There are quite a few masons who are in the police in the UK as well and they have waaaaay too much power.
"Why the secret handshake between police and Freemasons should worry us
Successive Met commissioners have tried to end the society’s influence. It is as clear as ever that membership of both bodies is incompatible with public service"
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When the late
Sir Kenneth Newman became commissioner of the Metropolitan police in 1982, he outlined his thoughts on how his officers should behave in what became known as “the little blue book”. Always a tactful man, his passage on freemasonry noted delicately that “the discerning officer will probably consider it wise to forgo the prospect of pleasure and social advantage in freemasonry so as to enjoy the unreserved regard of all those around him”.
More than 30 years later, it will come as a surprise to many that membership of the Freemasons is still causing disquiet within the police. Steve White, the retiring chair of the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers,
told the Guardian this week that he and his colleagues suspected that Freemasons within the service were hampering reforms and acting in an obstructive way. “I find it odd,” he added, “that there are pockets of the organisation where a significant number of representatives are Freemasons.”
Many younger recruits regard Freemasonry as little more than a weird old boys’ club
The Freemasons themselves have denied that there is anything untoward and say that they see no conflict of interest between membership of a masonic lodge and a job in the police. “We are parallel organisations … and have high moral principles and values,” Mike Baker, spokesman for the United Grand Lodge, told the Guardian.
That may well be, but being both a Freemason and a police officer remains just as delicate and conflicted an issue as it did in the 1980s. After Newman’s pronouncement, Freemasons within the Met, some of them in quite senior positions, responded defiantly by setting up their own new lodge called the Manor of St James, and there was little that Newman could do about it. Since then, commissioner after commissioner has made the same point."
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As recently as 1999, a former detective and a Freemason, Duncan Hanrahan, was jailed for
more than eight years for conspiracy to rob, supply drugs and pervert the course of justice. It emerged in his Old Bailey trial that he had used a fellow Freemason, who was a serving officer, to help him make contact with another officer, whom he tried unsuccessfully to bribe. And this came just three years after the home affairs select committee had announced: “We believe that nothing so much undermines public confidence in public institutions as the knowledge that some public servants are members of a secret society, one of whose aims is mutual self-advancement.”
Things may have changed a great deal in the intervening two decades since those remarks; there are thankfully many more women in the service now. Many younger recruits, particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds, regard Freemasonry and all its aprons and handshakes and rituals, as little more than a weird old boys’ club. But Steve White has made the point that its influence within the service still exists. All those commissioners were right. If the public thinks that a secret handshake can still swing a prosecution and officers themselves feel that the same handshake can affect a promotion, then it is as clear as ever that membership of both bodies is incompatible. And it is time that all those officers who are Freemasons decided to “forgo the prospect of pleasure and social advantage” until they have left the service."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/secret-handshake-police-freemasons
"Infamous Victorian serial killer Jack The Ripper may have escaped justice because of a Freemason cover-up.
The notorious murderer is believed to have been a second-rate singer called Michael Maybrick who is identified as a Freemason in the archive records.
Maybrick was a member of the St Andrew’s Lodge in London for more than 20 years.
He left a year before five women were murdered in the East End in nine weeks in 1888.
The case is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in British criminal history.
Records show the part played by Freemasons in the failed Scotland Yard inquiry.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren was a Mason along with his “eyes and ears” on the case Chief Inspector Donald Swanson.
Coroners Wynne Baxter and Henry Crawford who ruled on the murders were also Masons along with at least three police doctors who examined the bodies.
Maybrick was on the Supreme Grand Council of Freemasons and toured Britain as a performer.
His handwritten entry in the records describes him as a “vocalist”.
Met police chief Sir Charles was a senior member of the Masonic Society.
Author Bruce Robinson, film director of Withnail and I, claims in a new book that the Ripper murders bore the hallmarks of Masonic ritual."
Robinson - whose book is called They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - said: “The whole of the ruling class was Masonic, from the heir to the throne down. It was part of being in the club.
“Part of the whole ethic of Freemasonry is whatever it is, however it’s done, you protect the brotherhood - and that’s what happened.
“They weren’t protecting Jack the Ripper, they were protecting the system that Jack the Ripper was threatening.
"And to protect the system, they had to protect him. And the Ripper knew it.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/how-secret-group-freemasons-kept-6886802
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