David Carrick pleaded guilty to 49 sex offences, including 24 counts of rape. Photo / Hertfordshire Police via AP
David Carrick pleaded guilty to 49 sex offences, including 24 counts of rape. Photo / Hertfordshire Police via AP
The British Home Office has introduced further measures to root out officers “not fit to serve” after coming under fire for doing too little in response to the serial rapist David Carrick, who avoided detection in police ranks for two decades.
The National Police Chiefs Council will now ask policeforces across England and Wales to cross-check their officers against national police databases to identify offenders who might have “slipped through the net”.
The measure, announced on Wednesday, is meant to strengthen police vetting procedures in the wake of revelations surrounding Carrick, who was dismissed from London’s Metropolitan Police on Tuesday after pleading guilty to 49 sex offences, including 24 counts of rape.
The case has triggered public outrage and piled pressure on the government and police forces, particularly the Met, to accelerate reforms already under way following a string of previous scandals.
Speaking in Parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: “There will be no place to hide for those who use their position to intimidate those women and girls, or those who have failed to act to reprimand or remove those people from office.”
The Met said this week that it is reviewing a total of 1633 cases of alleged sexual or domestic violence by 1071 officers and other staff that took place over the past decade. Photo / AP
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who on Tuesday instigated a review of the way police officers are dismissed, was criticised from all sides of Parliament for not going far or fast enough in tackling the culture of impunity that has taken root within the police.
She has also asked the College of Policing to strengthen the statutory code of practice for police vetting, making the obligations that all forces must legally follow “stricter and clearer”, the Home Office said.
“David Garrick’s sickening crimes are a stain on the police and he should never have been allowed to remain as an officer for so long,” Braverman said.
“We are taking immediate steps to ensure predatory individuals are not only rooted out of the force, but that vetting and standards are strengthened to ensure they cannot join the police in the first place.”
Academics and experts involved with the police have been calling for more consistent regulations on what constitutes misconduct among other necessary reforms.
Carrick joined the Met in 2001, and was later promoted to the elite Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command. A police review has shown that he was reported for abusive and violent behaviour in his private life on multiple occasions during the course of his career without ever being sanctioned.
Furthermore, he was reissued with a firearms licence in 2021 after being investigated for an alleged rape and only months after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, a fellow officer in his unit.
The Met said this week that it is reviewing a total of 1633 cases of alleged sexual or domestic violence by 1071 officers and other staff that took place over the past decade.
This action is part of a raft of new measures introduced by Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who took office in September, to root out potential predators in the force’s ranks.
