The Met Police Commissioner is one of the toughest jobs out there. I welcome the appointment of Sir Mark Rowley to the job, but he’s got a mountain to climb to win back the trust of Londoners, given that less than half of them believe the police are doing a good job.
Back in December I wrote to the then commissioner Cressida Dick to ask that her officers investigate the Downing Street lockdown parties. With still no investigation forthcoming and mounting concern over a toxic culture in the Met, I called on her to resign.
With the force now in special measures, my view has been borne out. She was not the leader that the force needed to carry out a root and branch reform.
The Met has been failing in two fundamental ways: on violence against women and girls and in systematically failing to tackle endemic racism — issues I have repeatedly raised in parliament.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to those decent, courageous Met officers who put their lives on the line every day and who are as disgusted as the rest of us by those of their “colleagues” who have corrupted the culture, and hinder them from doing the job they love.
But it’s not good enough to say they are “just a few bad apples”. I am angry that so many people come into my surgery because they and have been subjected to police violence or had spurious prosecutions against them which appear to be racially motivated.
I remain sickened that it took two years for the Met to get the officers who took and circulated photos of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman off their payroll. I am equally furious about the treatment of 15-year-old Child Q who was strip-searched without any adult there to protect her. Racist attitudes have no place in our police and Sir Mark Rowley needs to make this a top priority.
Alongside it is the appalling number of incidents of violence against women and girls. The statistics are horrific with less than one in every hundred reported rapes ending up going to trial. It is too easy to say that women decide to drop the case. They do so because they do not get adequate support from the police and fear they will have to relive the trauma with no chance of justice at the end.
The abhorrent kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer has only undermined women’s confidence further. And the police behaviour in attacking the peaceful vigil women held in her memory shows just how little senior officers understood or empathised with the distress people felt.
The Minister for Police had to make a Statement to Parliament when the Met was put into special measures. Sadly, he used it to deny any responsibility and to make an ill-judged partisan attack on the London Mayor. Unlike the Minister and his government who have been in power for 12 years, the Mayor has at least set out a plan to make London safer and rebuild trust in the police.
Sadiq is demanding more robust vetting of new and serving officers, better recruitment processes, proactive procedures to weed out those who should never have been allowed to become police officers in the first place and the need for clear steps not just on how the Met will tackle racism, but how they will build a proactive anti-racist force.
He has also called for 6,000 new officers to bring police numbers per head of population to the level they were in 2010. So far, the government has failed to provide the funding to do so.
It’s utterly shameful.