PC David Carrick, 48, appeared at Southwark Crown Court on Monday and pleaded guilty to four counts of rape, false imprisonment, and indecent assault, relating to a 40-year-old woman in 2003.
Last month Carrick admitted 43 charges against 11 other women, including 20 counts of rape, between March 2004 and September 2020.
It emerged on Monday, following the dropping of reporting restrictions on the case, that the Metropolitan Police has already apologised to Carrick’s 12 victims.
Rowley, said: “This man abused women in the most disgusting manner. It is sickening. We’ve let women and girls down and indeed we’ve let Londoners down.”
Rowley added: “We have failed. And I’m sorry. He should not have been a police officer. We haven’t applied the same sense of ruthlessness to guarding our own integrity that we routinely apply to confronting criminals.”
He added, “Our mindset should have been more determined to root out such a misogynist.”
Carrick admitted a total of 49 charges of rape, violence, and harassment between 2000 and 2021.
A previous hearing heard that Carrick, who lived in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, had bragged to women about how he was an armed officer who protected VIPs including then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
It has emerged that Carrick lived a charmed life throughout his time in the Met.
In 2002, while still serving his probationary period, he was accused of harassment and assault by a former girlfriend. He was not arrested, the matter was not referred to the Directorate of Professional Standards, and no further action was taken.
He was the subject of five public complaints between 2002 and 2008, and then in 2009 Hertfordshire Police received a domestic abuse report from a third party, which was passed on to Carrick’s supervisors at the Met.
His offending continued and in July 2021 a woman reported Carrick to Hertfordshire Police for rape but no action was taken after she withdrew the complaint.
The Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards then placed him on restricted duties, but a misconduct hearing was dropped in September 2021. He was about to return to full duties when, on Oct. 1, 2021 a woman alleged he had raped her a year earlier.
At that point he was arrested, charged, and suspended by the Met.
It was the day after his former colleague, Couzens, had been told by a judge he would never be released from prison.
Met Women on Tinder and Used His Job to Gain Their Trust
Detective Chief Inspector Iain Moor, from Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit, said Carrick met women through online dating apps such as Tinder and Badoo, or by chatting them up in pubs or on social occasions and often used his position as a police officer to gain their trust.Moor said, “Whilst he was not a man that stalked the streets scouting for victims—he invested time in developing relationships with women to sustain his appetite for degradation and control—the coercive nature of his offending undermined his victims in the most destructive way.”
Moor said Carrick got into relationships with some of the women and would control them financially, isolate them from friends and family, and even forbid them from speaking to their own children.
“He thrived on humiliating his victims and cleverly used his professional position to intimate there was no point in them trying to seek help because they would never be believed,” said Moor, who said he even forced some of the women to stay in a locked cupboard under the stairs.
Moor said: “It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer. The offending was absolutely abhorrent and I’m disgusted by it. I have a lot of pride and respect in the police service and I’m proud to be a policeman.”
Assistant Commissioner Barbara Gray, the Met’s lead for professionalism, said, “On behalf of the Metropolitan Police, I want to apologise to the women who have suffered at the hands of David Carrick.”
She said: “Carrick is a prolific, serial sex offender who preyed on women over a period of many years, abusing his position as a police officer and committing the most horrific, degrading crimes.”
Gray added: “He used the fact he was a police officer to control and coerce his victims. We know they felt unable to come forward sooner because he told them they would not be believed.”
“We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation. We are truly sorry that Carrick was able to continue to use his role as a police officer to prolong the suffering of his victims,” she added.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said, “I am absolutely sickened and appalled by the truly abhorrent offences that David Carrick has committed.”
Khan added, “Londoners will be rightly shocked that this man was able to work for the Met for so long, and serious questions must be answered about how he was able to abuse his position as an officer in this horrendous manner.”
Baroness Louise Casey, who is conducting a review of the Metropolitan Police’s standards and internal culture, has called for a public inquiry into the Carrick case.
In a letter to the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, Casey said: “I am asking you to consider that the scope of Lady Elish Angiolini’s current non-statutory inquiry should include the conduct of David Carrick and the potential opportunities the Met, other police forces and organisations may have had to identify his pattern of behaviour prior to October 2021, to stop him being a police officer and, ultimately, stop him offending.”
Rowley said he planned to write to Braverman and Khan at the end of March in an open public letter, and said that by then he hoped the Met would have “finished reviewing all of our people, having checked their details against all the police, national intelligence data in the police national database.”
Carrick will be sentenced by Mrs. Justice Cheema-Grubb next month and is likely to face a life sentence.
