A Scotland Yard chief insisted efforts to get Londoners to trust the force again are “not yet done” after revealing the number of rogue officers sacked has more than tripled to over 100 this year.
Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said the “strongest doubling down on standards” since the 1970s had also seen hundreds accused of sexual or domestic violence have their vetting status rechecked or revoked.
In an interview with the Standard, Mr Taylor - head of the Anti-corruption and Abuse Command - said: “We can say all the right words but if we don’t back it up with action, that’s an issue.
“We will return to normality. People can trust us.”
His boss Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had vowed to be “robust” in rooting out so-called bad apples to restore confidence following a series of shocking scandal including the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by PC Wayne Couzens in 2021.
Asked if Sir Mark’s pledge to cut out the “cancer” was largely achieved, Mr Taylor urged caution: “We’ve made really substantial progress but we’re not naïve enough to say the job is done.
“The kind of dichotomy here is the more we investigate, the harder we look, the more we find and then the stories you see.
“You’ve got this slightly odd position where in order to restore confidence, we have to get out dirty laundry out first.”
He stressed the crackdown wasn’t about staff who make “genuine mistakes” doing an “incredibly difficult” role.
Mr Taylor said: “We don’t want to be paying officers public money when their standards have fallen below what the public expect. The quicker we can exit them from the organisation the better, so the majority of really good officers can go about their job in a trusted way without these individuals undermining them.”
When Sir Mark took over, approximately 30 officers were being dismissed over an average six-month period. That has increased to just above 100 in the 11 months since January 1.
Around 1,333 gross misconduct investigations have been launched by Britain’s biggest police force, of which 79 per cent came from internal tip-offs and 21 per cent from the public. It represents a 55 per cent increase in such probes in 12 months, although the most recent monthly average is slightly down.
Mr Taylor said: “That shows us our officers and staff are definitely calling out bad behaviours, are confident to report things and, as a result, we are seeing this consequential increase in investigations.”
Of 1,600 officers with a domestic or sexual assault report made against them in the past 10 years, 245 have been referred for a review of their vetting, 70 had warrant cards revoked, 28 resigned and 15 are awaiting a gross incompetence hearing, which could lead to their sacking.
Proactive “live” operations under way against officers has doubled from 25 in September 2022, to 63 this month, which Mr Taylor says proves the Met refuses to wait until “things to come to us”.
There has also been a 64 per cent increase in accelerated disciplinary hearings, held weeks after an officer is convicted of crimes such as drink-driving and sexual offences.
Since November 2022, Crimestoppers’ anonymous anti-corruption hotline received 6,466 contacts, with 1,200 pieces of intelligence passed to the Met. The remaining reports went to other forces.
Other measures designed to clean up the Met included all 50,000 employees being checked against the police national database. It didn’t reveal a single officer hiding a previous conviction but led to 58 conduct investigations, believed to mostly be off-duty association with criminals.
The Met’s rigorous vetting of potential recruits saw rejected applications jump from 6.9 per cent in 2022 to 12.5 per cent in September.
