Metropolitan Police officers suspected of discrimination could be placed under surveillance by undercover colleagues, the new commissioner has said.
Sir Mark Rowley, the former head of counter-terrorist policing who stepped into the role earlier this week, laid out the plan as part of a long list of reforms he hopes will restore public confidence in the Met.
In an interview, Cressida Dick’s replacement conceded that in light of a series of devastating scandals, the Met had “let the public down.”
“That’s clear from what they are telling us. Confidence has dropped across all communities,” he told the Sunday Times. “In some communities it’s dropped even further. At the bottom are the obvious - black communities and women.”
The murder of Sarah Everard by PC Wayne Couzens last year, the strip-searching of a 15-year-old black schoolgirl, known as Child Q, and the shooting of Chris Kaba by a Met firearms office are among the incidents that have impacted the Met’s reputation.
A cull of “toxic” officers involved in racist and homophobic behaviour appears at the top of his agenda, the new commissioner said: “The racist language, some of the toxic behaviours we have seen ... it’s so far beyond the pale. It should be, ‘Do not pass go, do not collect £200.’ Leave the organisation.”
Sir Mark conceeded the Met had not been “ruthless enough” in light of recent cases.
“We’ve undercooked it,” he told the newspaper. “We have inadvertently allowed behaviour to survive and perhaps grow that we should have been looking to extinguish from policing.”
Sir Mark, however, insisted part of the issue stemmed from regulations which mean he does not have the final say on the dismissal of officers, instead left to the discretion of experts presiding over police misconduct hearings that can be overturned on appeal.
As such, he intends to recruit more than 100 officers to the professional standards directorate for the Met.
His other pledges include a promise to send officers to every reported burglary, which he described as being “too invasive” a crime to ignore.
Sir Mark also said that fighting crime was being hampered by the “massive proportion police work that centres on mental health callouts, explaining officers were spending up to 12 hours sitting in A&E guarding vulnerable patients.
“They should be fighting crime,” he said. “They should be working with communities,”
“This is about effective policing that has the support of and contribution of communities. We lose that at our peril.”
He also vowed to end so-called “woke policing” and indicated Met officers should not take the knee.
Sir Mark has spent his first week as commissioner working to ensure the safety of crowds gathering to pay their respects to the Queen
The security operation around Elizabeth II’s lying in state at Westminster Hall and upcoming funeral is believed to be the biggest ever mounted by British police, with thousands of officers being pulled into London from across the country.
