Failure to properly vet officers resulted in serial rapists within Met ranks, review finds

Serial rapists including David Carrick were left in the ranks of the Metropolitan Police because of a failure to carry out necessary vetting on thousands of officers and staff, it has been revealed.An internal review by the force found it had lowered vetting checks into the backgrounds of prospective and existing police officers and staff between 2013 and 2023.The Home Office said the Met estimated that more than 5,000 officers and staff were recruited without the right checks. It has been unable to confirm if pre-employment checks were carried out on around 17,000 officers and staff.The Guardian revealed last September that approximately 300 new recruits may have had substandard or no vetting. But the Met’s report found that 1,400 officers who should have been flagged by vetting were left in the force with police powers.The Met found evidence that 131 officers committed criminal or misconduct offences, ranging from rape to drug offences, hate crimes and lower levels infractions such as being intoxicated on duty.Among those who joined or stayed in the force because of defective vetting was Cliff Mitchell, hired despite an unproven child rape allegation and later convicted of 10 counts of rape, including three of raping a child under the age of 13.The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, commissioned HM chief inspector of constabulary to inspect the Met’s recruitment and vetting practices.“Abandoning vetting checks on officers was a dereliction of the Met’s duty to keep London safe,” she said. “Londoners rightly expect officers to undergo robust checks so that the brightest and best – not criminals – are policing our streets.”The defective vetting allowed some to join the Met who should not have, while others who were revetted were allowed to stay in when they should have been removed.Most prominent among those is Carrick, one of the worst sex offenders in modern history, who in 2023 was jailed for committing 48 rapes. He used his status as a Met officer to silence victims.Carrick joined the Met in 2001, when he first passed the force’s vetting procedure. In 2009, he was given a gun and, despite a series of complaints against him, passed vetting again in 2017.In all, Carrick was convicted of 85 offences, dozens of which took place after 2017, when he passed revetting.The report says the Met was under pressure to recruit quickly and remove hurdles to speed up the time from an applicant being accepted to being out on the streets.The Met report said: “The scale and impact of these deviations that have been identified throughout this review have led to the recruitment and retention of individuals who should not have joined the MPS, contributing to police-perpetrated harm and public distrust.”The report added: “It is known that the scale and impact of these deviations ranged, with some tolerable and minor in nature, to those having a more substantive impact, including the recruitment and likely retention of individuals who have gone on to cause harm through criminality and misconduct – events that have undermined public confidence in the MPS.”The biggest strain on recruitment was during a programme under the last government known as police uplift, where 20,000 officers were to be recruited between 2020 and 2023, to replace officers the Conservative government had cut.The error was noticed because the refusal rate for applicants was lower than the historical average.The Met’s inquiries established that five other police forces in England and Wales had also made vetting errors.The Met assistant commissioner Rachel Williams said: “We have been honest with Londoners on many occasions about previous shortcomings in our professional standards approach.“We found that some historical practices did not meet the strengthened hiring and vetting standards we have today. We identified these issues ourselves and have fixed them quickly while making sure any risk to the public has been properly and effectively managed.“The Met report blamed “a highly pressurised environment” for the “failings” and said the bosses did not realise relaxing safeguards would lead to problems.Some of those who took the decisions are still employed, the force confirmed, adding that its standards were much higher now, with 1,500 ousted from the force since Sir Mark Rowley became commissioner in 2022.