On vetting police recruits

Chapter 1. An unexpected visitor

Chapter 1 Narrative

Not one but two predatory serial rapists were convicted in 2021 and 2023. They were both serving Metropolitan Police officers. They had not slipped through the vetting net, the net had been taken down. In bid to swiftly correct a shortage of officers the vetting system was relaxed in the early 2000s when both rapists joined. The political drive for numbers sacrificed safety. From 2010 onwards the political drive to cut “back office functions” included no vetting at all for those who were to serve on the frontline and finally a political bid to correct the fall in police numbers sacrificed public safety once more. Even as the rapists were being convicted the Metropolitan Police invited 250 previously disciplined officers to re-join the force to boost numbers. All these recruitment policy errors stemmed from the same fundamental political failure to understand that good policing is delivered by skilled human experts not unqualified numbers.I was just putting the empties out the back. The epic party the previous night had made a prodigious and satisfying contribution to recycling glass bottles and thereby to saving the planet. Yes, even back in the 1980s we were thinking about that.

It was just before noon when the doorbell rang at the far end of the ground-floor flat. I made my way through the disaster area that was the kitchen, to the long corridor that led to the front door. It looked as if it had snowed. There had been so many people there the previous night that they had rubbed the unpainted wood-chip off the wall-paper and it now covered the thin brown carpet. White specks in the middle and little drifts at the edges and corners. The cheaply converted flat was mostly corridor and it had been packed with people brushing past each other; it was all part of the fun, but it had damaged the new wall-paper. Not that it mattered, I had only put the wallpaper up in an effort to hold the wobbling plaster in place. It would be lucky to last the year.

I was not at my best, unshaven and hung-over. A great party, the second one that month.

I opened the door to find a large police sergeant. “Mr Hicks?”, he said. “Yes, I said”, wondering if it was about the noise from last night. A bit late for that, I thought. “You wrote to us”, he said, adding, “some months ago”. There was a pause, which lasted a bit too long whilst my tired brain registered that I had applied to join the police a few months before. There had been a mention of taking up references and other checks and, now I thought about it, a home visit. “Do come in”, I said. “Follow me”. I led him to the living room, past the open bedroom door of my flatmate, who was gently snoozing into the afternoon.

Fortunately, I had started filling the bin bags from the living room, so there was actually somewhere for my unexpected visitor to sit. “Can I get you something, a glass of water?” I was hoping that he would agree to this, as a cup of tea from my current kitchen was likely to be a serious challenge. He assented, and I left him to absorb the heady smell of stale alcohol and tobacco that permeated the whole flat.

I returned to find him with his notebook out. I was then gently interviewed about joining the police. I had spent the previous year working as a recruitment consultant[1], and I was impressed by interview techniques, which I recognised. It seemed polite but perfunctory. It was only afterwards that I reflected that my background had been thoroughly probed. There were open questions about my employment, the neighbours and the previous occupiers. Especially about the previous occupiers. Had I met them, what did I know of them? In fact, I knew nothing about them, except they seemed, to have left in a great hurry, there was even a trail of knitting across the living room floor as if they had literally run away mid-stitch. I had nowhere to forward their subsequent mail, much of which had the tell-tale red ink of unpaid bills and debt.

Thinking about it now, my neighbours and the address itself would have been checked against police records both locally and nationally. A police officer was only allowed to live somewhere ‘suitable’, which was not about convenience to get to work but about the criminal connections of the neighbours and indeed the future officer’s family.

The process to join the police was famously tough. A demanding written application, a face to face interview panel and a long wait before going to residential Training School. In my case the wait was ten months, during which this home visit happened. It was rightly intrusive, weeding out the ‘wrong-uns’ at the start is central to good policing.

I spent a demanding five months at the Training School as part of two years on probation. None of it was rubber stamped, some candidates did not last the course at Hendon, some had their probation extended or were never confirmed in the Office of Constable.

In any organisation, the biggest risk is a recruitment error. An uncorrected recruitment error can bring down a small organisation altogether, years later, my Fraud Squad in-tray was littered with such cases. The same goes for some big organisations.

