ANOTHER day, another police scandal.
The Met Police has revealed it hired thousands of officers and staff in the past few years without them undergoing the required background checks, including on references and criminal records.
More than 130 of the officers and staff who joined the Met in London without proper vetting went on to commit crimes or were found guilty of misconduct — including two serial rapists, violent thugs and drug offenders.
Astonishingly, this is not a storyline leaked from the new series of Line Of Duty. Indeed, it’s not a TV fictional drama at all — it’s a real-life FACT.
What makes it even more shocking is that this wasn’t something that happened by accident.
A computer didn’t break down, a few dodgy coppers didn’t lie, and it wasn’t a blunder.
MORE FROM JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER
This was a DELIBERATE policy authorised by the then-Met Police chief Dame Cressida Dick in a bid to quickly beef up police numbers.
I guess the recruitment panel didn’t think that child rape was a serious enough crime to worry about.
Julia Hartley-Brewer
We only know all of this thanks to the Met’s investigation into its own vetting after numerous scandals, including the 2021 kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Met protection officer Wayne Couzens.
Those vetting failures also meant that serial rapist and domestic abuser David Carrick, who is now serving 37 life sentences, was able to continue his 30-year crime spree while serving in the Met.
Potential terrorists weren’t screened out, while criminals may have had free access to police computer databases for years.
And the bad news keeps on coming because it wasn’t just the Met that dropped basic vetting standards to hurriedly enrol new officers.
At least six other police forces around the country followed exactly the same policy and only now is HM Inspector of Constabulary investigating whether further forces did the same.
At the very least there were 130-odd dodgy London hirings. Or were there?
After all, these are just the officers who were CAUGHT.
Heaven knows how many more there are lurking in uniform to this day.
But this scandal gets worse. Because this wasn’t just an abject failure to carry out adequate checks on would-be recruits.
We couldn’t give two hoots whether a police officer is black, brown or white
Julia
Even when they did have evidence or suspicions of wrongdoing, in some cases they ignored them.
This meant that Met officer Cliff Mitchell was able to join the force despite having previously been investigated for child rape.
The case against him had been dropped but Mitchell failed vetting as a result — until a recruitment panel over- turned that decision and gave him the job.
Woke race obsession
Mitchell is currently serving 17 and a half years in prison for 13 counts of rape, including six against a child.
So why on Earth did the Met decide to hire him? For one reason: he was black and the Met recruiters were desperate to boost diversity quotas.
That same vetting panel overturned decisions to reject 114 officers and staff in a bid to hit targets to hire more black and Asian officers to meet official quotas for ethnic minority hiring — 25 of those officers went on to be accused of a crime or misconduct.
I guess the recruitment panel didn’t think that child rape was a serious enough crime to worry about.
After all, it’s not like Mitchell had done something REALLY awful like misgender someone, deny climate change or vote for Reform, huh?
Mind-blowingly, those quotas — which put a tick-box culture of woke race obsession above the safety of the public — are still in place today.
This is all beyond belief. Law-abiding Brits have grown weary of the daily grind of shocking revelations about how the Thin Blue Line that used to stand between us and the criminals is no longer as straight and narrow as it should be.
We remember the good old days when police officers were hired for CATCHING criminals instead of fired for BEING the actual criminals themselves.
When the problem was a few rotten apples in the barrel, not a rotten barrel.
We couldn’t give two hoots whether a police officer is black, brown or white.
We just want a copper to show up when we’ve been burgled or attacked — but, call us old fashioned, we’d generally prefer it if that officer had been properly vetted so we know he isn’t a rapist or thug.
Today, the senior ranks of the police care more about virtue-signalling their woke agendas to please their political masters than they do about putting criminals behind bars.
The new year is a time to clear out the old and bring in the new.
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Whether it’s officers sent to harass people for posting their political opinions online or two-tier policing of different religious and ethnic communities, the reputation of our police for being unbiased protectors of the public is being slowly destroyed, one day at a time.
But this latest scandal may be the final nail in the coffin for our trust in the last few bobbies left on the beat.
It’s not just a terrible betrayal of the public.
It’s also a betrayal of the many dedicated officers further down the ranks who go to work every day to keep our streets safe and are being let down by their chief constables.
The new year is a time to clear out the old and bring in the new.
Never has there been a better time to clear out the senior ranks of every British force and replace them with officers who care more about protecting the public than ticking boxes.
‘MIRACLE’ JABS A FAT LOT OF USE
FAT jabs were hailed as the miracle cure for obesity.
But it comes as ZERO surprise to me that the likes of Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic turn out not to be wonder drugs after all.
A new study suggests most fat-jab users regain the weight they lose within two years of stopping the injections – and pile the weight back on FOUR times faster than traditional dieters.
The only solution is, of course, to keep paying £300 a month to continue the jabs for life. Which is exactly what the big pharma companies dreamed of all along.
We all know there is no pain-free way to tackle obesity.
Not only do the fat jabs have serious side-effects for many users – some of which have been fatal – but we have no idea what the long-term impact will be on people using the jabs for life.
Not that the pharma companies will care. They are too busy counting their cash.
Why bother curing cancer or dementia when obesity is where the BIG money can be made?
The fat-jab market is worth $70billion worldwide – and just like our waistlines is only set to grow bigger.
The NHS currently offers Wegovy to the most obese patients but only for up to two years.
When they come off the jabs, they’ll likely pile the weight back on.
So are we going to put millions of people on these drugs for life? And who’s going to pay for that?
As every reputable doctor will attest, short-term fixes don’t work unless you change your eating habits for good.
Whether people choose to believe it or not, the only proven “miracle” cure for obesity is eating less.
