THE NUMBER of Metropolitan police officers who are now suspended from duty or on restricted duties is comparable to “the size of a small police force”, according to Scotland Yard.
Based on deputy assistant commissioner Stuart Cundy, of the approximately 34,000 officers employed by the Met, 201 were suspended and 860 were on restricted duties.
ITV News UK editor Paul Brand said: “That’s one in every 34 officers”, on Twitter, now known as X.
The London Police said that 275 officers were already awaiting gross misconduct tribunals and that 450 officers were being investigated for possible sexual or domestic abuse.
The convictions of former officers David Carrick and Wayne Couzens, which led to a “blistering review” by Baroness Casey earlier this year, prompted the crackdown, according to the BBC.
The review concluded that racism, sexism, and homophobia were pervasive within the Met and had failed to address the needs of women and children.
Baroness Casey has referred to this as a “boy’s club” mentality.
According to The Guardian, 100 officers have been fired in the last year for gross misconduct, which is “a 66 per cent increase on historical averages”.
Stuart Cundy said: “The harder we work, the more effort, the more energy we put into identifying those who shouldn’t be in policing, and doing everything we can in the regulations and the law as it stands, the more difficult cases, the more difficult stories will become public, and rightly so.
“And this isn’t something which we can resolve alone as the Met police, and isn’t something which we can resolve in one month, six months … this is going to take one, two or more years to root out those who are corrupting policing.”
According to ITV’s Brand on X, the size of the Met’s clean-up effort “underlines the crisis of trust in the force, especially for women, if it needed further emphasising”.
“Public trust in the police is hanging by a thread” – His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary head Andy Cooke warned earlier this year.
Since Carrick’s conviction, 1,600 examples have been discovered where police were accused of domestic or sexual abuse over the course of ten years but no action was taken.
Carrick was a serving police officer who was revealed to be one of the worst serial sex offenders in the UK.
Additionally, the police national database’s intelligence records were compared to the personal information of every Met employee, including police and civilian workers.
There are currently 14 people under additional investigation for possible gross misconduct, and there will likely be more.
Allegations of rape were the most severe of all the instances examined, according to Cundy.
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