No, the London Met Police Is Not Institutionally Misogynistic

Four years after the Casey Review found London’s Metropolitan Police Service to be ‘institutionally misogynistic,’ a new review has been commissioned to see if there has been any change following that review. Yes, the Fairfield Independent Review has been ordered by (surprise, surprise) London Mayor Sadiq Khan to see if the Met still hates women. I think we all know the conclusions which will be drawn in what will be, essentially, a predetermined answer in search of a study.

The conviction of PC Wayne Couzens for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard and the exposure of serial sexual offences by PC David Carrick, both in 2021, produced a wave of public anger towards the Met which was entirely understandable. These were not merely crimes; they were grotesque abuses of authority by those entrusted with the power of the state. No civilised society can respond to such betrayals with anything other than outrage.

Yet outrage has a habit of morphing into ideology. In the months that followed, a sweeping claim hardened into orthodoxy: that the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally misogynistic. Like the assertion of institutional racism, it is a phrase repeated so often that it now passes largely without challenge. But repetition is not proof, and slogans are not analysis.

The argument rests on a sleight of hand. Two monstrous criminals are discovered within a vast institution, and the conclusion drawn is not merely that the organisation failed to unearth them—which it plainly did—but that the institution itself is morally corrupted. In other words, the presence of depravity is evidence of a depraved culture.

By that standard, no large institution could survive moral inspection. The Metropolitan Police employs tens of thousands of officers and staff drawn from the society it polices. Policing cannot recruit from a morally superior species of human being. It recruits from the same population that produces criminals, saints, and everything in between. Occasionally, disastrously, the worst slip through the system.

That is a failure of vetting, oversight, and internal discipline. It is not evidence of institutional misogyny. To describe the Met in such terms is to make an extraordinary claim about its everyday functioning. It would mean that the culture of Britain’s largest police force is fundamentally hostile to women, which is patently ridiculous. This is the same institution whose officers spend enormous amounts of their working lives responding to domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, and coercive control—crimes overwhelmingly committed against women. Thousands of officers dedicate their careers to protecting female victims and bringing male offenders to justice.

The Met’s female police officer strength is at the highest ever in its history, which would not be likely if the organisation despised them. As of the end of September 2022 (after the Couzens and Carrick cases became public knowledge), the Met had its highest-ever female officer representation of 30.4% (10,386 police officers), with strong representation of women at all levels. Currently, approximately half of the Met’s workforce is female. 

The idea that this organisation is structurally motivated by contempt for women requires an almost heroic act of ideological imagination. But what began as an accusation from activists has, as ever, been reinforced from within. The repeated apologies issued by Commissioner Mark Rowley have not merely acknowledged failures; they have echoed the language of those determined to portray the force as morally compromised.

This instinct for institutional self-flagellation is, in many ways, understandable in the modern climate of public relations. But it is also profoundly counterproductive. Every time the leadership apologises in sweeping, civilisational terms—apologising not just for procedural failures but for supposed cultural sins—it strengthens the narrative that the institution itself is rotten. Critics cite the apology as proof. The leadership apologises again. The cycle continues.

Baroness Casey’s 2022 original review into the Met concluded that the organisation was institutionally misogynistic, as well as being racist and homophobic. That’s quite the feat considering that, in 1999, the Macpherson Report declared that the organisation was only racist. While the Casey Review attracted substantial public attention and political support, its conclusion that the Metropolitan Police was misogynistic was substantially flawed on methodological, conceptual and analytical grounds. 

The review relied heavily on qualitative material, including interviews, anecdotal testimonies, case studies, and internal documents. While such sources can provide insight into individual experiences, they are limited in their ability to establish the scale or prevalence of misogyny across such a substantial organisation. The review certainly did not provide quantitative evidence demonstrating that misogynistic behaviour was widespread enough to justify the label of institutional misogyny. Without statistical analysis or representative sampling, conclusions about organisational culture risk being based on selective or unrepresentative accounts.

A further weakness lay in the ambiguity surrounding the term ‘institutional misogyny.’ The review frequently used this label but did not consistently define it in any clear sense. The term functioned as a judgement rather than a concept. Instances of workplace sexism, inappropriate behaviour, or failures in disciplinary procedures were often treated as evidence of institutional misogyny without demonstrating that such behaviour was sustained by formal organisational structures.

The review was commissioned in the wake of scandals involving officers such as Couzens and Carrick. But using extreme criminal cases as the context for a broader cultural diagnosis will only ever skew the interpretation of evidence. The review also paid little attention to developments that might have complicated its conclusions, such as the presence of women in senior leadership roles, diversity recruitment initiatives, and policy efforts addressing violence against women and girls. By focusing predominantly on negative examples and testimonies, the review presented an unbalanced portrayal of the organisation which only ever emphasised failure.

There is no sense of proportion in this currently fashionable sentiment towards the Met. A police force with more than 40,000 personnel will inevitably contain bad actors. The real test of institutional character is not whether such people exist—they exist everywhere—but whether they are protected, excused, or removed. The Met’s failure in the cases of Couzens and Carrick was not that it secretly approved of misogyny; it was that bureaucratic complacency allowed dangerous individuals to remain in uniform for far too long.

That failure demands reform, tougher vetting, and more ruthless internal discipline. But it does not justify the modish claim that the entire institution is morally suspect. Indeed, the constant repetition of that claim risks producing the very outcome its advocates claim to fear. A police force whose officers are told incessantly that they belong to a misogynistic institution will not become more confident, capable, or effective. It will become defensive, demoralised, and risk-averse. Whether we actually get the necessary reform from the senior leadership of the Met is dubious, however. They have embraced an institutional culture that leans too heavily toward contemporary progressive political priorities at the expense of their core policing mission.

Overall, the greatest victims of the progressive malaise will not be police officers but the public they serve. London requires a police force that is competent, accountable, and confident in its own legitimacy. What it does not need is an endless ritual of institutional self-denunciation in which every crime committed by an officer is treated as proof that the entire system is morally bankrupt.

The crimes of Couzens and Carrick were horrific betrayals of public trust. They demand justice, reform, and vigilance, not the propagation of the fiction that the Metropolitan Police itself is institutionally misogynistic—a charge that might satisfy the political moment but which ultimately lets us all down.