Your ultimate guide to the Met report
Everything Londoners should know about the damning Casey Review into their police
Morning — here’s what we’ve spied in the capital on Sunday, March 26, 2023:
👮 As promised we’ve got a full guide to this week’s Casey Review, a damning report into the Metropolitan Police’s standards and culture published on Tuesday. We’ve unpacked everything Londoners should know — the context to the review, its shocking findings, the reaction and what happens now. You’ll find that after your usual Sunday round-up below.
📱 Theatre audiences in London’s West End could be made to lock up their phones to prevent illicit images of actors being taken during performances. The suggestion comes after naked photos of James Norton on stage were published in the MailOnline.
💉 Children aged one to 11 in London will be offered polio vaccines as part of a catch-up campaign. Health officials warned last year that there had been "some transmission" of the virus in the capital after detecting poliovirus in sewage samples. Though a booster campaign was launched in the summer, uptake rates in some London boroughs are still too low.
📣 The family of a woman killed in a crush at the O2 Academy Brixton have spoken of their anguish at not having her body returned for more than three months. Rebecca Ikumelo’s body had been held by the coroner pending investigations into the crush in December, meaning her family have been unable to bury her till now.
🚫 The Greater London Authority has banned TikTok from the phones of staff at City Hall. The move mirrors a similar decision by the UK government to ban ministers from using the app and comes amid wider security concerns over whether China’s government could access user data.
🧱 A memorial to the victims of the slave trade is being put up in London. Announced by mayor Sadiq Khan, it’s the first such monument of its scale in Britain and will be built in West India Quay in the Docklands.
The Casey Review, explained
If a plane fell out of the sky tomorrow, a whole industry would stop and ask itself why. It would be a catalyst for self-examination, and then root and branch reform. Instead the Met preferred to pretend that their own perpetrators of unconscionable crimes were just ‘bad apples’, or not police officers at all. So throughout this review, I have asked myself time and again, if these crimes cannot prompt that self-reflection and reform, then what will it take?
Baroness Casey, writing in the foreword of her report into the Met
Tuesday was a watershed moment for the Met. If there’s a silver lining to the publication of the Casey Review — the most comprehensive look at the Met’s culture and standards for decades — it’s that it’s hard to see how things can go on as they have.
If you want to give the report a read yourself it’s here. Otherwise, buckle up — we’ve got everything you should know below.
The context
The Casey Review was commissioned in October 2021 in the wake of the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving officer Wayne Couzens. Couzens, a member of the Met’s diplomatic and parliamentary force, had used his warrant card and handcuffs to kidnap Everard near Clapham common while off-duty on the night of February 28, 2021.
Much of the details of Couzen’s crimes — including the use of his warrant card — weren’t made fully public until he was sentenced to life in prison by a judge in October. But in the time since his arrest it had become clear that the Met had missed several red flags about one of its own officers. These included incidents of Couzens publicly exposing himself, with one taking place just days before the murder of Everard, that Couzens was nicknamed “The Rapist” at work due to the way he treated female officers, and that he wore his police belt with handcuffs even while he was off-duty.
You might think the sentencing of Couzens would have offered a moment for the Met to draw a line under the year’s horrible revelations. Instead the Met issued a statement with bizarre recommendations that missed the point spectacularly. Most infamously was the tip that anybody concerned about someone claiming to be a police officer should wave down a bus for help. The Met also suggested women concerned about officers should ask them to present their warrant card — even though Couzens had used his warrant card when abducting Everard.
It was at this point that the then commissioner of the Met, Cressida Dick, announced an independent review into its culture and standards. Baroness Casey of Blackstock, a crossbench peer with a formidable reputation in Whitehall for investigation, was picked for the job. She and her team set about conducting hundreds of interviews with serving and former Met officers, victims, Londoners and politicians.
But the scandals didn’t end for the Met even while the Casey Review was in the works. In the time between the Review’s commission and publication, the Met saw outcry over: its handling of its investigations into the murders of four men by serial killer Stephen Port in east London; a report finding evidence of corruption in relation to the murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan in a pub car park in the 1980s; the strip search of a child by officers at a school in Hackney; officers taking and sharing pictures of two murdered women. All the while London’s trust and confidence in the Met fell to fresh lows, official polls conducted by City Hall showed.
And to top it off, just before the Review was due to be published another monster in the Met came to light: David Carrick. The officer, like Couzens also part of the Met’s parliamentary and diplomatic service, was sentenced to life in February 2023 for attacks on at least 12 women over 17 years while working for the Met. Again, there was clear evidence the Met had missed opportunities to stop him.
The report
Clocking in at 363 pages, the Casey Review is a detailed examination into what has gone so badly wrong with London’s police force. Its findings of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia are among the most shocking. Casey has exposed shameful cases like a Muslim officer having bacon left in their shoe, a Sikh officer having his beard cut by another officer ‘because it was funny’, women forced to eat whole cheesecakes until they vomited as part of an initiation challenge, and rape cases dropped due to shoddy freezers holding evidence samples being allowed to break. But it’s important to stress how deep the Review goes — she identifies failings at every level of the force, from top to bottom, at its frontline and at its headquarters. No process, department or culture is spared.
