London’s Metropolitan Police was one of the world’s first modern police forces and is still, by numbers, one of the largest. It is now the subject of one of the most damning reports ever filed on a major British institution. A review by a senior peer has deemed the Met institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic. The force is beset by discrimination and bullying, it says, and seems unable to police itself. The Met has degraded frontline services and is failing women and children in particular. Public consent — the principle underpinning the model of policing that Sir Robert Peel created in the 1820s — is “broken”.
The review by Baroness Louise Casey was commissioned after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, in 2021. Publicity around that case led to another coming to light — David Carrick, sentenced last month to 30 years for raping and sexually abusing 12 women over 17 years. Carrick and Couzens served together in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, described by Casey as a “dark corner” of the Met. Both abused their roles to facilitate their crimes.
While these are the most extreme examples, they reflect failings of an internal culture running through the force. Sexism and racism are routine, homophobia “deep seated”. Some 12 per cent of women who responded to a survey said they had experienced sexual harassment or assault at work. Distressing case studies illustrate the findings: a Sikh officer who had his beard cut; a Muslim who had bacon left in his boots.
London’s residents, the report warns, are being badly let down. The city “no longer has a functioning neighbourhood policing service”. Organisational cuts have severed contacts with communities. De-prioritisation of public protection has put women and children at unnecessary risk. Black Londoners are “both over-policed and under-protected”, and still disproportionately affected, as for decades, by the abuse of stop and search powers.
Successive governments bear some responsibility. Apart from Theresa May, home secretaries have been scared to take on the police. The Cameron government’s “austerity” measures have taken a lasting toll. Met spending is now about £700mn, or 18 per cent, lower in real terms than in 2013. That, the report says, would be enough to employ more than 9,600 extra police constables.
Casey rightly salutes the decency and bravery of many officers. But the Met has for too long put its problems down to a “few bad apples” instead of identifying and tackling the systemic causes. What is needed now is a root-and-branch overhaul of the 43,000-strong force, with measurable targets that are scrupulously monitored.
The latest Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, is an able and committed former counter-terrorism head. He will need courage and the full backing of the national and London governments to implement the report’s 16 recommendations to regain trust and rebuild frontline policing. Whitehall should give Rowley the powers he seeks to sack bad officers more easily. External police and experts need to be brought in to help drive change. And vetting procedures for recruitment and promotion, a particular weakness in recent years, must urgently be tightened and standardised.
The possibility of a Met break-up, which Casey warns may ultimately be necessary, should be kept on the table. Splitting off the force’s national role in counter-terrorism and government protection would allow it to focus entirely on the capital, and end its twin reporting lines to the home secretary and London’s mayor. Only by seizing this last chance to reinvent itself will the Met be able to enter a third century in anything like its current form.
