It looked like the reputation of London’s Metropolitan Police couldn’t sink much lower after it was accused of helping to cover up evidence of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lockdown-breaking parties last week—but a shocking new report has lifted the lid on a horrific culture of bullying, racism, and sexual harassment inside Britain’s biggest police force.
The report, carried out by England’s police watchdog, included dozens of text messages between male officers that showed them repeatedly talking about raping their female colleagues. The officers also shared messages about turning “African babies” into dog food, comparing the Holocaust to killing flies, and boasting about beating up “Somalian rats.”
Many of the messages appeared in one WhatsApp group that contained 19 serving Met police officers, according to the watchdog’s report. One shocking series of messages saw one male officer tell a female officer: “I would happily rape you”; “if I was single I would actually hate fuck you”; and “if I was single I would happily chloroform you.”
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The messages are peppered with homophobic slurs and the watchdog said it also uncovered repeated mocking of non-Christian religions, Black Lives Matter, people with disabilities, and the Holocaust. One of the worst examples in the report saw one officer write: “My dad kidnapped some African children and used them to make dog food.”
Another message read: “Opened my balcony door and loads of flies flew into the front room. So I got the fly spray and turned my gaff into Auschwitz.” One officer said he’d recently carried out “some uniform or plain clothes work on Somalian rats… I battered one the other day.”
One of the officer’s texts appeared to joke about George Floyd’s murder, saying: “PWPEHCLM—People with pre-existing heart conditions lives matter. Should of offered him a kit kat and a nice lie down.”
In its report, which was released Tuesday morning, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, or IOPC, concluded: “We believe these incidents are not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few ‘bad apples’... The culture of bullying appears to have been accepted and not challenged.”
The inquiry began nearly four years ago after an officer had sex with a vulnerable woman inside a police station in London, according to BBC News. As the investigation was carried out, 14 officers were investigated, but only two were dismissed for gross misconduct. Another two resigned and an unspecified number of them faced disciplinary action.
After the report was published, a Met Police spokesperson said in a statement that the misconduct “does not represent the values” of the force and added: “We are deeply sorry to Londoners and everyone they have failed with their appalling conduct and acknowledge how this will damage the trust and confidence of many in the Met.”
The Met is under severe pressure over its handling of the lockdown-breaking allegations against the prime minister over the past few weeks. Trust in the Met was also badly damaged by the killing of Sarah Everard last year, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Wayne Couzens, who used his position as a police officer to lure her into his car.
