More than 1,000 London Metropolitan Police officers suspended or on restricted duties amid force clean-up

Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy said it will take years to get rid of officers who have breached standards or failed vetting, amid a clean-up following a series of disturbing scandals.

The new figures come after the Independent exclusively revealed three-quarters of police officers and staff accused of violence against women are not suspended by their force despite the allegations against them.

The Met has faced a series of harrowing scandals, including serving armed officer Wayne Couzens, who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, who was unmasked as a serial rapist.

Currently, of the Met’s workforce of about 34,000 officers, 201 are suspended and about 860 are on restricted duties.

The revelations about sexual assault, violence, theft and more has led to one former Met superintendent warning that the “sinister” figures showed police stations were no longer safe.

Nusrit Mehtab, who spent decades working with the force, added the “mind blowing” numbers were a fraction of what the true figure would be, given the sheer volume of ongoing investigations, and the officers who were never caught.

Alongside officers themselves committing crimes in police stations, there’s an alarming number of failures to stop others crimes being committed, with a further 146 sexual offences committed by members of the public also in police stations. The FOI covered from January 1, 2017, to April 30 of this year.

Speaking to The Mirror, Nusrit said: “They’re predators, it’s eye-watering, these are offences committed in a police station, how can people feel safe? They can’t. As woman and girls when out on the street you’re taught to go to a police station … you’d run to a police station to feel safe, but these days you’re going from the frying pan into the fire.

“Going into a police station, any woman who might be drunk, or in there for a day or overnight, you worry what’s happening to her, I feel for other women, if any female relative was at a police station overnight I would honestly be so worried, you just don’t know who you’re going to get.”

Baroness Casey said: “The police don’t want to believe the boys in blue are doing bad things and back them. The balance is entirely against women suffering domestic violence at the hands of the police: they are not believed, they are not listened to. If anything, there is payback to women when they make a complaint.”

Three-quarters of police officers and staff accused of violence against women are not suspended by their force despite the allegations against them, shocking new figures show.

In the Metropolitan Police, which was found to be institutionally misogynistic by a damning review this year in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by a Met officer, just 12 per cent of officers and staff are being suspended from duties after being accused of crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence.