VETTING of recruits and investigations into complaints against police need to be taken over by an independent body, a former Metropolitan Police superintendent has said.
Parm Sandhu said police forces should not be allowed to “mark their own homework”, following the conviction of former police officer David Carrick over a string of sexual offences, including 24 counts of rape.
She told GB News: “Confidence and trust in policing has taken a huge nosedive.
“The issue here, even though we’re talking about vetting, is that it is different right across the country and also the complaints departments are different right across the country.
“In my view, the solution is to take in the investigation of police complaints outside of the Met and take the vetting outside of the Met, and have an independent body that then looks at all of those issues together and not allow the police to mark their own homework.
“What has happened in the last few years, vetting has become a tick box exercise where the candidate has to say whether or not something untoward has happened, so- the onus is on the candidate.
She told Mark Longhurst: “Obviously, if you’re going to have people like David Carrick, who are dishonest rapists, sexual predators, they are not going to tell the truth about what they’ve been up to.
“Vetting is failing right across the country but particularly in the Met and it needs to be an independent group of people who are not police officers doing that work.
“That’s what’s happened. Police marking their own homework investigating each other – and it is not going to work any longer.”
Asked if the Met needed to be dismantled and re-built, Ms Sandhu said: “There has to be something radical happening now to get that trust and confidence back.
“My biggest worry is that there are going to be people out there, men and women who are going to need police help, and they may hesitate to pick the phone up and ask for help.
“To restore the trust and confidence it has to be either start again or take the complaints away so that people know they can trust the complaint side of it at least, so that if they have any allegations or concerns they can raise them.
“But the culture of the Met in particular enables these kinds of individuals to flourish because they can hide behind that label of banter and that’s what’s gone wrong there.”
