Up to 60 Met Police officers a month face sack in effort to root out next Wayne Couzens
Up to 60 Metropolitan police officers a month will face the sack, the force has revealed, in an effort to root out the next Wayne Couzens or David Carrick.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy warned that some of the most “abhorrent cases” he has ever seen would emerge as the force continued to root out potentially dangerous and predatory officers.
At a briefing at Scotland Yard, DAC Cundy said there are plans to hold around 30 misconduct hearings and 30 gross incompetence hearings per month in a bid to get rid of those who breach standards or fail vetting.
He said that cleaning up the force could take “two years or more”.
Currently, of the Met’s workforce of about 34,000 officers, 201 are suspended and around 860 are on restricted duties.
DAC Cundy said: “If you add those two figures together, that’s over 1,000 police officers... that’s nearly the size of a small police force in other places in the country. It is a significant number.”
Old cases reviewed
Following the conviction of serial rapist and Met officer, David Carrick – one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders – 1,600 cases where officers faced allegations of domestic or sexual violence over the past 10 years, but no action was taken, were reviewed.
There are currently around 450 live investigations ongoing into the cases that were reviewed.
The Met has also checked all officers against records on the police national computer, uncovering 11 cases which were subject to further assessment and five are now gross misconduct investigations.
Details of all Met employees, both civilian staff and police, were also checked against intelligence records on the Police National Database. Fourteen are under further investigation for potential gross misconduct, with more due to be added.
The Met also announced it had launched a complete overhaul of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command (PaDP), which Wayne Couzens and Carrick both served in.
The force said it had removed a third of the elite unit’s 1,0000 officers in the wake of the scandals and was planning to remove another third by 2025.
Baroness Louise Casey last year criticised the unit for being a masculine-dominated environment that lacked supervision and leadership.
‘Acute problems in the PaDP’
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said officers in the team were “detached” from the rest of the force and “needed to be better supervised and better trained”. He questioned the suggestion made last week by the former head of counter terrorism Neil Basu, that diplomatic and parliamentary protection should be handled by the military.
He said: “We have looked at alternative options and there is still work going on across all of my commands looking to security in the future.
“We had some really acute problems within PaDP that we needed to address and if I’m really frank, I think it’s more important to address those and deal with people who don’t want to deal with cultural challenges and then look at what a very long-term solution might be.”
As part of the overhaul, officers will no longer be able to remain in PaDP indefinitely, but will instead be rotated around to other parts of the Met.
Currently 49 PaDP officers are accused of breaching standards – 12 for misconduct, 33 for gross misconduct and four public complaints.
Twenty-four officers are subject to restrictions, since October 2021 11 have been suspended, and more than 30 have had their firearms licences removed.