Murders could be going undetected because police are still failing to properly investigate deaths nearly a decade on from their blunders in the Stephen Port case, a watchdog has warned.
The risk of homicides not being identified by the Metropolitan Police is ‘way higher than it should be’, with some officers admitting they are relying on luck to spot links between deaths, inspectors found.
HM Inspector of Constabulary Matt Parr said history ‘could repeat itself’ if officers do not grasp basic standards of investigation when faced with an unexpected or unexplained death.
It comes just weeks after Baroness Louise Casey’s review, ordered in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, found the Met is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic and laid bare a slew of troubling incidents.
Basic errors by a string of detectives left serial killer Port free to carry out the series of murders as well as drug and sexually assault more than a dozen other men.
Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor all died at the hands of Port, who drugged them with overdoses of GHB and dumped their bodies near his flat in Barking, east London, between June 2014 and September 2015.
The police were criticised for missing ‘glaringly obvious’ links between the murders, with an inquest ruling the force’s ‘fundamental failures’ were likely to have contributed to the deaths of three of the men.
‘Had the police conducted a professional and thorough investigation after the first victim, Anthony, was murdered it’s entirely possible – likely even – that Gabriel, Daniel and Jack would still have been alive, a dreadful failing,’ Mr Parr said.
He went on: ‘The Met has not learnt enough from their failings eight years ago, and starkly, what went wrong there could happen again.
‘It is very difficult to explain how such obvious murders, linked murders, were completely missed at the time.’
On a typical day, the Met is called to attend 30 unexpected deaths in London, amounting to around 10,000 a year, with the force dealing with around two or three homicides a week.
‘The vast majority are – as they initially were in Port – discounted and not recognised as a homicide,’ Mr Parr said.
Asked if the Met was missing homicides, he told reporters ‘I don’t know’ but, considering the number of unexpected deaths, added: ‘It seems to me likely, if not certain, that among the deaths that they do not classify as homicide, that there are some.’
Mr Parr agreed some changes had been made since the Port case and has seen that the force’s resources are ‘stretched’ and there is a young, inexperienced workforce.
But that ‘doesn’t absolve the Met of its responsibility to meet, frankly, basic standards of investigation,’ he added.
The inspection between May and September last year reviewed 100 death probes carried out by the Met and found evidence of poor training, supervision and handling of property and evidence.
Some officers were found to have displayed a lack of professional curiosity and there were examples of vital evidence only being discovered at mortuaries because officers had ‘not even looked in the pockets’ of somebody found dead.
Who was Stephen Port?
Stephen Port was known as the Grindr Killer because he found his victims online.
The pornography-obsessed ‘loner’, now 48, killed four people between 2014 and 2015 and is now in jail. He is serving a life sentence with a whole life order, meaning he will never be released from prison.
He was convicted of murdering Anthony Walgate, 23, Mr Kovari, Mr Whitworth, and Jack Taylor, 25, by plying them with fatal doses of GHB, as well as a number of rapes.
The Met Police agreed to pay compensation to the victims’ families and apologise for failings after they were accused of prejudice and homophobia.
The watchdog made 20 recommendations, including calling on Met officers to use more intelligence information when investigating deaths and improving the quality of family liaison support.
Inspectors considered whether homophobia explained why the Met did not investigate Port’s killings properly, but said it was ‘impossible to reach any definitive conclusions’.
The report did, however, say there ‘were and still are homophobic officers’ at the force and that there was a ‘lack of understanding of the lifestyle of those they were investigating’.
The officers ‘didn’t even realise that these were four young gay men at the start so the failings are all just about, I think, a lack of professionalism and a lack of expertise across the board in the way that they deal with unexplained deaths’.
‘The same thing would have happened’ even if the victims had not been four young gay men, Mr Parr said.
However, he noted that there was a ‘palpable difference in the attitude of the leadership of the Met’ compared to 18 months ago.
‘Senior police leaders recognise that this is a really important time for them and if they don’t turn things around, the problems just continue to mount because without a high level of trust in policing our policing model doesn’t work,’ he added.
