Baroness Casey has warned that it will be “tragedy” for victims and the people of London if the Met fails to reform as her offer to return each year to check on the force’s progress was rebuffed by Sir Mark Rowley.
The peer, whose landmark report condemned institutional racism, sexism and misogyny as well as failings in frontline policing and Scotland Yard’s leadership, said the Met was facing a “gargantuan” task to implement the “very deep” changes needed to restore its reputation.
She added that her fear was the the force, which she said had ignored previous reports, would return to being “clammed shut” and continue without sufficient reform and that she would be willing to make yearly checks on its progress to stop this happening.
But the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said that Baroness Casey’s offer would risk his force spending “more time marking the homework” than pushing ahead with reform and that instead he would discuss with London Mayor Sadiq Khan allowing reviews after two and five years.
Baroness Casey, who was speaking with Sir Mark and other panellists including Mina Smallman, the mother of murder victim Nicole Smallman, on a BBC Radio 4 Today debate about policing said she accepted that the Met needed “time” to reform and called for external help to be brought in to help transform the force.
But she said she feared that Scotland Yard’s previous inaction in response to critical findings could be repeated unless the organisation remained “open”, including to whistleblowers, and willing at all levels to accept wholesale reform.
“It’s a whole Metropolitan Police responsibility or else, God forbid, ten years, twenty years from now somebody else that is sitting on a panel like this is saying that Casey report, that came and went didn’t it, and that would be such a tragedy for all those victims,” she said.
“The situation for the public is we can’t have trust in the police if we can’t trust the police to police themselves. It’s really straightforward, “ she said. “When Sarah Everard was abducted, raped and murdered by a serving police officer you would have thought that the organisation would have thought a plane fell out of the sky. It didn’t. It carried on. They’ve got this sense the Met will always prevail, that there’ll be lots of reports but the Met will always carry on. No.”
Asked if she would be willing to return annually to the Met to check its progress, Baroness Casey, who was appointed to produce her report in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by Met officer Wayne Couzens, said: “Come back every year? Yes, I would.”
But Sir Mark declined to accept her offer, saying instead that Baroness Casey had “made some recommendations in the report about reviews after two and five years and we’ll work out with the Mayor the best way of doing that.
He added: “We need time. If we are not careful, we have more time marking the homework than actually doing the homework.”
The Commissioner added that Baroness Casey’s report had provoked “shock and awe” within the Met and that he was already making “a lot of progress” in removing rogue officers, although he admitted that it would be “messy” and take time to achieve all that was required.
Sir Mark came under fire, however, from Mina Smallman, who said she was “gobsmacked” by his refusal to use the term “institutional” to describe the racism, misogyny and homophobia in his force and that it amounted to an “own goal”.
The Commissioner replied that he accepted the existence of all the problems identified by Baroness Casey but was unwilling to use “institutional” because it was ambiguous and politicised.
