Will the Casey Review — the result of a 12-month examination of the Metropolitan Police by Baroness Casey — actually change the Met? There are signs that it won’t.
The first instinct of those at the top seems to have been to try to evade some of its language. Commissioner Mark Rowley has objected to putting the word “institutional” next to various other words that also seem to crop up a lot in the report: misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and to deny personally seeing some of its evidence. “You make choices as a leader, and I was spending a lot of time wrestling with Isis. The level of toxicity that Louise calls out, didn’t see it”, he said.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has also rejected the term “institutional” and produced a pat statement about driving bad elements out of the force.
Rishi Sunak, too, had a rather weasel- worded statement about the report: “Clearly at the moment trust in the police has been hugely damaged by the things we discovered over the past year. What we need to do now is to make sure that won’t be repeated and we can regain people’s trust,” he said.
I hope Casey has added all this to her file of charges. Because of course this is precisely the problem her review recounts: a management that simply “does not see” the depths of toxicity in its own organisation, and persists in blaming it on “bad apples”, which it somehow never quite manages to “root out”. The idea, too, that the main issue before us is the lack of public trust in the police — rather than the force’s inherent trustworthiness — is just another evasion.
Rowley has accepted the review’s findings on the Met’s failings, but Casey said yesterday that his organisation is “completely in denial” and “long on hubris, short on humility”. “I don’t want it to end up as another report that is shrugged off, that doesn’t get the deep-seated reform needed,” she said. That’s a real danger.
The case of Sarah Everard, Casey said, should have had the impact of a “plane falling out of the sky”. Yet it only resulted in toothless “initiatives” and advice to officers to delete potentially incriminating WhatsApp messages.
The issue, as Casey must be sick of saying by now, is not that the Met is a well-meaning organisation which happens to includes a few bad elements, yet to be fully discovered, but that it seems to nurture and even produce them. This is the riddle that Braverman, the Mayor, and Rowley need to solve: How does a workplace that attracts many good people with good intentions, people willing to put their lives on the line for justice, end up apeing the character of its very worst members?
The report’s key charge — that the Met is institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic — is controversial but backed up by much evidence. Staff surveys and data analysis point to two departments in particular: the specialist firearms unit MO19, a “boys’ club” where male officers “frequently interrupted and spoke over” women, and the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, where black officers were subjected to racism — one was referred to as a “gate monkey” by other officers. Female officers were sexually assaulted by colleagues. Black officers were far more likely to be referred for misconduct. It also found the Met routinely downgrades investigations of violence against women and girls.
The Met, the report found, is not capable of driving out bad elements as its management system is fundamentally dysfunctional — run as a ‘series of disconnected moving parts’. Vetting procedures were ‘broken’. Britain’s biggest police force is accused of recruiting officers capable of committing rape and murder, and keeping them in its ranks for years. This was accompanied by a culture that resists external criticism, dismisses accusations as the work of a few, and instructs its members to “keep their heads down”. It cannot be trusted to police itself.
Enough cajoling. The time has come for a threat. The question with which the review leaves us is: should the Met be broken up? Is the task of reforming such a sprawling organisation simply too much? Should it be divided into specialisms, so that the force can concentrate on its job? Casey makes other recommendations: overhauling the misconduct process, improving vetting, and giving chief constables the power to sack rogue officers. Give the Met one more chance to improve itself. But it it fails: break it up.
