Reviewing the Casey Review of the Metropolitan Police Service

The Baroness has no clothes

Last year, Pimlico Journal credited Baroness Louise Casey for her Report on the Pakistani grooming gangs — the ‘National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’ — for identifying the ethnic component of the crimes. Though her recommendations were rather tepid, this was the first official recognition by the British state of the active choice of institutional actors to ignore the systemic rape and abuse of English girls, and it compared well to the Patel Home Office’s straightforward cover-up.

Baroness Casey also led a 2023 review of the Metropolitan Police. This was commissioned as a response to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by an off-duty police constable, Wayne Couzens. It is entirely reasonable to say that the ability of someone like Couzens not only to become an officer, but a firearms officer who was responsible for protecting nuclear power stations and the Houses of Parliament, in spite of numerous red flags, raised serious questions about the police force. But the Review instead turned into a politicised broadside on policing as a whole — issues mostly or entirely separate from the problem of an individual like Couzens.

Casey’s report, entitled An independent review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service, found it to be institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic. This was followed by breathless reporting about how the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) was on the road to being broken up. Senior officers mostly lined up to agree with her findings, with only the slightest resistance to the ‘institutional’ label from Sir Mark Rowley, the current head of the Met. Recently, Baroness Casey stoked the embers by suggesting Sir Mark is ‘not man enough’ to accept these labels. Sir Mark finds himself in a difficult position because, having given Casey an inch, she is now trying to take a mile. All of policing, and not just the Met, should have pushed back much more strongly on the Casey Report, because the majority of it is nonsense, and accepting its arguments necessitates accepting Casey’s fundamentally anti-policing (and often stupid) premises.

Casey says that the Met is often defensive when criticised. This was a clever point to make, because it means that it is hard to disagree with her without appearing to do exactly what she criticises. Yet this does not actually make any of her criticisms necessarily true. She specifies that this defensiveness can manifest when ‘[the Met] looks for, and latches onto, small flaws in any criticism’. Setting aside the obvious fairness of being able to point out flaws in criticism of oneself, even ‘small flaws’ can actually reveal big failings. Take, for instance, the Casey Review’s uncertainty about the name of the MPS’s professional standards body. She refers to it variously as the ‘Department for Professional Standards’, the ‘Professional Standards Directorate’, and the ‘Directorate of Professional Standards’. Only the last of these is correct, and this error is immediately obvious to any MPS officer who reads the Review. Casey would likely say this is one of those ‘small flaws’ that the Met likes to ‘latch onto’, but in reality, it seriously undermines her argument. It shows that her report has not been proofread by even one person with a good eye for detail or with working knowledge of the MPS, that at least parts of it have been written by various people with a poor grasp of detail and a lack of curiosity, and that she did not seek any feedback from any police officer to ensure accuracy.

Now we know the basic lack of care which has gone into producing the criticism in the Review, this ‘small flaw’ must surely prompt the reader to ‘latch onto’ a bigger question: what else did Casey not bother to get right? Due to the limitations of space and sanity, I will only go into a few of Casey’s more egregiously stupid passages, but I urge anyone reading the Review to always bear in mind that its authors evidently did not hold themselves to high standards of accuracy.

Before examining some of the more glaring errors, it would be unfair not to note what the Review did get correct. It is true that the MPS’s senior officers are prone to groupthink (although Casey would disagree as to what they tend to think groupishly about), that the MPS’s restructuring from a borough model to Basic Command Units was a disaster, that getting rid of the specialist sexual offences investigation unit was foolish, and that austerity obviously did not make anything better. All of these criticisms are fair and any MPS officer below the rank of Chief Inspector would have freely told you about them, and yet, because of the cultural weight that comes behind accusations of racism and sexism, the Met’s senior leaders have completely ignored them and instead focused on Casey’s fatuous claims about race and sex, and vowed that no stone will be left unturned nor any standard be left un-lowered in the pursuit of achieving Casey’s ridiculous idea of ‘equality’.

