Met Police ‘on its last chance’ and ‘riddled with racism, sexism and homophobia’
An upcoming official review of the Metropolitan Police will find it’s crawling with racism, sexism and homophobia.
Set to be published on Tuesday, the report by Louise Casey is set to lay bare the scale of misconduct allegations against officers and how they’ve been handled internally.
Baroness Casey, the government’s Victims’ Commissioner, was appointed to lead the review in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens in 2021.
Senior figures in the police and civil service labelled the findings ‘horrible’ and ‘atrocious’, according to reports.
One official who’s seen its contents told The Guardian they will shunt the force firmly into the ‘last-chance saloon’.
It’s thought Baroness Casey will state cases like Couzens and David Carrick, an officer from the same unit who was recently found to be one of the UK’s worst serial rapists, cannot be dismissed as one-off ‘rotten apples’.
She will also reportedly argue Met bosses have failed to clear up failings which have been public knowledge since a 1999 review of the force commissioned in the wake of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.
A spokesman for the Met said: ‘We are aware of media reporting on the imminent publication of the report by Baroness Casey of Blackstock into the culture and standards of the Metropolitan Police.
‘The report will play an important role in informing and shaping our work to deliver More Trust, Less Crime and High Standards.
‘It will be published next week which will be the appropriate point for us to respond in further detail.’
An interim version of the report published in October revealed 1,809 Met Police staff had repeatedly come under suspicion of misconduct since 2013.
Of those, just 13 were dismissed, Baroness Casey found, concluding that the force’s disciplinary system was racist and misogynistic.
In many cases, the allegations included sexual assault, domestic abuse and harassment, and one officer was allowed to stay in the job despite facing 11 accusations covering all three offences.
Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley admitted the ‘appalling’ findings showed hundreds of officers should leave the force.
Statistics published by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) earlier this month found less than 1% of more than 1,500 officers and other workers facing complaints over their treatment of women were fired in a six-month period last year.
A separate review by Home Office adviser Professor Betsy Stanko published a report in December finding forces nationwide had fostered a culture of ‘disbelieving victims’ of rape.
Prof Stanko, who concluded deep-rooted prejudice was part of the problem, has claimed Sir Mark’s predecessor Stephen House described the ‘bulk’ of rape complaints as ‘regretful sex’ in a meeting about her findings.
Mr House, who was Deputy Commissioner at the time, said he ‘categorically denied’ using the phrase, while people who attended the meeting had differing recollections of whether he did so.
Earlier this month an LBC survey found that four in 10 Londoners trust Met officers.
The figure fell to less than a third among women under 35.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.