The Metropolitan police is riddled with deep-seated racism, sexism and homophobia and has failed to change despite numerous official reviews urging it to do so, an official report will say.
The report from Louise Casey, due to be published on Tuesday, will excoriate Britain’s biggest police force, the Guardian has been told.
Senior government and policing figures are aware of its contents, with one describing it as “horrible” and another as “atrocious”. One source with knowledge of the findings said the report would make clear that the Met was in the “last-chance saloon”.
The force commissioned the report in 2021 after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens. The report will consider whether Met failings result at least in part from institutional misogyny, homophobia and racism.
Lady Casey will criticise the force for failing to tackle its problems despite decades of warnings in previous official reports, and she will illustrate her findings with damning new case studies.
In 1999, a report by Sir William Macpherson on the failings that helped the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence escape justice for so long identified institutional racism as a cause of some of the problems. A decade later, the Met said the label no longer applied. However, Casey will say significant problems persist, and she will raise the question of what should happen to the Met if it cannot reform.
The final draft has been sent to the Met leadership and government, leading to crisis talks in the past few days between Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner since September, and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, Whitehall sources say.
The Met’s biggest recent disasters, such as the cases of Couzens and the serial rapist David Carrick, were not one-offs but symptomatic of how profound and serious its failings were allowed to become, the report will say. It will criticise poor past leadership and say pernicious cultures took hold and grew in the Met.
Couzens and Carrick were judged as fit to carry a gun and served in the same unit, the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, which Casey will highlight as having unacceptably high levels of problematic behaviours.
Casey’s team has sent so-called Maxwell letters – which allow figures criticised in an official report to respond before publication – to former Met leaders including Cressida Dick.
The 300-page report is expected to criticise Dick’s leadership from 2017 to 2022 as the Met’s problems grew. But it will say the problems were apparent before her commissionership. One supporter of Dick said she had been focused on reducing violent crime during her tenure.
Casey will say austerity – when the Conservative government from 2010 cut police budgets – had a damaging effect on the Met, its neighbourhood policing and its relations with the communities it serves. Some officers and units have been left overworked.
The furious reaction to the Couzens case after he was sentenced to a whole-life term prompted Dick to order the review in October 2021. Dick was ousted as commissioner in February 2022 as the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was unconvinced she could lead the Met out of crisis.
The Casey report will say while Couzens and Carrick were responsible for their crimes, clues were repeatedly missed about the dangers they posed. Couzens was a serial flasher but the Met bungled chances to identify him as a danger to women despite his crimes being reported to them.
A draft of the Casey report has been sent to Rowley and is said to have been met with shock at its findings and concern at the further damage it may do to public confidence in the Met. Confidence was already low before Carrick’s conviction in January and details of the Met errors that left him free to attack women.
One senior source said Rowley’s turnaround plan had a year to show signs it was working. Another said the commissioner had two years to show progress.
Casey’s first set of findings, released in October 2022, focused on the Met’s disciplinary system, and found that too many complaints from officers and staff about their colleagues were not taken seriously. Rowley has vowed to change that and already promised reforms.
The October report found that officers and staff were being fobbed off when they complained of wrongdoing, and were reluctant to do so because they feared nothing would be done or there would be reprisals.
It found that officers suspected of serious criminal offences, including sexual assault and domestic abuse, had been allowed to escape justice, and Rowley accepted that hundreds of racist, women-hating and corrupt officers had been left in the ranks.
Last June, the policing inspectorate placed the Met into special measures over a series of failings.
A spokesperson for the Casey review said: “The review into the culture and standards of the Metropolitan police was commissioned in light of the appalling facts relating to the murderer of Sarah Everard.
“This must be remembered if at all possible as we move towards its publication. We will not be commenting on its contents ahead of publication. We respectfully ask others to do the same.”
Policing faces two more official reports commissioned by the government, including one on the Couzens case, which will be released this year.
The Met faces another damning report on failings that left the serial killer Stephen Port free, and this month the police watchdog will announce whether a Met firearms officer should be referred to prosecutors over the shooting of Chris Kaba last September.
On Thursday night Kaba’s relatives said they were “concerned” by the resignations of two officials from the watchdog investigating the shooting.
“We have concerns that two of the senior people at the IOPC [Independent Office for Police Conduct] who have been overseeing the homicide investigation in this case – Michael Lockwood and Sal Naseem – have resigned during the investigation,” the family said.
“We find this unsettling and are concerned that it does not affect the nature of the IOPC decisions or their timing – we have already waited too long to know if the IOPC is seeking advice on criminal charges from the CPS.”
Lockwood, the director general of the IOPC, stepped down in December as he was the subject of a police investigation into an historical allegation.
The departure of Naseem, the regional director for London and national lead for race discrimination, was announced this month, the organisation said.
