The Metropolitan police service 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, which is 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, institutional homophobia and institutional racism.
Lady Casey will criticise the force for failing to tackle its problems despite decades of warnings from 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, but 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 leadership of the Met 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 both judged as fit to carry a gun and they 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 have sent so-called Maxwell letters – which allow figures criticised in an official report to respond in advance of 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 began. 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 Met 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 that while Couzens and Carrick were responsible for their crimes, clue after clue was missed about the dangers they posed. In Couzens’ case, he 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 gone 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.
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One senior source said Rowley’s turnaround plan had a year to show some 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.
Policing faces two more official reports commissioned by the government, including one on the Couzens case, which is out later 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.