Thousands of corrupt or unsatisfactory police officers may be working in England and Wales because of poor standards of vetting during the recruitment process, a watchdog has stated.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) looked at the vetting of recruits in eight police forces and found many had joined despite having criminal records or links to organised crime.
The inspection was commissioned in October 2021 by the then-Home Secretary Priti Patel in the wake of Wayne Couzens being jailed for life for the murder of Sarah Everard.
The Inspector of Constabulary, Matt Parr, said the chances of someone like Couzens—a serving police officer who abducted, raped, and murdered Everard in March 2021—would have been “clearly reduced” if better screening checks had been in place when he joined the Metropolitan Police.
Parr told reporters at a briefing, “It seems reasonable for me to say that over the last three or four years, the number of people recruited over whom we would raise significant questions is certainly in the hundreds, if not low thousands … it’s not in the tens, it’s at least in the hundreds.”
Parr said this culture existed in all eight police forces—the Met, Kent, Cumbria, South Wales, Nottinghamshire, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall; and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary.
The report found 131 cases where the vetting decisions made were “questionable at best” and in 68 of these they said the forces had been wrong to grant vetting clearance.
It said, “We found officers and staff with criminal records, or suspicions that they had committed crime (including some serious crime), substantial undischarged debt, or family members linked to organised crime.”
HMICFRS said it found a conviction for indecent exposure had been dismissed as a “one-off,” a warning that a different recruit may “present a risk to the public” was ignored, and a chief constable argued that hiring a third officer would make an area “more diverse” despite a string of sexual assault allegations against him.
‘Vetting Must Be Much More Rigorous’
Parr said: “It is too easy for the wrong people to both join and stay in the police. If the police are to rebuild public trust and protect their own female officers and staff vetting must be much more rigorous and sexual misconduct taken more seriously.”He said the pressure to meet government targets to hire 20,000 new officers by March 2023 “cannot be allowed to act as an excuse” for failing to vet new recruits properly.
HMICFRS looked at 11,277 police officers and staff in all, and examined 725 vetting files in detail. It also considered 264 complaint and misconduct investigations.
The chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Martin Hewitt, said recruitment procedures had been considerably reformed since the Couzens case emerged.
Hewitt told the BBC: “The picture is very bleak, but I do think it’s important for people to understand that we haven’t waited for this report to arrive. In the aftermath of the awful revelations about Sarah Everard’s murder, there has been a range of work that has been undertaken around issues of vetting.”
Marc Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said: “What is also clear is that there is much more to do to address the toxic misogynistic culture which remains engrained in some areas. Complacency is not an option.”
