A dysfunctional, disgraced force in need of reform

Professionalism, integrity, courage, compassion. These are the values that the Metropolitan police say underpin their work to keep Londoners safe. They claim that their vision is to be the most trusted police force in the world. Those lofty statements appear ludicrous when set against the findings of Louise Casey’s independent review into behaviour and culture at the Met, published last week. She was commissioned to undertake the review in the wake of the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met firearms officer, who used his warrant card as a tool to commit his abhorrent crimes. Her findings are shocking and unequivocal, yet unsurprising to anyone who has followed scandal after scandal in recent years. Almost 25 years on from the landmark Macpherson report that judged that the Met was institutionally racist, Casey is clear that it remains so and that it is also institutionally misogynistic and homophobic.

The Met is the UK’s largest police force, responsible for London but also for counter-terrorist policing across the country. It developed the philosophy of policing by consent, copied across the world: the idea that the authority of a force derives not from the fear it instils in citizens but through cooperation with a public that trusts it to use its powers responsibly.

The Casey review outlines just how far the Met has strayed from this. The fact that a serving firearms officer could use the trust his position conferred in order to abduct, rape and murder is the sign of a rotten organisation riven with toxic cultures. Casey paints a grim picture: officers are openly racially abused by their colleagues, and black officers are 81% more likely to be subject to disciplinary action. Gay and lesbian officers have described how they have been targeted through sustained campaigns of homophobic abuse. Female officers who have been repeatedly subject to sexual assaults by colleagues were labelled as troublemakers when they tried to raise complaints.

The challenge for effective leadership and governance in any police force is that policing by its very nature draws in the wrong sorts alongside those who want to serve for the right reasons. The police have huge power over our lives, attracting abusers as well as the brave men and women who join to uphold the rule of law and keep citizens safe. So forces need robust vetting processes that weed out the unsavoury characters, and leadership and management that are committed to zero tolerance of the discrimination, bullying and harassment that have plagued the Met. Without constant vigilance from police leaders, toxic cultures will quickly spread, undermining the work of countless decent officers and eroding public trust.

The leadership of the Met has comprehensively failed to understand this basic dynamic. The review found that vetting procedures are inadequate and cannot identify individuals whom it might be dangerous for the Met to employ. The misconduct and complaints processes are dysfunctional, which means that red flags about officers’ behaviour – like that of Sarah Everard’s murderer – are missed, over and over again. The responsibility for the appalling cultures exposed by the review lie with the Met’s leadership. But there is a custom of total denial in the Met’s senior ranks: extraordinarily, Casey says that former commissioner Cressida Dick, still in post in the first stages of her review, seemed to expect a clean bill of health. Casey was told by leaders that the Met had made “great strides”.

It is this level of delusion that has paved the way for the policing failures Londoners have had to endure in recent years: its black population “under-protected and over-policed”; the bungled investigations of the murder of four gay men by Stephen Port; and such terrible failings on violence against women that one detective told Casey: “You might as well say it [rape] is legal.” She also draws attention to the “major inadequacies” that continue to plague the Met’s child protection service more than six years after the independent police inspectorate described its report on child protection at the Met as “the most severely critical that HMIC has published about any force, on any subject, ever”.

Levels of trust in the Met are perilously low; fewer than half of Londoners trust it to do a good job locally. The dreadful thing is that that lack of trust is rational: given that vetting and misconduct procedures remain as inadequate as they were at the time of Sarah Everard’s murder, it is in no way hyperbolic to say that there is currently no guarantee that the Met could prevent another officer using his position to murder a woman.

Reforming the Met and rebuilding public trust will be an immense undertaking. Casey says she has confidence that its new commissioner, Mark Rowley, is the right person to lead this work. But she is correct that it is very disappointing that he chose to quibble with the term “institutional racism”, despite the clear definition set out in the Macpherson report more than 20 years ago, and the four tests of institutional racism she outlined in her review. This review cannot be shelved by a complacent leadership, as has happened in the past. The Met must earn back the trust of Londoners in the next few years or be broken up.