Leroy Logan. Photo: Emily Langford

A SENSE of anxiety and anger cuts through the heart of Leroy Logan’s autobiography, Closing Ranks, My Life as a Cop. The menace of racism lurks in every corridor in Scotland Yard he walks down.

When he was a new recruit based out of Islington police station in Upper Street, he came back from a day on the beat to find the words “Dirty N*****” scrawled across his locker.

Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen dramatises this moment in his film Red, White and Blue – part of his BBC Small Axe series.

John Boyega, who plays the young Logan, yells out in fury and slams the locker.

Asked about this scene, Logan told Review: “I wish I had just slammed the thing and really released my anxiety and annoyance.

“I really wish I had done that. But I just went and reported it and I don’t know if anyone was spoken to, or disciplined.

“I had to clean the N-word off my locker because no one was doing anything. It was there for weeks.”

The reality of fighting racism in the police from the 1980s to the 2010s is that it is a long, slow, agonising journey. It’s one man trying to alter the course of a vast bureaucratic juggernaut.

When the investigation into the murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in Peckham was met with a “wall of silence” by the predominantly black community, Logan was called in. The incumbent investigation unit was not pleased about this.

“I knew the investiga­tion team wouldn’t embrace me with open arms, and I felt strongly that the people I was supposed to be working with would close ranks against me and shut me out,” he writes.

His hunch was confirmed when he heard through the grapevine, known as “Rumour Control”, that they saw him as a “threat”.

Nonetheless, he ploughed ahead and set up a crack force of young and enthusiastic black and Asian police officers who gained the confidence of the North Peckham Estate residents.

The group triggered a breakthrough in the case and gained “special status” in the force.

“I saw an appetite for complex investigations that had been lying dormant in them surface fully, as newly found skills and abilities blossomed,” he says about his team.

But this enthusiasm was dashed when a “cost-saving review” cut funding for the team, confining it to “bureau­cratic obscurity”. This happened time and again.

In the 1990s black and Asian officers were invited to Bristol to open up about their experiences of racism. The “no-frills” bus the officers travelled on was commonly known as the “Green Goddess”, but the “racist elements in the Met renamed it the Wog Wagon” for this trip.

Still, Logan and his group saw this as a pivotal moment.

“We opened up our veins and bled out the pain we suffered in the hostile environment of the occupational culture. One officer told how whenever he would radio his colleagues, they would make monkey noises back at him.”

They had high hopes for the Bristol seminar’s report but in “in fine Met tradition, it got shelved”.

There was a pervasive sense of shadowy figures working against Logan. When he was trying to instil a fresh anti-racist ethos in new officers as one of the top managers at the Met’s Hendon training centre, a rumour was leaked to the tabloid press that he had impregnated one of the female recruits. He was investigated while on holiday with his family. The truth is the woman had actually suffered a miscarriage with her fiancé’s baby.

In his next role as chairman of the National Black Police Association, again he heard whispers that an investigation was looming. He was eventually served with a disciplinary notice for defrauding the Home Office out of £80 in expenses and his career was on the line. His lawyers (including current London Mayor Sadiq Khan) won the case and the charges were quashed, but the reputa­tional damage was done.

Despite all this, his efforts did bear fruit. In particular, setting up the Black Police Association and the work it did shaping the Macpherson Inquiry following the botched investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The investigators found the Met to be “institutionally racist” and brought about a wave of changes.

In the foreword to Closing Ranks, Steve McQueen asks what kept this man going through all the knockbacks?

The book has three answers to this question. One is his religious conviction. He felt impelled by a higher power to join the Met and change it from within. His faith consoled him through the darkest times.

The second is the poverty and pain he witnessed growing up on the streets of Islington. For himself and his friends, life was constantly on a knife-edge. As an officer in the early days based in King’s Cross and Angel, he was often arresting people he went to Highbury Grove School with and when he does he thinks: “It could have been me”.

Finally, he credits the discipline and principles that his parents instilled in him.

In a bitter irony, some of his parents’ steadfast ideals of meritocracy and fairness were partly learned as colonial subjects growing up in Jamaica. But they found the so-called motherland was rotten to the core and it took the sacrifices of the former colonial subjects and their children to suck this poison out of the state.

• Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop. By Leroy Logan. SPCK Publishing, £14.99
• Small Axe: Red, White and Blue is available on BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime