‘Beggars belief’: Questions over vetting of predatory UK cop
Vetting in policing is “non-existent”, a female former chief constable has warned, as Scotland Yard revealed that more than 1000 officers accused of domestic abuse and sex offences are to have their cases reviewed.
Sue Fish, the former head of Nottinghamshire Police, said there were fundamental problems in the way forces recruited and monitored officers which was allowing predatory men to join up.
She made the comments as it emerged that Metropolitan Police officer David Carrick, a serial rapist, was not vetted for 16 years after joining Scotland Yard as a rookie in 2001. When he was eventually assessed in 2017, the Met failed to spot a pattern of worrying incidents including numerous allegations of domestic abuse, assault and violence.
Fish said: “Vetting in policing is non-existent and it’s utterly unfit for purpose. It beggars belief, frankly.
“There is something fundamental about how vetting doesn’t work, how it fails to recognise predatory men within policing ranks or aspiring to be members of the police service — and that is a gaping chasm in capability because we will still be recruiting the same sort of people. I am rarely speechless, but this is worse than horrific.
“I think the scary question is: how many others are there?”
Carrick joined the police despite having previously been investigated for burglary, theft and malicious communications. He should have undergone a fresh assessment after 10 years but because of cuts this did not happen. Then, in 2017, despite a string of complaints, he still was passed.
Fish said: “With vetting in policing, it is not seen if it is not proven. It doesn’t exist. But it does when it comes to people who are not police officers, that intelligence picture is completely compelling — the profiling of sex offenders in the community is vast. But the inability of policing to do it is obvious and also for vetting teams to understand what is significant.”
She added: “The disciplinary process judges things in isolation, it does not see patterns of behaviour. What they should be doing is profiling their officers. Given how few times sexual offences are reported and what needs to happen to enable women to report them, you need to double that when the perpetrator is a police officer. All the red flags are there. The attitude seems to be ‘let’s deal with what is in front of us’, as opposed to ‘what have we got?’. And what they had was a serial predator.”
In November a report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that vetting failures had potentially allowed thousands of “predatory” officers to join and stay. Officers had been allowed in despite having committed offences such as robbery, indecent exposure, possession of controlled drugs, drink-driving and domestic abuse-related assaults.
Scotland Yard has now announced that all officers who have been subject to allegations of domestic abuse or sexual offences, in the past 10 years, which did not lead to a criminal charge, are to have their case reviewed.