Louise Casey’s report on the Met police: the fall of a British institution

Here we all are again.

The venues change, as do the decades, the people who chair the inquiry differ, as does the Metropolitan police commissioner vowing to act.

About a quarter of a century ago, in a cake box pink building in south London where he held hearings, the evidence he heard led Sir William Macpherson to conclude the Met was institutionally racist.

The former judge concluded this at least in part explained why the killers of Stephen Lawrence had escaped justice.

Then, unlike now, the then commissioner Paul Condon accepted the label.

This time it is even worse: the Met is again found to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic, and Louise Casey says it should also accept the finding of an earlier inquiry in 2021 that it is institutionally corrupt.

It may be an understatement to say this is a cataclysmic disaster that has befallen the Metropolitan police, the people it serves, the trust it has squandered and the bullied and overworked staff repeated leaders have let down.

Lady Casey’s report details the fall of a British institution, tumbling harder than any organisation at the centre of national life has managed before, and one that is so crucial to society.

It is not just a London issue. Not just because the Met has national functions such as counter-terrorism, but because its size makes it about one-quarter of policing in England and Wales.

Its repeated scandals, as Casey details, its bungled response or cover-up, is buffeting forces across the country, dragging down trust and confidence even hundreds of miles from the capital. “It’s always the Met,” is a refrain among other chief constables, and their tolerance of their fellow chiefs in London is thin to nonexistent, where once there was support. And they have made the Home Office aware of the drag effect of the better resourced London force’s inability to clean up its messes, and generate new ones.

Crime and policing will be a key issue in next May’s London mayoral election, and general election. Polling for the Home Office, seen by the Guardian, already shows a high fear of crime, and low confidence much will be done about it.

The fall of the Met came and accelerated during a time when a series of reforms meant police were supposed to be under more scrutiny and face more accountability than ever. Even if the Met leadership was deficient, we should never have got even close to this dire position.

Several organisations have questions to answer about whether acts of omission or commission played a part in Scotland Yard squandering public trust. Now on certain measures trust is at 50%, when in 2017 it was 17% higher. As one senior Met insider said: “It is a hard swing to happen to an institution so quickly.”

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary praised the Met after the arrest of Patsy Stevenson and others at the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

Those with questions to answer include the London mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime – first under Boris Johnson when he was mayor, then under Labour’s Sadiq Khan and his deputy for policing, Sophie Linden.

The current mayor may have earned some redemption by pressing the Met to change and ousting Cressida Dick as commissioner. But also among those charged with holding the Met to account were a succession of Tory home secretaries. Unique among forces the Met has two political bosses.

His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary was late placing the Met in special measures, instead under its previous leader, Sir Tom Winsor, praising the Met and condemning the force’s critics after it waded into mourners for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common after her murder by a Met officer. Winsor also praised Cressida Dick.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct faces constant claims of being too lax about allegations of Met wrongdoing, though its report on the Charing Cross police station hate messages helped end Dick’s commissionership.

Anyone watching the London Assembly’s police and crime committee is more likely to hear praise for the Met than a well thought out and well researched question, with the occasional exception of the Green party members.

Denis Healey’s line that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was “like being savaged by a dead sheep” is a pretty accurate description.

Casey notes in her report: “The system as a whole does not hold or deliver real consequences where failures persist.”

Casey places the primary blame on the Met’s past leadership, who condemned external critics, intimidated internal ones into silence, and reassured the public that everything was all right.

Can Sir Mark Rowley, who came out of retirement to start his commissionership in September turn the Met around and avoid being the last commissioner of the Met as we know it?

Both he and his deputy, Dame Lynne Owens, served previously at the top table of the Met, and say they will reflect on why they did not see more of the signs.

Among senior policing sources there is an increasing view that Rowley’s stated hope to turn the Met around within the five years of his commissionership is an understandable aim, but if he merely stops the bleeding he will have done amazingly well.

“It is not achievable in five years,” said one senior insider. “This is a 10-year game.”

There is talk that if in a year to two years the Rowley plans are not showing results, the issue of whether the Met continues in its current form and size, starts to move to the foreground.

To reverse the fall of the Met, Rowley – a maths graduate – will need to reengineer the gravity of history.

Because past attempts to get the Met to accept it needs to radically reform, and then to get them to actually do it, have ended with today’s damning and depressing report by Casey.