THE Metropolitan Police is failing in almost all its areas of work, a damning report by the police inspectorate declared today.
Out of nine areas assessed, the Met was rated as “requires improvement” in five and “inadequate” in two, with investigating crimes and managing offenders receiving the lowest rankings.
The report highlighted that the Met had failed to manage risks posed by sex offenders and online child abusers “effectively.”
In one shocking example, a high-risk registered sex offender had not been visited by the force since 2017.
It also found that “too many” visits to registered sex offenders were announced in advance, which could allow offenders to conceal prohibited devices and appear less of a risk.
A performance report revealed that the force had opted for “no further action” in 60 per cent of “indecent imagery of children” investigations.
The inspectorate said that complex crimes were being allocated to officers with only basic investigative training and that the crime allocation policy led to “inconsistent decision-making across the force.”
It also found that the Met fails to consistently help victims access their rights — and did not record whether it considered protections such as Domestic Violence Protection Notices.
When victims withdrew support for an investigation, the force didn’t always record the reasons why, nor did it always consider progressing the case.
It found that those attending domestic abuse-related incidents didn’t always understand how to fill out risk assessments, so these were generally of poor quality.
The damning assessment comes one year after the Casey report found that the Met was institutionally biased against women and ethnic minorities, following the murder of Sarah Everard by a Met officer.
Just a month ago, the inspectorate found that overall, violence against women and girls remains highly prevalent, despite an overall downward trajectory in crime rates.
Southall Black Sisters executive director Selma Taha said: “Thirty years on from the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson Report and a year on from the Casey report, both of which found the Met police to be institutionally racist and misogynistic, we have seen little change in the Met’s attitude towards tackling violence against women and girls, particularly those from black, minoritised and migrant communities.”
She said prejudice she had witnessed against the women that her organisation supports “includes rampant disbelief in black, minoritised and migrant women’s accounts of the horrific abuse they endure, a reproduction of racist tropes in policing responses and a failure to institute safe reporting mechanisms to encourage victim-survivors with the least state protections to come forward.”
