Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, faced a media grilling this morning as he championed his plans to clean up the force. It comes a fortnight after Louise Casey’s damning report into the Met, which branded it ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’.
A YouGov poll out today shows that public confidence in the Met has been shattered, with 42 per cent of Londoners saying they ‘totally distrusted’ it following recent scandals. Some 700 officers are currently on restricted duties, with hundreds more facing re-vetting or ‘risk management measures’. Rowley has pledged to ‘remove the cancer from the bone’ as he seeks to root out hundreds of officers found guilty of wrongdoing.
Rowley has won plaudits for talking a good game. The trouble is we have heard much of this before
It’s being billed as the Met’s ‘biggest purge in 50 years’, but Rowley warns he will need ‘greater powers’ to remove rogue officers. He told the BBC it was ‘nonsensical’ that tribunals can reinstate people that the Met have sacked for acting inappropriately at work.
Currently, officers are exempt from normal employment law and instead operate under different regulations. ‘You can understand these in some ways,’ said Rowley but added that these regulations ‘are more complicated than they need to be and that has contributed to this [situation] as has poor decisions’. It will be up to Home Secretary Suella Braverman – who last night triumphed in her parliamentary selection battle – to decide whether to grant the commissioner more powers to sack rogue officers.
Since taking up the commissioner post in September, Rowley has won plaudits for talking a good game and he demonstrated that again today. He promised to boost racial diversity in leadership roles and pledged to make street crime a priority for his force. He told the public to ‘judge us on our actions’ and earnestly spoke about the importance of transparency.
The trouble is we have heard much of this before. There are some early encouraging signs, such as today’s announcement that 90 officers will be seconded to the professional standards directorate to oversee the clean-up.
In his six months of heading the Met, Rowley has also nearly doubled the number of gross misconduct cases to 150 and increased dismissals by 70 per cent to 51 officers. But his casual admission that ‘there has been “too much flexibility” in employing criminal convicts in the force’ shows the scale of the challenge which is facing him.
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