Louise Casey’s review, commissioned in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, has laid bare in more than 300 pages a series of grave concerns about the Metropolitan police’s culture and standards.
Describing her findings as “rigorous, stark and unsparing”, she said she hoped they would lead to fundamental change in the force.
Discrimination
The report identifies institutional homophobia, misogyny and racism in the Met.
This can be seen in mistreatment and abuse of LGBT+, female, Black, Asian and minority ethnic officers and staff and unfair outcomes for these groups inside the organisation as a result of bias in processes and systems and in attitudes and behaviours.
There are unfair outcomes in communities that result from underprotection or from overpolicing, or both, and a culture of downplaying and denial of discrimination and repeated unwillingness to accept and deal with institutional failures that let down Londoners, it says.
But the Met has only reluctantly accepted discrimination and has preferred to put this down to a minority of “bad apples” and to systemic bias, the report adds.
Sexism and misogyny
Sarah Everard’s murder and other horrific crimes perpetrated by serving Met officers against women in London have shone a light on shocking treatment of and attitudes towards women in the Met, the report says.
Despite improvements in gender representation and increasingly flexible working practices, women are not treated equally in the workforce, with new female recruits resigning at four times the rate of all probationers.
Homophobia
While the relationship between the Met and London’s LGBTQ+ community is vastly different to what it was in the last century, it has been in decline in recent years, the report says.
Trust in the Met among LGBTQ+ Londoners has fallen at a faster rate than that among other Londoners over the last seven years and has coincided with criticism of the Met’s defensive handling of the murders of Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor by Stephen Port.
Racism
The Met’s proportion of Black, Asian and other minority ethnic officers falls far short of the diversity in London’s communities, and it is even more unrepresentative at higher ranks or among women.
At current recruitment rates it will take at least another 30 years to come anywhere even close to ethnic balance, the report adds.
Tackling corrosive and racist myths about needing to “lower the bar” in order to recruit more diversely, and addressing the racism experienced by officers and staff in the Met is necessary, the report says.
Two specialist units (specialist firearms MO19 and parliamentary and diplomatic protection PADP)
The report found these two specialist units were well-resourced, with elitist attitudes and toxic cultures of bullying, racism, sexism and ableism.
Normal rules do not seem to apply in MO19, with junior ranking officers and trainers holding disproportionate power in their relationships with senior officers because of the importance of their “blue card” firearms status to Met operations.
In parliamentary and diplomatic protection, with which both Wayne Couzens and David Carrick served, the report found low morale, overtime-dependency and a “dark corner” of the Met – in which two of the most serious police offenders in British history had worked – where “banter” and a bullying culture were not challenged.
The Met and Londoners
In a growing and increasingly diverse city, the Met has tried but failed to ensure its workforce fully reflects all the communities it serves, the review says.
More crimes are being reported but fewer cleared up, the report says.
In the same period, public trust and confidence in the Met has fallen, hitting its lowest ever point, persistently lower among Black Londoners but now falling sharply in communities where it has traditionally scored highly.
The Peelian principle of policing by consent is at risk, the report warns.
Resources and austerity
The Met has been challenged significantly during a period of financial austerity, the report finds.
It has prioritised officer numbers, but even these fell below 30,000 during the last decade.
Other efficiency measures taken have weakened the management and have had an impact on frontline policing in the capital and its connection to Londoners.
Met spending levels are now around £700m, or 18%, lower in real terms than they were 10 years ago, the report adds.
Spending on contracted services more than doubled from £24m in 2017-18 to £54.5m in 2021-22.
Spending on external consultants, excluding HR, finance, and commercial services, more than tripled from £10.4m in 2015-16 to £32.1m in 2021-22. For the years 2017-18 to 2020-21 it was spending about £50m each year on consultants.
How the Met is run
The Met’s management systems have resulted in an organisation that is incoherent and unstrategic, the report concludes.
Poorly implemented systems of recruitment, vetting, management, training and promotion, with specialist and frontline units competing for resources, allow a culture in which poor performance, behaviours and attitudes can go unchallenged.
