'Significant number' of police officers should never have been recruited, inspector says

Around one in 10 police officers should never have made it through the vetting stage, a senior police inspector has said.

Inspector of Constabulary Matt Parr said there was a “widespread and historic” problem of failing to adequately assess new recruits.

He claimed that policing had “smelt the coffee” and “woken up to the scale of the problem”, in the wake of recent scandals.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: “When we reported back in November about vetting across the country, we looked at hundreds of officers that had joined the police.... about 10 per cent of them should not have got through vetting.

“That was not a random sample, these are cases we had highlighted but a significant number of officers joined the police that, in our view, should not have done.

“This is a problem that is widespread, I think it has been historic. I do think at last policing has smelt the coffee, woken up, recognised the scale of the problem.”

He added that a drive to recruit 20,000 new officers should not cause a drop in vetting standards.

He said: “The general problem is public confidence in the police has definitely taken some serious knocks, and the most important thing now is to restore this confidence.

“I don't accept that the new 20,000 officers can be used as an excuse for lowering standards of the people that join.”

This week it was revealed two or three Metropolitan Police officers appear in court charged with crimes every week - with Sir Mark Rowley warning that a clean-up of the force will unearth yet more “ghastly” cases.

Speaking at London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee, the Metropolitan Police commissioner apologised for the failings that allowed serial rapist David Carrick to carry on serving as an officer.

“He shouldn’t have been a police officer and we have failed,” Sir Mark said of the Carrick case.

The Metropolitan Police is currently undertaking a review of around 1,000 officers who were accused of sexual or domestic abuse crimes but were never prosecuted and are still serving.

Sir Mark said he hopes the initial phase of the review would be complete by the end of March.