A consistent failing of the Review is that Casey confuses anecdotes for data. Most of the discussion of institutional prejudice relates to first-hand accounts of complaints made by Met officers and staff about other employees and then being dissatisfied with the outcome of their complaint. Some of the examples provided are indeed shocking (although it must be said that they are all from one perspective, and no effort whatsoever is made to confirm their accuracy or ask for any alternative account of events). But even if we accept that every single anecdote is a full and accurate account of what happened, anecdotes are not data. It is not possible to draw conclusions about an institution with tens of thousands of employees from even dozens of accounts over several decades.

When Casey does gather data, she either does not recognise its shortcomings or hopes the reader will not notice. The Review surveyed the MPS to find out how many people had been bullied, discriminated against, and so on. This was sent by email to 47,000 officers, staff, and volunteers, and there were 6,751 respondents. A response rate of just under 15% is perfectly acceptable; political polling companies can draw valid conclusions about the mood of the nation from a much smaller group. But Casey’s survey was sent out and advertised as an opportunity to raise issues of bullying. What effort was made to make sure the results didn’t reflect this obvious risk of selection bias among respondents? Absolutely none. On page 352 out of 363, within ‘Annex B – Methodology’, Casey finally brings herself to admit, just the once, that ‘Due to the survey methodology, the findings reflect the perceptions of those who opted to take part and are not necessarily representative of every Met officer, staff and volunteer.’ And yet, even with this enormous bias, the survey found only 22% of respondents had experienced bullying at work. (The Baroness does not tell us when this bullying occurred, either because she did not think it pertinent to ask or does not want us to know. Yesterday? Last year? 1991? Who knows.) Compared with non-rigged staff surveys finding that 14% of Home Office civil servants reported having been bullied in the previous year in 2019, and that 18.7% of NHS staff were bullied by a colleague in 2021, it would appear to an objective reader that Casey discovered that the MPS is staffed by something approximating the general public, and nothing more insightful than that — not that you’d know it from any newspaper coverage.

It is when the Review turns to the thorny topic of racism that Casey most obviously loses touch with reality and any pretence of integrity. Casey believes, with arguments only a mother could love, that a police force should ‘look like the community it serves’. I don’t plan to go into why this is a braindead aphorism, so let’s just leave it described as something which Casey unfailingly and unreflectingly believes in, and all of her recommendations keep this in mind as the platonic form of a police force. As evidence of the Met’s institutional racism Casey says:

The Met continues to say that only a tiny minority of officers display discriminatory behaviour. But our survey of Met officers and staff found a different picture:

• 46% of Black and 33% of Asian Met respondents report personally experiencing racism while at work.

Casey only acknowledges in a footnote that ‘…due to the survey wording this may refer to experiences from working with the public as well as experiences with other Met employees.’

Casey also says that worse retention of black officers than white officers is further evidence of racism within the force. But is it perhaps instead evidence of poor behaviour from the black community towards officers who ‘look like the community they serve’? We can’t say for sure, but Baroness Casey doesn’t consider the possibility of this for even a single moment. She knows what’s going on, and she’s going to find or make the data prove it.

The Review discovered that non-white officers are 81% more likely to have misconduct proceedings brought against them. Casey says this is because the misconduct system is ‘systemically biased’. She even claims that non-white officers being more likely than white officers to be found guilty of misconduct is also evidence of racism. Apparently, the fairly obvious conclusion — that this is actually evidence of non-white officers committing misconduct at higher rates — does not occur to her. We could say that Casey fails to apply Occam’s razor, but even this would be a stretch: Casey simply does not think about these matters in the same way as a normal person. Nor does she think it is important to mention that misconduct hearings are led by Legally Qualified Chairs — that is to say, by people independent of police forces. It would appear that the only misconduct system Casey would not describe as racist would be one which did not involve black officers at all.

