Victims’ relatives demand change at the ‘rotten’ Met
BEREAVED families let down by the Metropolitan Police have made powerful calls for change after a savagely critical review found the force is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic.
Baroness Doreen Lawrence, whose son Stephen was murdered by racists in 1993, said the force, Britain’s largest, is “rotten to the core”.
Family members of the victims of serial killer Stephen Port, who was left free to murder three men after police failures in investigating the death of his first victim, called for a public inquiry to understand “how and why this force is failing people so badly”.
They spoke out after the publication of a major review by Baroness Louise Casey, commissioned in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by then-serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.
The force was found to be institutionally racist in 1999 in the Macpherson Report on Stephen’s murder and its aftermath.
Only two of the 18-year-old’s five killers have ever been brought to justice, following abject failures in the investigations into his death that were marred by racism and alleged police corruption.
Following the publication of the Casey review 24 years later, Baroness Lawrence said: “It comes as no surprise to me that the report from Baroness Louise Casey has found that the Metropolitan Police is riddled with deep-seated racism, sexism and homophobia.
“My suspicion that racism played a critical part in the failure of the Metropolitan Police to properly investigate my son’s death in 1993 was borne out by the Macpherson Report.
“Since then, despite repeated reassurances that the Metropolitan Police had learned lessons from its failures, discrimination in every form is clearly rampant in its ranks.
“It is not, and has never been, a case of a few ‘bad apples’ within the Metropolitan Police. It is rotten to the core. Discrimination is institutionalised within the Metropolitan Police and it needs changing from top to bottom.”
She went on: “I suspect a lot of people will feel, like me, that enough is enough and change is needed. And needed now.”
Donna and Jenny Taylor, the sisters of Port’s fourth victim Jack Taylor, believe the Met would have dealt with their brother’s murder differently if he had been a woman.
“Someone needs to take responsibility for tackling issues such as homophobia, someone needs to own it,” they said.
“Not one person has. We still feel that if Jack had been a girl the whole situation would have been dealt with differently from the start. You can’t put it right and change the culture if you don’t know what’s going wrong, why it’s going wrong, or fail to fully investigate the root of the problems.
“That is why there must now be a public inquiry into how and why this force is failing people so badly.”
In December 2021, inquest jurors found that “fundamental failures” by the police left Port free to carry out a series of murders, as well as drug and sexually assault more than a dozen other men in Barking, east London, between June 2014 and September 2015.
The Met was accused of homophobia over the failure to stop Port, but force bosses repeatedly denied there was an issue with such discrimination.
In her 363-page report, published on Tuesday, Baroness Casey found that the Met is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic; has failed to protect the public from officers who abuse women; and organisational changes have put women and children at greater risk.
There are racist officers and staff and a “deep-seated homophobia” exists in the organisation, the review found.
The peer said that she could not guarantee that there are not more men like murderer Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick serving in the Met.
Women’s rights campaigner Jamie Klingler said: “Nothing’s been done to prevent another Wayne Couzens.
“Why wouldn’t we expect another David Carrick or another Wayne Couzens?
“There is no question there are more men on the force who are capable of the violence they carried out.”
She said Baroness Casey has given the force a route map that it must now follow.