. Vetting of recruits concentrates on three areas: whether the applicant has been involved in criminal activity; has financial vulnerabilities; or 'has been the subject of any concerning adverse information'. Details of potential recruits are run through police databases, including non-conviction databases and credit checks, and their social media accounts are scanned. Several red lines are drawn: sex offenders and domestic abusers, as well as those who have served jail terms or committed hate crimes, are supposed to be definitively barred from joining. But, as the re){kind=link}
As a report reveals that police systems for rooting out bad apples are seriously inadequate, we investigate how standards have fallen so far
“On occasion,” former Met Police chief Cressida Dick said last year on the day that Wayne Couzens, one of her serving officers, pleaded guilty to the kidnap and rape of Sarah Everard, “I have a bad ‘un.” But she insisted: “We are intolerant, and we set ourselves high standards in how we work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours.”
In the light of a new report into the vetting of police officers and their subsequent misconduct, she was wrong on both counts. It’s not just the odd “bad ‘un”. And the standards for rooting out the many “bad ‘uns” who do get into uniform are not high at all. As Matt Parr, His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and Fire Services, put it, summarising the report’s findings: “It is too easy for the wrong people both to join and to stay in the police.”
The report is a catalogue of failure. Take the applicant cleared to join the Special Constabulary despite the fact “his brother was actively involved in organised crime, with convictions for violence and drugs”. The force concerned didn’t stop to think that it might be an infiltration strategy, or put in place any extra checks once the applicant had successfully signed up. Then there’s the officer cleared to join despite being linked by intelligence to drug trafficking, with a car linked to his address being involved in a police pursuit in which a gun was seen.
It’s not just organised crime. Other applicants were cleared to serve despite investigations into racially aggravated criminal damage. Domestic abuse, repeated indecent exposure, robbery – none of these offences was a barrier to being cleared by police vetting. Indeed, of the 725 vetting files that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire Services examined, there were red flags with 131 of them, some 18 per cent.