Casey says that it is a ‘racist myth’ that the Met lowers standards to increase diversity. She must not have read reporting over the last decade that the Met first reduced the importance of English and Maths tests, and then removed them altogether, in an effort to improve the acceptance rates of ethnic minorities. Since 2020, the Met has also maintained an ‘Equalities Team’ within vetting. This team’s role is to help black applicants through the process of vetting, including by advocating for vetting failures to be overturned. Could lowering the intellectual and moral standards of a group you’re trying to recruit result in recruiting people of a lower standard who commit more misconduct? If you thought ‘yes’, then Louise Casey says you’re racist.

When it comes to policing London’s black community, Casey claims there is evidence of institutional racism in black people’s experience of policing in that they are disproportionately likely to be policed, i.e., being arrested or having force used on them, and that they are disproportionately likely to be victims of crime, leading her to use the truly moronic expression that black Londoners are ‘overpoliced and under-protected’. It is, of course, the case that if black Londoners are ‘under-protected’, it is from the predations of other black people. Again, Casey makes a selective use of data to back up her argument. She is clearly aware of the rates at which black people are victims of crime, but has a peculiar lapse of curiosity when it comes to the rates at which they perpetrate it. A few seconds on Google would have told her that black people are 16% of the population of London and commit nearly 60% of its murders. Casey notices that black people are four-and-a-half times more likely to have force used on them by police, but this evident tendency towards murder suggests they might be about four-and-a-half times more likely to use pretty serious force themselves, which one might expect to prompt something of a reaction from an organisation charged with preserving law and order. Casey may or may not think so, but she doesn’t think it worth considering in her report.

Sexism is another area in which Casey departs from basic considerations of rationality. Casey recently described herself as having a chip on her shoulder (as if we didn’t already know), and approaches the review in the absolute certainty that a police force — the members of which must physically confront violent criminals, the vast majority of whom are male — should be 50% female, so as to ‘look like the community [the Met] serves’. The Baroness has not spent one second doing any police work in her entire life, so let’s give her views on the physicality required to arrest violent offenders the respect they deserve. In particular, she is upset about women’s experiences within the Met’s firearms unit. Again, she uses mostly anecdotes to back up her views, and again, some of them are shocking. Yet the data which does not interest her at all is the data on the effectiveness of firearms units. The Met shoots hardly anyone, and when it does it is never found criminally liable. The vast majority of armed operations end with a bad man taken off the streets and without a shot being fired. But Casey does not think this is the correct way to judge a police force’s firearms capability; instead, she believes that such units exist to fulfil the ambitions of women who want to be armed cops. So when the firearms instructors, who are responsible for gate-keeping the quality of officer who makes onto our streets with a gun, decide that someone isn’t up to scratch and cause them to be removed from the recruitment pipeline, the correct response is to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they probably know what they’re doing. The real world evidence implies they’re doing well. It’s only compared to Casey’s made up standard of ‘representation’ that the output can be judged to fail.

None of the problems with Casey’s review which I’ve mentioned are obscure. Any police officer, of any rank, would have noticed them immediately. This then raises the troubling question of why have senior officers been so reluctant to point out such obvious shortcomings, rather than pursue their actual course of action of falling on their faces and begging the Baroness to show mercy. The answer, contrary to Casey’s criticisms, is that they actually agree with her. It is orthodoxy amongst senior officers, and an orthodoxy that any ambitious officer must at least enthusiastically parrot, that a police force should ‘look like the community it serves’, that there are no meaningful differences between men and women, that any racial disparity can only be evidence of racial prejudice, and that a police force exists to make people feel good about themselves and has only a tangential role in physically confronting criminals.

And so Casey will get what she wants. The Met will continue in its evolution towards a photo-op of the sort of state institution which people like Casey find palatable, and when reality intrudes, it is not the photo-op which will adapt. Proactive officers will be demoralised and dismissed; stop and search will continue to fall from its already record-breaking nadir; recruitment standards will be lowered beyond the point where they actually weed out anyone; and the police service across the country (because obviously none of Casey’s ideas limit themselves only to policing London) will continue to get worse. You will be left at the mercy of criminals as the Baroness and the Met’s senior leaders pat each other on the back for a job well done.

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This article was written by DS Andy Wainwright, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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