A thousand Met police officers suspended or restricted: Report

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News websites
19 Sep 2023 12:03

The British Metropolitan Police has suspended 201 officers and placed 860 on restricted duties as part of ongoing reforms to address the proliferation of corruption within the force.

Police officers leave as a car crashed into a primary school building in Wimbledon, London, Thursday, July 6, 2023 (AP)

The British Metropolitan Police revealed that 201 officers were suspended and 860 were on restricted duties.

This decision comes in the context of an overhaul of culture and standards in the Metropolitan police after the revelation of criminal scandals within the force.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy, who has been leading the reforms, said it would be years before the task force is filtered from corrupt policemen.

"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," he said.

“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.”

The Met also revealed updated figures about disciplinary processes, including:

100 officers have been sacked for gross misconduct in the past year, up by 66% on the normal rate;
201 officers are suspended, up from 69 in September last year;
275 are awaiting gross misconduct hearing, a significant proportion of which involved alleged violence against women and girls, compared with 136 last year;
The number of reports from the public and officers of alleged misconduct has doubled.

Back in April, eight serving and former Metropolitan police officers were found guilty of "gross misconduct" for sending discriminatory and abusive communications.

Between 2016 and 2018, the police, seven men and one woman, were discovered to have posted sexist, racist, and ableist insults in a WhatsApp group named "Secret Squirrel Sh**."

Christopher McKay, the legal chair, defined egregious misconduct as a "breach of the rules of professional behavior that is so serious as to justify dismissal." He ruled that each former and serving officer had committed egregious misconduct in their own communications, as well as by "failing to challenge or report" the behavior of others in the group.