How good is SY in reality.
In recent history there has been a litany of cases and situations where it's reputation for law enforcement has been caste in to serious light.
Below is a link to the view of Yvonne Ridley, a name some will know.
Last week an anti-terror cop was sent down for 15 months for trying to sell a story to the News of the World. April Cashburn wasn’t some lowly grunt at the bottom of the pile – she was a detective chief inspector involved largely in counter terrorism.
...In fact the Yard’s counterterrorism activities leave much to be desired, as a catalogue of incompetence and flawed intelligence attests. Take, for instance, the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was mistaken for a suicide bomber in 2005.
...who can forget the fiasco, a year later, of the Forest Gate raid in which hundreds of officers swooped on an East London street, claiming one of the homes was a base for the manufacture of deadly chemicals? During the raid Mohammed Abdul Kahar was shot at close range inside his own home. As they frantically back-pedalled when not even so much as an asprin was found, police had plenty of words to say about the shooting of an innocent man but “sorry” was not one of them – until officers were ordered to apologise for the botched raid.