London Police Accused of Institutional Racism, Misogyny in Report
Review of the Metropolitan Police was carried out after the murder of Sarah Everard by an on-duty cop in 2021
LONDON—An independent report concluded that London’s Metropolitan Police force—Britain’s largest—is institutionally racist, antigay and sexist, and should be broken up if it can’t change.
The review into the Met’s cultures and standards, which was released on Tuesday, was written by Baroness Louise Casey, who has held a number of top government posts working in social welfare, in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met police officer in 2021. It details failings about which it says the force has been in denial for years. A previous independent report in 1999 called the Met institutionally racist.
“We have found widespread bullying, discrimination, institutional homophobia, misogyny and racism, and other unacceptable behaviors which are a far cry from the high ethical standards the public rightly expects of its police officers,” the report said. The report concluded that independent progress reviews should be conducted in two years and if matters aren’t being resolved the force should be broken up into smaller entities.
Mark Rowley, the recently appointed Met commissioner, accepted the report’s findings and said he would take immediate action to fix the issues it raised. “We’ve got hundreds of toxic individuals that need sorting out,” he said. “We’re removing officers at a faster rate than ever before.” But he cautioned that change wouldn’t come overnight.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said trust in the force had been “hugely damaged.”
The U.K. hasn’t seen the same kind of backlash to heavy-handed policing that led to calls from some social activists in the U.S. to defund police forces. That is partly because London pioneered the model of “policing by consent,” whereby officers are unarmed and rely on the trust and respect of the population at large to keep order.
Incidents of lethal force by police in the U.K. are rare. There were just two fatal shootings by police in the year up to March 2022, and 11 deaths in or following police custody in England and Wales, according to government statistics. In the U.S., roughly 1,000 people are killed by police in an average year, according to independent estimates using police data.
The report’s findings illustrate some of the real-life pitfalls of what happens when a police force is defunded, or if funding is sharply curtailed.
The report emphasized how the Met had suffered a significant squeeze in government spending, with a budget that is now 18% smaller in real terms than at the start of the past decade. A fifth of its civilian workforce has gone, and 126 police stations have closed. This, combined with a toxic work culture, has had a deeply detrimental impact on the Met’s ability to serve London’s population, the report said. “Local policing has been fractured,” the report said.
A number of high-profile scandals, meanwhile, have eroded Londoners’ trust in the force. Mr. Rowley recently said there are 1,000 sexual and domestic-abuse claims against 800 other police officers out of a force of about 35,000 officers.
Former Met police officer David Carrick was in February sentenced to at least 30 years in jail after he was found guilty of committing a series of rapes over the past two decades as an active police officer.
Another former officer, Wayne Couzens, arrested and then kidnapped, raped and killed Ms. Everard, sparking the inquiry published on Tuesday. Mr. Couzens pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Both men had been flagged to the Met in the past over their conduct, but no action was taken. Both men were also members of the Met’s armed diplomatic security unit, which the report recommended be disbanded.
In March 2022, just 45% of Londoners had trust in the police force to do a good job, the report said. That raises questions about whether “policing by consent” can remain an effective model. The review said the Met “has become unanchored” from the principles of policing by consent as the public no longer have faith in it.
The 363-page report paints a bleak picture of a disjointed police force starved of funding and struggling to deal with an internal culture of bullying. While overall crimes such as burglary have fallen since 2010, domestic abuse-related crimes have doubled over the past decade and the number of reported rape cases have increased fourfold. These are harder to investigate and require more resources, which haven’t been provided.
Rape cases often went uninvestigated with evidence kept in “overstuffed, dilapidated or broken fridges and freezers,” the report said. It also highlighted what it called over-brutalized policing methods. For instance, between 2018 and 2020, 650 children were strip-searched, a quarter of whom were between 10 and 15 years old, the report said.
A culture of hazing also existed among officers. These included food-eating challenges and people being urinated on in the shower. A Sikh policeman had his beard cut with scissors by another officer because they thought it would be funny, and a Muslim officer had bacon put in his boots in his locker as a prank. One female police officer described women colleagues being forced to eat whole cheesecakes until they vomited. Several anonymous case studies alleged male police officers sexually assaulted colleagues.
“The Met preferred to pretend that their own perpetrators of unconscionable crimes were just ‘bad apples,’ or not police officers at all. So throughout this review, I have asked myself time and again, if these crimes cannot prompt that self-reflection and reform, then what will it take?” Ms. Casey concluded.