Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

The MET police - which Sunak, Braverman & other Tory MPs & the entire right-wing media, absurdly claim is "woke" - is riddled with deep-seated racism, sexism & homophobia & has failed to change despite numerous official reviews urging it to do so, says the Casey report.

The MET commissioned the report in 2021 after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens. The report will consider whether Met failings result at least in part from institutional misogyny, homophobia and racism.

Lady Casey will criticise the force for failing to tackle its problems despite decades of warnings from previous official reports, and she will illustrate her findings with damning new case studies.

In 1999, a report by Sir William Macpherson on the failings that helped the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence escape justice for so long identified institutional racism as a cause of some of the problems.

A decade later, the Met said the label no longer applied, but Casey will say significant problems persist, and she will raise the question of what should happen to the Met if it cannot reform.

The final draft has been sent to the leadership of the Met and government, leading to crisis talks in the past few days between Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner since September, and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, Whitehall sources say.

Casey will say #austerity – when the Conservative government from 2010 cut police budgets – had a damaging effect on the Met, its neighbourhood policing and its relations with the communities it serves. Some Met officers and units have been left overworked.

The Casey report will say that while Couzens & Carrick were responsible for their crimes, clues were missed about the dangers they posed. Couzens was a serial flasher but the Met bungled chances to identify him as a danger to women despite his crimes being reported to them.

Casey’s first set of findings, released in October 2022, focused on the Met’s disciplinary system, finding that too many complaints from officers & staff about their colleagues were not taken seriously & officers and staff were being fobbed off when they complained of wrongdoing.

It found that officers suspected of serious criminal offences including sexual assault and domestic abuse had been allowed to escape justice, and Rowley accepted that hundreds of racist, women-hating and corrupt officers had been left in the ranks.

The Met faces another damning report on failings that left the serial killer Stephen Port free, and this month the police watchdog will announce whether a Met firearms officer should be referred to prosecutors over the shooting of Chris Kaba last September.