For the police, the risk of a recruitment error is both more likely and more serious, the twin elements in risk assessment. Risk assessment has always been central to policing, so this is a central tenet of the Metropolitan Police. That’s why I started this blog series here. These days there are even ten risk principles, set out in a 26-minute read from the national College of Policing.

The likelihood of a recruitment error stems from the wrong sort of people wanting to become police officers. Here’s Matt Gardner, head of anti-corruption, Metropolitan Police talking to The Global Anticorruption Blog :

“If you are a thief, a sexual predator, a bully, or lean towards corruption and criminality, joining the police service in any country is an excellent career choice. You can hide behind your warrant card, police ID, or uniform.”

Professor Brian Klaas (from my old college University College London) - a specialist on corruption - adds this:

“Bad people are disproportionately attracted to power.”

His research focus was on authoritarian leaders, but he includes police officers in his podcast; he makes a fascinating contrast between New Zealand and US police recruitment campaigns is this epidode of his podcast series: ‘Power corrupts’.[3]

The seriousness of a recruitment error stems from the unique employment status of the British police. As a constable, I was not an employee at all but a ‘Crown appointment’. I could be sent anywhere, anytime and be expected to do anything. The only card in my hand was the proviso was that I could refuse to obey an order that was unlawful.

In return for this lack of employment rights police officers get tenure. Unless I committed a crime, I couldn’t be sacked. This deal is to protect us all from the abuse of power. A corrupt government or police leadership that wants officers to do something unlawful cannot sack the good cops who refuse. This averts one risk of becoming a Police State, which could be defined as one where there are no good cops left.

In my two decades of experience as a police manager I was faced with very few ‘recruitment errors’. But each one soaked up huge amounts of management time and seriously damaged the effective policing and morale of surrounding officers and therefore endangered the public at large. The worst cases have to be ‘side-lined’ (removed from policing work, but not sacked) and a handful end, after a long and expensive wait, in trials and convictions.

As I write, the current Commissioner of the Metropolis, Sir Mark Rowley, is struggling with recruitment errors. Too many bad apples have been let in by false economies in vetting years ago. A recent estimate of the cost of ‘side-lining’ officers from the Met Police was £7m. [4]

It is a recognised problem. A Greco Report review in 2017 recommended:

“that adequate measures be taken and sufficient resources allocated in order to ensure that within the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) vetting takes place not only during staff recruitment but also at other regular intervals during its staff members’ careers.[5]

An expert but less formal evaluation is made by fellow Police Blogger, Dom Adler:

He refers to the Met vetting system being overwhelmed by PCSO recruitment in the 2000s and transfers from the Civil Nuclear police (where Wayne Couzens came from). His view is that these recruits wouldn’t have survived the Met Training School at Hendon and normal probation and I tend to agree:

He also recommends an obvious course of action, the Met:

‘Should dig its heels in and refuse to recruit anyone if there is a question mark over their suitability’.

I agree with Dom for the simple reason that sacking someone requires investigation, evidence, justification and significant management time and effort. Not recruiting someone involves just saying ‘no’.

In my globe-trotting years, I repeatedly found that police officers were underpaid and their institutions were unable to recruit the best calibre people. Governments say they can’t afford to pay police more. The same governments expensively train more recruits than they need, the best of whom maximise this public investment taking it to better-paid jobs, often in the private sector. It is a massive waste of public money. Far better to attract the best recruits and keep them for a whole career. Like the UK used to, before the radical reforms of the 2010s.

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[1] Financial investigation colleagues might be amused to hear that one of my best clients (during 1984, pre-police) was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The very good people I recruited for them tended to leave after a few months. I then found them new jobs and got more commissions for replacing them at BCCI. A win-win for me. The departing staff said they didn’t like the ‘atmosphere’, but gave no deeper explanation. Seven years later BCCI was found to be a wholly criminal enterprise and remains one of the first and most famous London banking scandals of all time.

[3] Does power corrupt? Brian Klaass Power Corrupts Season 3, Episide 11 bonus, 1^st November 2021. (minute 31 onwards)

[4] Guardian, 11 Feb 2025. Vikram Dodd. “Met vows to keep suspect officers away from public…”,

[5] Council of Europe, GRECO (2017) Evaluation of United Kingdom. “Preventing corruption and promoting integrity…”