Casey presents several big trends she thinks go some way to explain the current state of the Met. The first of these is its failure to keep up with how the city it serves has changed. Today a majority of London’s population are not from White British ethnic backgrounds and 52% of the population are women. By contrast 82% of the Met’s officers are white, 71% are male and a majority do not even live in the city.
The Met is also having to deal with a greater volume of crimes that are more serious and take more resources to investigate. Recorded crime is at a recent high, with officers dealing with fewer cases of ‘traditional’ offences like burglary and theft and more cases of serious offences like sexual assault, violence against the person and domestic abuse.
All of this is set against the backdrop of austerity. Casey estimates that the Met’s budget is now £700m smaller in real terms than it was in 2010 — an 18% fall that would be enough to hire 9,000 officers. While the Met has managed to maintain the number of officers on its payroll in the past decade, it’s lost a fifth of its civilian staff and two thirds of its special constables — meaning a greater workload for officers meant to be focused on policing. 126 police stations have closed in the capital between 2010 and 2022. Yet while Casey concedes that Met leadership faced tough decisions, she criticises where they the cuts fall.
Where this is most damning in Casey’s view is the de-prioritisation of the Met’s teams that tackle rape, sexual offences and child abuse investigations. These cases were once tackled by a central, specialised unit. No longer — to help save cash, they’re now handled by a decentralised set of overworked and inexperienced teams. One officer told Casey that while murders in London still recieve a whole team of experienced and specialist trained detectives, a woman raped and left in a coma would likely be dealt with by one trainee detective constable. Another said: “If you look at our performance around rape, serious sexual offences, the detection rate is so low that you may as well say it’s legal in London.”
Meanwhile, Casey finds frontline policing in London has collapsed. In 2018, as part of its cost-cutting drive, the Met re-structured its local units — the part of the force that the public is most likely to come into contact with on a daily basis. It moved 32 borough-based police commands into 12 units that cover much bigger swathes of the city. This severed the police’s local ties in London, leaving many officers estranged from the patches and communities they once closely worked within. Commanders manage multiple boroughs that each have very different criminals, gangs and crime types. Even getting out and about has become harder for officers on the frontline — the majority of Londoners now only see police officers in vehicles, and part of that is simply logistics.
But the Met’s problems don’t stop at poor structures — Casey condemns the Met’s culture. She describes discrimination as “baked into the system”, with 33% of those with disabilities and 30% of LGBTQ+ employees telling the Review they’d experienced bullying. Discrimination complaints by Black, Asian and ethnic minority officers are likely to be turned back against them, and they’ve ended up overrepresented in the Met’s misconduct system compared to White counterparts. That of course comes as Black Londoners find themselves over-policed — they’re more likely to be stopped and searched, handcuffed, batoned and tasered.
In a nutshell, the Met’s general culture comes across as one of arrogance in the Casey Review. Too much hubris and too little humility; defensiveness and denial; a strong tendency to look for positive spin; and an elitism within the upper ranks in New Scotland Yard who look down on the frontline.
It’s fair to say Casey believes the Met’s leadership has let down its own force and Londoners catastrophically. She says it’s failed to develop the processes to root out bad officers, help to tackle mediocre officers and support the good officers. Policing will attract those who wish to abuse the powers conferred by a warrant card. Casey says the Met has not taken this fact seriously.
The reaction
As soon as the Casey Review dropped on Tuesday, the new commissioner of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, was ready to react. In broad terms he accepted the report’s diagnosis, saying: “The report is vivid and it is painful reading. I’m not going to underestimate its significance, the power of it, the scale of reform needed. We all want to fix it. We all know that we have let London down.”

But there was one thing Rowley refused to do: describe his force as “institutionally” misogynistic, racist and homophobic, as Casey had done. Mayor Sadiq Khan publicly clashed with Rowley for not using the term, though still expressed his confidence Rowley was committed to reform. In radio interviews Casey too agreed that Rowley just seemed hung up on the word but nonetheless accepted her findings.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman also offered her backing for Rowley’s ability to deliver change — though notably shied away from using “institutional” too.
Others, particularly some former victims and their families, were less optimistic. A woman who reported being raped to the Met Police, only to then be warned she could be investigated herself, told the BBC she did not think there was any chance of reforming it. The mother of Stephen Lawrence — a Black british teenager whose racially motiviated murder was the subject of a previous review in to the Met in the 1990s — said the Met was still “rotten to its core”.
What next?
No big decisions, for now. The Casey Review made 16 recommendations in light of its findings, which ranged from reforming the Met’s misconduct and vetting processes to re-specialising its teams dealing with violence against women to rebuilding its frontline services. The force will have a progress review with the mayor in two years time, and another after five years. Success, according to Casey, would mean improved trust and confidence amongst Londoners, more misconduct cases leading to action, narrowing diversity gaps in the workforce and improving charge rates, particularly for sexual offences and rape.
And if it fails after five years? The Met could be broken up. Casey ends her recommendations by saying: “If sufficient progress is not being made at the points of further review, more radical, structural options, such as dividing up the Met into national, specialist and London responsibilities, should be considered to ensure the service to Londoners is prioritised.”
The ball is now in Rowley’s court to fix things fully. If he can’t, London may end up with an entirely new police force.