A damning new review into recruitment and vetting practices at the Metropolitan Police has laid bare one of the most troubling scandals in recent British policing history. Between July 2019 and March 2023, thousands of officers and staff were recruited or retained without proper background checks, and at least 131 went on to commit crimes or misconduct after slipping through the cracks, including two convicted serial rapists.
The review, which examined vetting processes over a decade up to March 2023, found that the Met failed to carry out essential checks on more than 5,000 officers and staff and could not confirm proper vetting for around 17,000 personnel. The reasons were as stark as they are unacceptable; senior leaders, under pressure to hit recruitment targets set by the government’s Police Uplift Programme, chose to shortcut national guidelines and weaken safeguards that should never have been compromised.
Among those whose vetting was inadequate were David Carrick and Cliff Mitchell, two of the most heinous examples of what can go wrong when basic checks are ignored. Carrick, now serving 37 life sentences, is one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders; vetting failures in 2017 meant that a prior domestic abuse allegation was not properly flagged, allowing him to remain a serving officer until his arrest in 2021. Mitchell, meanwhile, was allowed to join the force in 2020 after an internal panel, partly established to improve diversity, overturned an earlier decision to reject his application despite a previous child rape allegation. He later carried out a “campaign of rape” against two victims over nine years before his conviction.
These are not isolated slip-ups; they represent an institutional failure that has damaged public trust, jeopardised public safety, and betrayed the values police are meant to uphold. Other officers whose vetting was insufficient went on to commit serious offences, including drug use, racism, violence and affray.
The Met’s own report estimated that around 1,200 recruits who passed under the relaxed vetting regime would likely have been rejected had proper procedures been followed. That a force entrusted with safeguarding one of the world’s greatest cities was willing to let such risks accumulate is a sharp indictment not only of Met leadership but of the government’s recruitment targets and oversight during this period.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has since ordered an independent inspection of vetting practices, and the Met claims it has tightened standards, including re-vetting thousands of personnel. But repairing the eroded confidence of Londoners, especially victims of the crimes committed by those once in uniform, will take more than new policies. It will require genuine accountability, transparency and a clear acknowledgement that hitting numerical targets should never have trumped public safety. As it stands, this episode will be remembered as a profound breach of trust, a failure of duty at the very heart of British policing.
Image source: Financial Times