolled up some substantial criminal networks as well as investigated the "cash for peerages" scandal that rocked the Labour government led by Tony Blair. There has also been greater outreach to ethnic minorities.
The current crisis for the Metropolitan Police is about both illegal conduct and excessively close relationships between senior officers and media executives.
A Scotland Yard inquiry is underway into alleged illegal payments to police officers in exchange for information. In addition, the IPCC is investigating whether Assistant Commissioner John Yates had "inappropriately" hired the daughter of a long-time associate, Neil Wallis. Wallis was a senior executive at News International who later became a consultant to the Met. He was arrested last week in connection with the phone-hacking scandal. Yates resigned Monday but vigorously denied any wrong-doing.
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Another former senior officer, Andy Hayman, who was in charge of the original hacking investigation, became a columnist with The Times, a News International title, after his retirement. During heated exchanges with a parliamentary committee last week, Hayman was dubbed "Clouseau rather than Columbo." He later attacked what he called the "lynch-mob mentality" of the committee.
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has acknowledged that relationships between the media, police and politicians became too cozy. "The truth is, we've all been in this together," Cameron said on July 8.
Of the British people, he said: "Just look at who they put their trust in. The police to protect them. The politicians to represent them. The press to inform them. All of them have let them down."
Whatever the results of the many inquiries now underway, faith in the Metropolitan Police has again been shaken. One poll found that 63% of the public felt less confidence in the police after the latest revelations.
With the London Olympics less than a year away, the Met's top officer and the man in change of its counter-terrorism operations are gone; and the rest of its leadership is dogged by the turmoil within.
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