The public of London is being failed by an institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic Met riddled with bullying, poor leadership and the “rotten” treatment of black people, the most damning report in the force’s history warned on Tuesday.
Baroness Dame Louise Casey said that the protection of women had also been “thrown out of the window” as she denounced a catalogue of failings at Scotland Yard infecting every level of the force.
In a landmark report commissioned in the wake of the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Met officer Wayne Couzens, she warned that the problems are so severe that there could be other officers as bad as the killer and his serial rapist colleague David Carrick still within the Met’s ranks.
She highlighted incidents including dildos being put in coffee mugs, bags of urine thrown at cars, and ethnic minority officers being ridiculed and talked down to as examples of misconduct within the Met and lashed out at the “off the barometer” decision to allow an officer convicted of indecent exposure for masturbating on a train to keep his job.
Baroness Casey said rape victims were also being failed with forensic samples taken from them stored in fridges so full that three officers were required to close them and the evidence being ruined through contamination.
She said the Met’s firearms unit and the separate parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, where both Couzens and Carrick served, were blighted by “elitist attitudes and toxic cultures of bullying, racism, sexism and ableism” but that such attitudes were also present in too many other parts of the force.
“What would it take for policing to wake up that it has to be different,” Baroness Casey told a news briefing held to unveil what she described as “very grave and serious” findings.
“They’ve got to clean it up so people can sleep easily at night.
“There must be fundamental change. This must not be another report that the Met forgets. It has to do a better job for Londoners.”
Baroness Casey, who makes a succession of recommendations for reform in her 360 page report, said the failings inside the Met had gone unaddressed for decades and were the result of poor management and inadequate supervision rather than the force’s size.
She said there had also been “too much hubris and too little humility”, a “we know best attitude” and a “defensiveness and denial” at the top of the force that “starts from position that nothing is wrong, speaking up not welcome.”
She said women and children had been “left behind” and placed “at greater risk than necessary” because of the decision to exclude violence against them from a definition of “serious violence” which focused instead on tackling knife crime and drugs.
Baroness Casey said an overhaul of stop and search was also required and the “Met under-protects and over-polices Black Londoners”.
She also found that homophobia is rife and called for a new process for the Met to apologise to Londoners for past failings and rebuild consent.
Other proposals include improving leadership by bringing in “specialist expertise from outside” and a new supervisory structure with a quarterly Policing Board for London headed by the London Mayor.
Her report adds that if progress is not made then “more radical, structural options, such as dividing the Met into national, specialist and London responsibilities” should be considered.
Other recommendations include boosting the proportion of misconduct cases ending in action, improving charge rates and increasing the number of rape cases reaching court.
Baroness Casey says the “diversity gap” among in officers, including senior officers, must be narrow too and condemns poor workforce planning in the force despite large increases in human resources spending and the use of external consultants.
She says the vetting system for officers is “broken”, the frontline “degraded”, and caseloads for rape, sexual abuse and domestic abuse officers “unmanageably high”.
She says there is not enough time for officers to get protective orders or to make disclosure about abusers under Clare’s law or the domestic violence disclosure scheme as a result.
Baroness Casey added: “I absolutely recognise the commitment that Met officers make to protecting the people of our capital city every day.
“But everyone within the Met also now needs to recognise that its failings go well beyond the actions of ‘bad apple’ officers. My report makes clear that, on top of the unimaginable crimes of individuals and the shocking series of events that have hit the service in recent years, the way in which the Met has responded to them is also a symptom of a wider malaise in an organisation that has fundamentally lost its way.
“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.
“It is fixable if the Met recognises the true scale of the challenge in front of it, with drastic and effective action. London deserves nothing less.”
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley on Tuesday said he was “deeply sorry” for the “appalling examples of discrimination, the letting down of communities and victims and the strain felt by the frontline” which he admitted were both “unacceptable” and inexcusable.
But while he accepted Baroness Casey’s diagnosis of the problems, he was not willing to say the Met is “institutionally” racist, sexist and homophobic.
