Rape may as well be legal in London, Met Police officer told Casey Review
21 March 2023, 06:41 | Updated: 21 March 2023, 09:44
The detection rate for rape is so low in London that it may as well be considered legal, a Met Police officer told the Casey review.
The report by Baroness Louise Casey found examples bad practice in the way sexual cases were handled, including losing evidence because of faulty freezers.
Meanwhile, a lunchbox was found to have been kept in the same fridge that rape samples were being kept in, contaminating the evidence.
One officer, working in the Met's Sapphire sex offences unit, said she had "lost count" of the number of times evidence had been lost in rape.
It would often take three officers to even close the evidence fridges because they were so full, the officer said.
Casey report says Met Police may have more officers like Couzens and Carrick
The Casey review, which looked into the culture and standards of the Metropolitan Police, has said it needs a wholesale reform of leadership, and called the force institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.
Baroness Louise Casey stopped short of calling for the UK’s largest police force to be split into smaller ones, after numerous high-profile cases of officers abusing their power.
But she did not rule out the possibility that the Met could be harbouring more criminal officers like killer Wayne Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick.
The review, which was commissioned after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021, has found evidence of discrimination being “baked into the system”.
Baroness Casey has warned the force’s leadership would have to “wake up” and bring about “fundamental change” in light of her findings.
One former officer, Alice Vinten, said her colleagues shared "revenge porn" with each other and claimed most rape cases were just "regretful sex".
Alice Vinten, who served in the Met for 11 years, said her fellow officers shared around images that had been sent by their girlfriends in private.
She also said her male colleagues would randomly show her pornography and made jokes about her giving oral sex while she was eating a banana, in a career plagued by sexism.
Ms Vinten said: "I remember them taking the mick out of one of the younger officers because he had got an STI from a prostitute. There was even stories of them using prostitutes in this country.
"There were things that would now be considered revenge porn. A number of the police officers had seen intimate pictures and they would share them around."
