Racist, misogynist, homophobic – the damning verdict on Met police

Public trust in force is collapsing, says report in wake of Everard murder

The Metropolitan police is broken and rotten, suffering collapsing public trust and guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, an official report says today.

The report by Louise Casey, commissioned by the Met after one of its officers abducted Sarah Everard, taking her from a London street in March 2021, before raping and murdering her, is one of the most damning of a major British institution.

The 363-page report details stories of sexual assaults, usually covered up or played down, with 12% of women in the Met saying they had been harassed or attacked at work, and one-third experiencing sexism.

Lady Casey said the lifeblood of British policing was haemorrhaging and her report warned that “consent is broken” with just 50% of the public expressing confidence, even before revelations about the force’s worst recent scandals.

She pinned the primary blame on its past leadership and said: “Public respect has fallen to a low point. Londoners who do not have confidence in the Met outnumber those who do, and these measures have been lower among Black Londoners for years.

“The Met has yet to free itself of institutional racism. Public consent is broken.”

The report found a bullying culture, frontline officers demoralised and feeling let down by their leaders, and discrimination “baked into the system”.

Casey revealed that one Muslim officer had bacon stuffed in his boots, a Sikh officer had his beard cut, minority ethnic officers were much more likely to be disciplined, or leave, and Britain’s biggest force remains disproportionately white, in a capital that is increasingly diverse.

Use of stop and search powers and force against black people was excessive, the report found. The Met stops more people per head of population than any other force.

A catalogue of suffering by women included frequent abuses by senior officers, including one subjecting a female junior to repeated harassment and an indecent act. She complained and told the inquiry: “It would have probably been better to suffer in silence, but I couldn’t do that. He got away with everything, I was made to look like the liar.”

Casey said the Met was failing on so many levels

the crisis is existential and if not fixed could end in its dismemberment: “If sufficient progress is not being made at the points of further review, more radical, structural options, such as dividing up the Met into national, specialist and London responsibilities, should be considered.”

Casey said austerity had robbed the Met of £700m but the cuts it made left its protection of children and women as inadequate. Already crushingly low convictions of rapists were made worse by fridges used to hold rape kits being broken or so full evidence was lost, and cases dropped with rapists going free because of police bungles. Casey said in one instance someone ruined a fridge of evidence by putting their lunch in it.

Casey said the Met had blown repeated chances to change and warned the force must not cherry-pick the reforms it likes. It should implement her recommendations as a whole, she said.

But a gap and potential high-level clash was emerging after Casey’s report was published, with those who oversee and run the Met having had the report for days.

Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner since September, said he would not use the labels of institutionally racist, institutionally misogynistic and institutionally homophobic that Casey insisted the force deserved.

The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, will be chairing a new oversight board for the Met, in effect placing it in a form of special measures. Khan said: “The evidence is damning. Baroness Casey has found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, which I accept. I’ll be unflinching in my resolve to support and hold the new commissioner to account as he works to overhaul the force.”

Rowley said he wanted more time to study Casey’s recommendations. He said he accepted Casey’s factual findings about racism, misogyny and homophobia in his organisation and they were systemic, but neither he nor the Met would accept they were “institutional”, claiming it was a political term.

Rowley, battling to avoid being the last commissioner of the Met in its current shape and form, said: “I have to use practical, unambiguous, apolitical language … I don’t think it fits those criteria. It’s simply a term I’m not going to use myself.”

Asked if he was not accepting the finding, Rowley said: “I’m accepting we have racists, misogynists. I’m accepting, we’ve got systemic failings, management failings, cultural failings. This is about an organisation that needs to become determinedly anti-racist, anti-misogynist, antihomophobic. I’m not going to use a label myself that is both ambiguous and politicised.”

Until now, Rowley had generated a small degree of hope with his vows to reform, but Andy George, the chair of the National Black Police Association, said: “The commissioner is wrong to once again fail to accept the Met is institutionally racist. We risk repeating history and cannot let this moment pass as another missed opportunity.” He repeated an apology to the people of London and vowed he would deliver sweeping reform.

Casey’s 300-page report details how both Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, and Met serial rapist David Carrick were spawned by errors and toxic cultures in the force.

She found officers making offensive remarks about rape and racially abusing a black colleague.

Some firearms officers, the report said, defrauded the taxpayer, buying iPads with public money, night-vision goggles they could not use for work and hotel stays.

Meanwhile the Met was so elitist and hierarchical that frontline officers were run ragged and neighbourhood policing had been decimated.

Casey also said the Met should accept it is institutionally corrupt, as branded in 2021 by the official inquiry into the murder of the private detective Daniel Morgan, which the Met rejected.

The report said cultures of “blindness, arrogance and prejudice” were prevalent and Casey said: “The Met can now no longer presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them. The loss of this crucial principle of policing by consent would be catastrophic. We must make sure it is not irreversible.”

She added: “It is rot when you treat Londoners in a racist and unacceptable fashion. That is rotten.”

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, backed Rowley: “It is clear that there have been serious failures of culture and leadership in the Metropolitan police … I will continue to hold the commissioner to account to deliver a wholesale change in the force’s culture.”

Harriet Wistrich of the Centre for Women’s Justice said Casey’s findings were “without precedent in its unswerving criticism of a corrupt, institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic police force.”