The Casey report is damning – and the failings go beyond the Met

Editorial: Even if the force were as ‘woke’ as some of its critics accuse it of being, it is also failing on basic policing

A hopeless, perhaps self-interested, complacency at the top of government permits such institutional failings (PA)

It is profoundly depressing that, three decades on from the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and almost a quarter-century after the Macpherson report criticised the Metropolitan Police, the service is once again being described as “institutionally racist”.

It is a stark, disturbing phrase, and one that continues to be controversial, but there is no doubt that Baroness Casey has come to the correct conclusion based on the evidence she has collected about the state of the force today. Indeed, her report, commissioned in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard and a series of other appalling cases, is even more damning than its 1999 predecessor, condemning the Met for being “institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic”.

No wonder, then, that the former commissioner, Cressida Dick, lost the confidence of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and had to resign last year. She gave no indication that she had any conception of the scale of the problems in the force; problems that are mirrored, to varying degrees, in constabularies across the country.