Putting senior officers in charge of disciplinary panels does not get to the heart of the problem
The demand for greater powers to sack bad police officers has been at the heart of Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s campaign to clean up his force and all the others.
He’s the poster boy for the whole of UK policing and must have known he had political backing for such a reform. It should be law by next Spring.
But putting senior cops back in charge of disciplinary panels does not get to the heart of the problem.
So often, rogue officers have been suspected, exposed, and even confronted by their seniors and escaped with minor punishment or no sanction at all, with worrying patterns of behaviour not recognised or simply ignored.
The two officers usually cited as examples in the call for greater sacking powers are PCs Wayne Couzens, the sex killer of Sarah Everard, and serial rapist David Carrick – but both of those were recognised, to different degrees, as a risk and allowed to stay in their jobs.
In Carrick’s case, “missed opportunities” hardly does justice to the nine times he was suspected but not seriously challenged over his behaviour towards women.
There’s an argument that neither of them should have been allowed to join the Met in the first place as there were already suspicions about them when they were recruited.
The Police Federation, which represents junior ranks, warns that the new police-led disciplinary panels will be “kangaroo courts” with chiefs more likely to fire a defendant than use a less punitive option.
In these times of more enlightenment and zero tolerance, all officers are being urged to blow the whistle on their bad colleagues.
If they think those exposed officers might not get a fair hearing, the proposed new law might have the opposite effect.