The police cannot reform themselves, so the Home Office must do it for them

How can the Met have missed it? One of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders walked through the doors of a police station every day. During his career as a police officer David Carrick attacked at least 12 women. It is not as if he kept all of this secret either. He was only suspended from duty after a second rape complaint was made, leading to his arrest. His colleagues are, remember, people trained explicitly to catch criminals. Yet one of the country’s most dangerous men passed unnoticed, every day, right under their noses.

Is Carrick the best undercover criminal in the world? Does he have a stomach of iron? If so he’s not alone. In 2021 Wayne Couzens murdered Sarah Everard while serving as a police officer.

But Carrick and Couzens were not good at hiding their behaviour — in the case of Carrick his employers knew of the pattern of the allegations against him. The police aren’t failing to identify the criminals among them. These crimes are not missed, but tolerated.

The question is: where does the toleration happen? And by whom?

Well, clearly there is a “culture of tolerance” among fellow officers, on which much of the media attention has focused. Carrick was known as “bastard Dave”. If officers had even a hint that their colleagues were so awful, why did they not report them?

But a “culture of tolerance” like this is a difficult thing to tackle. You can’t discipline every one of Carrick’s peers who might have suspected him or heard his nickname for not reporting him. People with the moral fibre to blow a whistle on a colleague and risk their careers are rare enough as it is (would you do it? Have you ever?). Add in a job where your life can depend on the loyalty and trust of these colleagues — in a stadium of hostile football fans or faced with armed and desperate criminal, officers rely on each other for their safety. Then add endless punishing and occasionally soul-destroying encounters with the public and you might start to lose faith in people altogether. The officer who reports their colleague for a nickname — or for seeming to indulge more vigorously in a culture of misogyny that already exists — starts to look very rare.

Blaming a culture — a diffuse and complex problem — somewhat shifts responsibility from those in charge too. What individual can be expected to change a whole culture? But clearly the responsibility for dealing with people like Carrick lies further up the chain. Why was he not sacked earlier?

Met Commissioner Mark Rowley says the fault does not completely lie with his force either. In December he said he employs some 500 officers under misconduct investigations and about 100 who cannot be trusted to deal with the public, but doesn’t have sufficient powers to remove them. “It’s ridiculous. We are looking at whether we have got any new legal levers, but under the conventional approaches we can’t”.

Does the fault really lie higher up than the top of the Met? A report by Baroness Casey in October found it takes far too long to resolve misconduct cases — on average, 400 days. Moreover, there seems to be a serious flaw in the way an officer’s “file” is put together — cases of misconduct are dealt with individual meaning that repeated patterns of behaviour go unnoticed.

Some of this is the responsibility of the Met itself, and some is Scotland Yard’s, which has set up a team to root out rogue officers. But the responsibility for sorting out wider structural problems lies with the Home Office.

So far it has not shown itself up to the task. An much needed overhaul of the disciplinary system in 2016 made the system more transparent but the process much lengthier. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is not much of an improvement on what it replaced either. Its director general was forced to resign last month over his own alleged misconduct — an investigation into a sexual relationship with a minor.

More responsibility needs to be laid at the door of the Home Office. It is clear that the police do not have the ability to reform themselves — they need ministers to do it for them. That will take more than Suella Braverman bashing them for being too “woke”.

Spend less time on “diversity” and more on fighting crime, she said in December. She could do with a similar lesson herself. Braverman should spend less time virtue signalling over the police and more time dealing with the criminals in their ranks. Wholesale reform is needed and it can only come from the Home Office.