The head of the Metropolitan Police (Met) of London apologized yesterday, Wednesday, for the “abhorrent, criminal” behavior by police officers who displayed racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia in a report conducted by an undercover reporter for the BBC.

“The behaviour portrayed in this programme is reprehensible and totally unacceptable,” said commissioner Mark Rowley in a statement released ahead of the broadcast of the BBC’s Panorama news programme.

Nine police officers and one staff member have already been suspended, while two others were removed from the front line after the BBC published the report, Rowley said. “I sincerely regret this ‘toxic legacy,”
He added.

BBC journalist Rory Bibb spent seven months, until January 2025, working as a civilian prison officer in the detention wing of Charing Cross police station in central London.

During this time, “police officers suggested shooting migrants, boasted about using force and were indifferent to accusations of rape,” the BBC said in a statement.

Several police officers were filmed on hidden cameras making shocking comments, such as that a detainee whose visa had expired “deserved a bullet in the head” and that Algerian and Somali migrants were “scum.”

The Metropolitan Police has been at the center of a series of scandals in recent years, including the kidnapping, rape, and murder of marketing director Sara Everard in 2021 by a serving police officer who was later sentenced to life in prison.

She had pledged a purge in her ranks and restoring public trust after a report found the police were institutionally racist, homophobic, and sexist.

While acknowledging that there were “systemic, cultural and managerial failures”, Rowley asserted that the Metropolitan Police had carried out “the biggest anti-corruption operation in the history of British policing”.

The team in charge of detainees at Charing Cross police station has been disbanded, and Rowley revealed that “nearly 1,500 police officers and staff who did not meet our standards” have been dismissed from the Metropolitan Police’s workforce of 40,000 in the last three years.