Failure to properly vet officers resulted in serial rapists within Met ranks, review finds | Metropolitan police
Serial rapists, including David Carrick, were revealed to have been left in the ranks of the Metropolitan police because of a lack of due diligence on thousands of officers and staff.
An internal review by the force found that background checks on prospective and current police officers and staff were reduced between 2013 and 2023.
The Home Office said the Met estimated more than 5,000 officers and staff were recruited without proper checks. It could not be confirmed whether pre-employment checks were carried out on approximately 17,000 civil servants and staff.
The Guardian reported last September that around 300 new hires may have been below standards or not screened at all. But the Met’s report found 1,400 officers who should have been flagged through scrutiny were left on duty with police powers.
The Met found evidence that 131 officers had committed criminal or misconduct offenses ranging from rape to drug offenses, hate crimes and lower-level offenses such as being drunk on duty.
Among those who joined or remained with the agency because of the flawed investigation was Cliff Mitchell, who was hired despite an unproven child rape allegation and was later convicted of 10 rape charges, including three counts of raping a child under 13.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has appointed HM constabulary chief inspector to oversee the Met’s recruitment and vetting practices.
“Abandoning vetting checks on officers was a dereliction of the Met’s duty to keep London safe,” he said. “Londoners rightly expect officers to be subject to tough checks, so the brightest and best will be policing our streets, not criminals.”
The faulty review allowed some to join the Met who should not have attended, while others who were re-reviewed were allowed to stay when they should have been removed.
The most prominent of these is Carrick, one of the worst sex offenders in modern history, who was jailed in 2023 for 48 rapes. He used his status as a Met officer to silence the victims.
Carrick joined the Met in 2001, the year the police first passed the investigation procedure. He was issued a gun in 2009 and was re-inspected in 2017 despite a number of complaints against him.
In total, Carrick was convicted of 85 crimes; Dozens of these occurred after 2017, when it passed reinvestigation.
The report says the Met is under pressure to recruit quickly and remove barriers to speed up the time an applicant gets from acceptance to street.
The Met report said: “The extent and impact of these deviations, identified throughout this review, led to the recruitment and retention of people who should not have participated in the MPS, contributing to the harm committed by the police and public mistrust.”
The report added: “The scale and impact of these deviations are known to vary, some of a tolerable and minor nature, to those having a more significant impact, including the recruitment and possibly retention of individuals who cause harm through crime and abuse – events that undermine public confidence in the MPS.”
The biggest recruitment challenge came during a program under the last government known as police strengthening, under which 20,000 police officers were to be recruited between 2020 and 2023 to replace officers laid off by the Conservative government.
The error was discovered because the rejection rate of applicants was below the historical average.
The Met’s investigations found five other police forces in England and Wales also made investigative errors.
The Met’s deputy commissioner, Rachel Williams, said: “We have been honest with Londoners on many occasions about previous shortcomings in our approach to professional standards.
“We found that some past practices did not meet the strengthened hiring and review standards we have today. We identified these issues ourselves and quickly remedied them, ensuring any risks to the public were managed accurately and effectively.”
The Met report blamed a “highly pressured environment” for the “failures” and said bosses did not realize that easing measures would cause problems.
The force confirmed that some of those who took the decisions were still in office, adding that its standards were now much higher and that 1,500 people had been sacked since Sir Mark Rowley became commissioner in 2022.
