“If anybody here questions the need for the police to change, I am here to tell you that it’s time to face up to reality.” After yet another shameful week for the police, those words could have been spoken yesterday. But in fact they date back seven years to a furious showdown between the then home secretary, Theresa May, and a stony-faced Police Federation. The cherished British ideal of policing by consent was, she told them, in danger of being destroyed by scandals ranging from the covert surveillance of murder victim Stephen Lawrence’s family to allegations of corruption, bribe-taking and covering up fatal police errors during the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. At the time, May thought it was worrying that only two-thirds of the public trusted the police to tell the truth. Now that feels like a figure from some lost golden age. An Ipsos-Mori poll this week found that fewer than a third of Britons are confident that the police investigation of alleged lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street will actually result in anyone who broke Covid rules getting punished, while considerably fewer than half expect the police to be thorough or independent. The Metropolitan police’s strange, foot-dragging reluctance to investigate, at least until shamed into it by a Whitehall inquiry, now looks like a catastrophic misjudgment; how could it not see that this was about showing that nobody, no matter how powerful, is above the law? But it wouldn’t have been so damaging had it not reinforced a more longstanding sense that something has gone very wrong in British policing. Fear and distrust of the police is, sadly, nothing new in some communities, stemming often from bitter experience. But it’s spreading now to parts of society where officers would once automatically have enjoyed the benefit of the doubt. The publication this week of a series of stomach-churning WhatsApps exchanged between officers at Charing Cross station – in which they joked casually about hitting their wives and girlfriends or turning “Africans” into dogfood – has reawakened all the same fears stirred up by the murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving Met police officer, and the revelation that officers posed for grotesque selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry. These are the men we’re expected to call on at our most frightened and vulnerable, in the wake of a sexual assault or after having finally summoned the courage to escape a violent relationship, for heaven’s sake. Yet one of them messaged a female colleague “I would happily rape you” – supposedly in jest. And while this particular Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation involves the Met, there’s no reason to expect such attitudes magically stop at the edge of London. Greater Manchester police was judged by an inquiry last year to be so badly run as to be actively putting public safety at risk. Victims of crimes including domestic violence waited in some cases weeks for a police response that should have come within hours, reportedly thanks to short-staffing and lack of training. Last autumn, newspapers were briefed that the current home secretary had finally lost patience with an institution she considered dysfunctional, misogynistic and tin-eared. The Met was, a Home Office source said, “like a horrible onion. You start peeling back [the layers] and you cry more and more.” There was talk of big reform plans. Yet so far, we have had a police, crime and sentencing bill handing yet more draconian powers to an institution Priti Patel herself supposedly considers dysfunctional, and briefings about how she wanted to ditch the Met commissioner, Cressida Dick, last year but was overruled. That may be true, but public sniping undermines any authority Dick had left to drive change in her own force. Who will take hard truths from someone so politically friendless, knowing she might not be around that much longer? This is a dangerous moment for decent officers trying to do a good job in thankless circumstances, including female officers horrified by some male colleagues’ behaviour who may have felt forced (as one told the Charing Cross inquiry) to “play the game or stay quiet”. Given this government’s proven tendency to ignore constitutional niceties, it may also be a dangerous moment for the perennially delicate balance between police operational independence and political meddling. But reform needn’t mean overstepping that line. Patel could replicate the continuing inquiry into culture and standards in the Met across all forces, focusing on misogyny and racism in the ranks. She could insist the findings of police misconduct hearings aren’t swept under the carpet and overhaul recruitment and vetting, examining whether standards have slipped under the pressure to recruit. And she could ensure that whoever succeeds Dick is chosen for all the right reasons and then backed to get on with the job, rather than treated as a political football. Without substantive reforms, however, sooner or later May’s warning seems doomed to come true. Robert Peel’s famous dictum that the public are the police and the police are the public was a reminder of the symbiotic bond between the law-abiding majority and the officers to whom they willingly yield authority in return for protection. But that bond is visibly unravelling now. It’s in the interest of both sides to fix it before it snaps. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist