The full extent of Wayne Couzens’ alleged offending was laid bare in a devastating official report that revealed accusations of serial sexual abuse including rapes, before he used his status as a police officer to kidnap and murder Sarah Everard.
His alleged offending going back nearly 20 years, included two allegations of rape, sexually assaulting a girl, barely in her teens, and several incidents of indecent exposure.
The police failures laid out in the report by Elish Angiolini are worse than previously thought, including catastrophically flawed vetting, which allowed him first to join when he should have been rejected, then stay in policing and be entrusted with a gun.
Lady Angiolini, a former lord advocate of Scotland, said there may be other victims yet to come forward and there may be other officers as dangerous as Couzens at large.
Everard’s family criticised the police in a statement and told how her loss haunted every part of their lives: “It is obvious that Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer. Whilst holding a position of trust, in reality he was a serial sex offender.”
Couzens, the government-ordered report said, should never have been allowed to become an officer in the first place, and found policing culpable for leaving him at large.
Vetting picked up he was in debt but in breach of the rules he was allowed to join the police in 2011 instead of being rejected as he had previously been.
He became a Metropolitan police officer in 2018, enabled by another error, and was entrusted with a gun as part of the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command.
In March 2021 with Covid restrictions still in place he drove round London hunting for a woman.
Couzens in plain clothes used his police warrant card and police powers he was not fit to have, to convince Everard, 33, to get into the back of his car, the report said.
He then raped and murdered her, leaving her remains scattered across the Kent countryside, and is serving a whole-life term in prison.
The failings were so severe that Angiolini told the Guardian there may still be other officers as dangerous as Couzens within the police: “They [police] need to improve. Unless the processes for vetting and revetting are significantly improved, then there is a danger there may be another Wayne Couzens operating in plain sight.”
She said that the public and politicians needed to keep the pressure on the police and that the keeping of promises of reform needed to be monitored.
The report criticised police culture, finding Couzens showed colleagues extreme pornography, none of whom came forward, and a film showing a police officer murdering a woman who mocked him was found on one of his electronic devices after he was finally arrested.
He was the subject of reports to police for indecent exposure – eight in all – with investigations being bungled by Kent police in 2015, as well as 2020 and the Met in 2021 – days before the murder. In some of those cases police identified his name but nothing happened to stop him.
In a statement, Everard’s parents, Sue and Jeremy, and siblings, Katie and James, criticised the police, saying: “Warning signs were overlooked throughout his career and opportunities to confront him were missed. We believe that Sarah died because he was a police officer – she would never have got into a stranger’s car.”
Couzens was a prolific offender, the report said, allegedly attempting a knife-point kidnapping of a woman in 1995 and also allegedly attacking a child.
The report said a woman claims Couzens raped her in 2006 or 2007 while he was a special constable with Kent police, and that he raped a woman in October 2019 while he was an officer with the Met. He is also alleged to have tried to sexually assault a man dressed in drag in a Kent bar in summer 2019, during which he used his status as a police officer to silence the man’s complaints.
Couzens first applied to join Kent police in 2004. He failed the vetting process but was later allowed to serve as a special constable with the same powers.
The report finds he should never have been hired as a police officer, employed first by the Civil Nuclear constabulary despite being in debt, which the vetting rules in 2011 said should be a bar to being hired.
In 2018 he applied to join the Met, which missed material on the police national database linking his car to an allegation of indecent exposure in Kent in 2015.
In 2019 the Met bungled another vetting check by missing his potential sexual offending, and gave him a gun.
Angiolini concluded: “Repeated failures in recruitment and vetting meant that Couzens could enjoy the powers and privileges that accompany the role of a police officer. He went on to use his knowledge of police powers to falsely arrest Sarah Everard.”
The inquiry chair said: “Even after Couzens’ arrest and a review of his vetting clearance, the Met told the inquiry in 2022 that they would still have recruited him if provided with the same information. I found this astonishing.”
Angiolini demanded an overhaul of police vetting and noted that this call, along with some of her other 16 recommendations, were addressing failings that forces had already been told to rectify by previous official reports but had failed to.
She said police must take indecent exposure more seriously because of concerns it can be a gateway offence for more serious attacks.
The chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, chief constable Gavin Stephens, said: “Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer. His offending should have been stopped sooner. This should never have happened.
“Listening this morning to Lady Elish Angiolini’s clear findings of a catalogue of missed opportunities and red flags left me aghast. ”
The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said: “The fact that he abused his position as a Metropolitan police officer to carry them out represents the most appalling betrayal of trust. It damages the relationship between the public and the police and exposes longstanding fundamental flaws in the way we decide who is fit to be a police officer and the way we pursue those who corrupt our integrity once they get in.”
This was the first of three reports by Angiolini, next is a wider one into policing. She also said she would examine whether policing is institutionally misogynistic, as Lady Casey’s report into the Met last year concluded.
The Centre of Women’s Justice condemned police refusal to accept the finding: “While the Met wastes time rejecting those labels, this deflection allows abusive officers to continue to abuse, while the force engages in PR battles rather than focusing on creating real change.”
Angiolini’s third report will deal with the scandal of how David Carrick while a Met officer in the same unit as Couzens became one of Britain’s worst sex offenders despite repeated complaints.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said government had been warned of the perilous state of police vetting by official reports as long ago as 2012, and demanded national vetting standards.
In a signal to police chiefs of a tougher approach to come if there is a change of government, Cooper told the home secretary: “I have to be really blunt about this, his response is too weak, it is too little and it is too late, and the lack of urgency is unfathomable to me.”
The home secretary, James Cleverly, said the government was taking action: “I understand the frustration that not enough has happened, it has not moved fast enough, there is cultural change that still needs to be driven through.”
Dame Priti Patel, who as home secretary ordered the Angiolini report, warned that the foundation stone of British policing had been shattered: “We police by consent in our country and that bond has been broken.”
