Met police found to be institutionally racist,
misogynistic and homophobic
Author of landmark report says Met can ‘no longer
presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them’
Vikram Dodd
Police and crime correspondent
Tue 21 Mar
2023 00.01 GMT
The
Metropolitan police is broken and rotten, suffering collapsing public trust and
is guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, an official report
has said.
The report
by Louise Casey, commissioned by the Met after one of its officers abducted
Sarah Everard, taking her from 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 disturbing stories of sexual assaults, usually covered
up or downplayed, with 12% of women in the Met saying they had been harassed or
attacked at work, and one-third experiencing sexism.
Lady
Caseysaid that the lifeblood of British policing was haemorrhaging and her
report warned that “public 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 amongst black Londoners for years.
“The Met
has yet to free itself of institutional racism. Public consent is broken. The
Met has become unanchored from the Peelian principle of policing by consent set
out when it was established.”
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.
Stop and
search and use of force on powers against black people was excessive, found the
report for the Met – which 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 to ensure the service to Londoners is prioritised.”
Casey said
austerity had deprived the Met of £700m but the cuts made by the force left its
protection of children and women as inadequate.
Already
crushingly low convictions of rapists were made worse by fridges that housed
rape kits being broken, or being so full that evidence was lost, and cases
dropped with rapists going free because of police bungles. Casey claimed in one
instance someone ruined a fridge full of evidence by leaving their lunchbox in
it.
Casey said
the Met had blown repeated chances to reform by official inquiries over the
decades and warned the force must not cherrypick 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, the force’s commissioner since September, said he would not use the
labels of institutionally racist, institutionally misogynistic and
institutionally homophobic that Casey insisted Britain’s biggest force
deserved.
But one of
the two people who hired him – and thus can fire him – made clear he agreed
with Case’s damning verdicts.
Sadiq Khan,
the London mayor, has not previously used the term “institutional” about
prejudice in the force he oversees since coming to office. He will be chairing
a new oversight board for the Met, in effect placing it in a form of special
measures for the foreseeable future.
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, but said he accepts the
findings. 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, anti-homophobic.
“I’m not
going to use a label myself that is both ambiguous and politicised.”
The current
Home Office is opposed to the idea of institutional racism.
Until now,
Rowley has 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.”
Both Rowley
and his deputy, Dame Lynne Owens, had served previously as assistant
commissioners in the Met and both said they would reflect on why they had
missed the disastrous state the force was falling into.
Rowley
repeated an apology to the people of London and vowed he would deliver sweeping
reform.
Casey’s
363-page report details how both Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard, and the
serial rapist David Carrick were spawned by Met errors and toxic cultures in
the force.
Despite
clues to their danger both were given a gun, passed vetting and served in the
parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, which Casey said should be
“effectively disbanded”.
She found
officers making offensive remarks about rape and racially abusing a black
colleague using the term “gate monkey”.
Some
firearms officers, the report said, defrauded the taxpayer, buying iPads with
public money, night vision googles they could not use for work, and hotel stays
for fun.
Meanwhile,
the Met was so elitist and hierarchical that frontline officers – most likely
to be the point of contact for the public – 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 eye Daniel Morgan, which
the Met rejected.
The report
said cultures of “blindness, arrogance and prejudice” are prevalent, and Casey
added: “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.”
Keir
Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, said: “The racist, sexist and
homophobic abuses of power that have run rife in the Metropolitan police have
shattered the trust that Britain’s policing relies on and let victims down.
“For 13
years there has been a void of leadership from the Home Office, which has seen
Britain’s policing fall far below the standards the public have the right to
expect.”
Home Office
officials insist they have put police reform measures in place. Suella
Braverman, the home secretary – who with Khan appointed the commissioner,
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”.
She said
the two government inquiries after the Couzens scandal should be given greater
powers and placed on statutory footing.
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