The Metropolitan Police is truly a disgrace it really is. There’s the well documented accounts of bias, political correctness, an obsession with Twitter comments and the employment of officers who have gone on to use their warrant cards to rape and murder. All this is set against a background of rising violent crime in London and criminal gangs running and indeed ruling the streets.
Now it seems that the Met is now burdened with officers and civilian staff who are both indolent and utterly incompetent and who didn’t take frantic reports of a case of a double missing persons incident at all seriously.
Sky News said:
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has said it will apologise to the family of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry over the way detectives responded when the sisters were reported missing.
The force was advised to do so after an investigation from the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found the level of service provided to the sisters’ family over the weekend of their disappearance was “unacceptable”.
Ms Smallman, 27, and Ms Henry, 46, were attacked and stabbed to death in the early hours of 6 June, last year, after an evening out celebrating the elder sister’s birthday at Fryent Park in Wembley, north London.
Danyal Hussein, who was 18 at the time of the killing, was found guilty of murder at an Old Bailey trial in July.
The Sky report makes for worrying reading for anyone who wants to see London policed fairly and effectively. An Inspector and civilian staff failed to record details of the missing people correctly and even at one point referred to the missing people as ‘suspects’. A police call handler was also found to have been ‘dismissive’ to those who reported Ms Smallman and Ms Henry missing.
The Met received three calls from the family and friends of the victims in this case which were not properly acted upon. At one point police officers closed the case prematurely and didn’t deploy police resources until the day after Ms Smallman and Ms Henry were initially reported missing.
What is even worse is that the Met didn’t even find the victim’s bodies, they were found by friends and relatives of the missing people. Maybe, just maybe, if the police had acted sooner and done the jobs that we pay them to do, then there might have been a chance, a small chance granted, that the families of the victim would be dealing with a serious assault rather than a double murder.
The IOPC in a statement that is a gross understatement said: “We found the level of service provided to their family and friends over the weekend following their disappearance was unacceptable.” Personally I feel the word ‘unacceptable’ doesn’t quite cut it. I would have used the phrases ‘utterly disgusting’ and ‘appalling’.
Of course it would not be a serious police complaints case without bugger all really being done to punish the guilty in this case. No officer or civilian staff member is looking at this stage as if they will be sacked. According to the IOPC those involved will face ‘management action’ which as we all know will probably mean the square root of sod all.
According to Sky the IOPC said: “As a result, an MPS inspector and a civilian staff member must undertake unsatisfactory performance procedures to address and improve their professional capability,” it said, adding that the call handler will also receive management action.
Not good enough. It’s really not good enough. The errors made were not small ones they were big ones. The Met ignored a succession of frantic calls from the relatives of the missing women, failed to take proper notes and failed to deploy officers and other police resources when required. These are not the sort of low level mistakes that could justifiably be dealt with by ‘management action’ or ‘retraining’, these are big errors that demand exemplary punishment for the officers and civilian staff involved.
This is another fine mess for Dame Cressida Dick. They say that a fish rots from the head and in the case of the Met this is very true. But for the Met the rot is not only at its beginning stage in the fishes head, it’s spread right down to the tail and all we have left is an unpalatable, noisome stink of a police force.
The worst aspect is that they has to extent the Pantomime Dame’s contract for another two years, because, shockingly, there is no-one else in the Met’s “leadership” competent to do the job, the worst, even more so than her, is Asst Commissioner Neil Basu, who after having asked him a dime question “what are you doing to ensure Londoners are treated equally under the law” gave us a right load of “equality inclusivity & diversity” tripe and was subsequently demolished and embarrassed by me when I cited several examples of the exact opposite. Needless to say, mult card has been marked, as you know.
I’ve come around to the view that Dick’s extension may well be to soak up the noisome pus that seems to be oozing out of the Met daily. I don’t trust Basu but equally I can see the job as a bit of a poison chalice until the drek that has accumulated under the reign of Dick and her predecessors is drained out.
Keeping Dick in place shields several high up politicos from closer scrutiny about how the Met is run.
If only such attitudes were confined to the Met, here in the east Midlands the police just aren’t interested. I have given up calling them as I just can’t keep my anger from boiling over when I get their excuses. We can’t find your post code so can’t come out, that’s a civil offense (not the truth) so its nothing to do with us, that’s a road traffic master (it was criminal damage) and so it goes. Anything short of actual work to try to massage down the number of recorded crimes to make it look as if they are doing a good job.
You are correct. Avoidance techniques like you described are present in nearly all police forces. However I must say that the litany of excuses that you’ve been getting look particularly egregious.