Boris Johnson’s promise to hire 20,000 more police officers has increased the risk of introducing misogynist and racist recruits, a police watchdog has said, amid concerns that a discriminatory culture exists in forces across England and Wales.
Sir Tom Winsor, in his ninth and final annual review, said that police must confront a series of problems, including the aftermath of Sarah Everard’s murder by a police officer, if damage to public confidence is be restored.
The report comes a month after Dame Cressida Dick’s resignation as Met commissioner which followed a damning inquiry by another police watchdog into a culture of violently misogynist, racist and homophobic messages at Charing Cross police station in central London.
Winsor reiterated warnings that the “sheer magnitude and speed” of the recruitment campaign to hire 20,000 police officers “inevitably carries risks”, adding that there is a “heightened danger that people unsuited to policing may get through and be recruited”.
He said in too many cases the system “fails” when, on occasion, organised crime groups try to infiltrate the police which can have “catastrophic consequences”.
“When unsuitable applicants lie on their application forms, conceal their social media activity or play down their criminal connections, the quality of vetting needs to be consistently high,” he said.
“If during the probationary period, a constable displays behaviour like homophobia, racism, misogyny or dishonesty, it’s necessary to take that really seriously. If they just say ‘well, he’s going to be a good cop, we’ll knock off the rough edges’, you’re storing up a problem that could last for 30 years.”
Johnson pledged in 2019 to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers. Police numbers had dropped by more than 20,000 since 2010.
Asked about the scale of problems with culture and behaviour in policing, Winsor told reporters at a briefing on Thursday: “I don’t think that what we saw in Charing Cross police station is limited to London. But we don’t have evidence yet of just how widespread that is.
“I think these matters are taken very seriously … by all police forces. And while what has happened recently is London-centric, it is not London-limited in all probability.”
Revealing how a regional chief constable had told him within the last fortnight “we have this problem too”, without disclosing their identity, he added: “I expect that there are pockets of those things in other parts of the country.
“How much and how bad it is, we don’t know at the moment.”
His comments follow the release of a wide-ranging report that also says:
Fraud has “exploded” and continues to be wrongly treated as a low priority by many forces.
The model of local accountability, involving police and crime commissioners, has fractured some relationships between police and politicians, and left some chief constables lacking in confidence in their operational independence.
The “fragile architecture” of having 43 police forces, devised in 1962 and implemented in 1974, is “very far from fit for purpose” in the 2020s.
Online crime is now by far the most prevalent type of crime. “It used to be that our children were unsafe if they were out on the streets. They’re now more unsafe in their own bedrooms,” he said.
Public expectations to fight crime cannot be met without sufficient funding and “the public through their politicians must decide how much threat, harm and risk they are prepared to tolerate”.
Winsor said: “Major shortcomings in policing persist, and these need to be addressed. Criminality is often now complex and far more sophisticated, and investigations can take far longer. If the police continue to use 20th-century methods to try to cope with 21st-century technology, they will continue to fall further and further behind,” he said.
Speaking to the BBC last month, the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, claimed the prime minister was correct to leave out fraud when quoting statistics stating crime had decreased, because fraud is not a “crime that people experience in their day-to-day lives”.
Winsor said it was “wrong” for politicians to leave fraud out of crime statistics. “Fraud needs to be taken far more seriously.
“It is indefensibly a low priority for the police. It is a tsunami of offending which can, and does, lead to catastrophic human suffering and some people destroy themselves when they’ve lost everything they’ve ever worked for,” he said.
The report comes at the end of Winsor’s 10-year stint in the job, which ends in this month.
He said: “As I reflect on the past decade in policing, I commend the courage and commitment of police officers and staff across the country.
“The severity of the problems that our police service now faces should not be underestimated, but the public should be reassured by the strong, pragmatic and professional approach of police officers and staff.”
