Southwark Labour Leader Cllr Sarah King has signed a joint letter with London Labour leaders following BBC Panorama’s investigation into the Met Police. The statement reads:
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Londoners will have watched last night’s BBC Panorama programme with horror and disgust.
To see serving police officers engage so openly in racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and violent language and behaviour is truly sickening.
Trust in the Metropolitan Police among many of our diverse communities is already deeply fractured. From Stephen Lawrence and Sarah Everard to Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, time and again our communities have been failed by institutional shortcomings within the police. These latest revelations will only deepen that mistrust and further undermine attempts to rebuild confidence.
Baroness Casey’s landmark review was supposed to mark a reset moment for the Met — a chance to begin the journey towards restoring trust and confidence in policing. Yet the behaviour exposed in last night’s programme shows just how far the Met still has to go to deliver the culture change that Londoners were promised.
We know that many of our residents, particularly those from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, women, and those from faith and migrant backgrounds, will be deeply worried by what they have seen. Their concerns are justified — and it is vital that they see swift and decisive action being taken to address them.
Every person has the right to feel that the police are there to protect them and keep them safe. So long as this culture is allowed to persist within the Met, that right is being denied.
The Mayor of London is right to call for a zero-tolerance approach to this behaviour, and we fully support him in holding the Met to account. It is essential that the reforms recommended by Baroness Casey are not just implemented in full, but accelerated, so that we can build a police service that every Londoner can trust.
As leaders of some of the most diverse boroughs in the capital, we will be writing to the Commissioner to seek an urgent meeting and request further information on the immediate steps being taken to address these specific incidents, as well as the broader institutional failings they expose.
The statement can be found on Brent Leader Cllr Butt’s X feed at this link here