The Metropolitan police commissioner has “potentially missed his moment” to radically overhaul Britain’s largest police service by refusing to acknowledge there is institutional racism, sexism and homophobia within its ranks, according to Dame Louise Casey.
Casey, whose damning 300-page report found that prejudice was systematically present throughout the force, said Sir Mark Rowley was an “outstanding leader” but had missed an opportunity, nearly 25 years after the Macpherson report applied the term “institutional racism” to the police following the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
“Doreen Lawrence lost her son 30 years ago. It was a racist murder. Why can’t you give Doreen Lawrence that? Why? And then [Rowley’s] wings would fly, everybody would be under him. And he will be able to go forward in a very, very different way,” Casey said in an interview with the Times.
Asked whether Rowley, who became head of the force in September, had missed his moment, she said: “He potentially has missed his moment. And I worry for him, and I worry for that because he is an outstanding leader.”
Casey said she found discrimination still “baked into the system”, and dismissed Rowley’s argument, that using the term “institutional” is political and ambiguous, as a “get out of jail card”.
Speaking of her experience of being embedded in the Met for a year with her team of 10, Casey said there were high levels of “delusion” within the force.
“The level of delusion in this building, I don’t know what happens when they come through the front door and they get into the lift,” she said. Calling the drinking water in the Met’s headquarters “House Met”, she suggested that its secret ingredient was optimism: “It’s like they’re drunk on House Met; they can’t see anything outside. And these are potentially good people.”
Casey, who has been called the “tsar of tsars” for carrying out inquiries under Tony Blair, David Cameron and Theresa May, told the Times that the task facing Rowley was like “climbing Everest in flip-flops” because of its scale and the level of denial in the organisation.
Casey added that there was a “yawning gap” between the leadership team’s rhetoric and the reality for many officers on the ground.
In her report, Casey revealed 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.
There were also shocking examples of racism: one Muslim officer had bacon stuffed in his boots; a Sikh officer had his beard cut, and minority ethnic officers were much more likely to be disciplined or leave.
“This is one of the most weighty, evidenced documents I think we’ve ever produced,” Casey said.
“We speak for almost 50% of police officers who are black in this organisation who experienced racism. We speak for the 33% of women who experienced sexism on a daily basis in this organisation and the one in 10 who are sexually harassed or assaulted.”
She also pointed to fridges used by the sex offence units, which were often full, old or broken, as symbolic of a wider problem.
“When a woman is raped, she has to go to a place called the Haven [specialist centre] or a hospital,” she said. “To know then that your specimens are essentially put in a fridge that people can’t close, that people stick their lunchbox in, that essentially, every week, or every fortnight, people ask for new fridges and new freezers … to know that’s so uncaring, it’s so symbolic of an organisation that has completely lost its way.”
