Met Police May Fail to Identify Serial Killers Like Stephen Port – A Surveillance Agency

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By Liz Jackson and BBC Media, BBC News April 27, 2023

Updated 12 minutes ago

photo caption,

The Young Men Killed by Port: Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth, and Jack Taylor

A watchdog said the Metropolitan Police may fail to identify serial killers because it does not properly investigate unexpected deaths.

The police inspector warned that she had not learned from a “string of tragic failures” in the case of Stephen Port nearly a decade ago, and “history can repeat itself”.

The Met said it was “disturbed by the results” and would review the cases.

Between June 2014 and September 2015, Port Anthony Walgat, 23, originally from Hull, was murdered; Gabriel Kovari, 22, of Lewisham; Daniel Whitworth, 21, of Gravesend, Kent; and Jack Taylor, 25, of Dagenham, east London, by being overdosed on the drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) “date rape” at his home in Barking.

His Majesty’s Inspector of Police and Fire Services (HMICFRS) looked at the learning and future risks of unexplained deaths after homicides.

She identified five major failures at the Met in a report: lack of training, poor supervision, “unacceptable” record-keeping, confusing policies, and “inadequate” intelligence procedures.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Matt Parr of HMICFRS said it was “inevitable” that among the deaths not classified as homicide by Met Police, there were some.

“The risk of missing a murder is much higher than it should be.”

He added, “The Met doesn’t have a system for analyzing patterns. If there’s an association between murders, they don’t discover it unless they’re lucky.”

“This report highlights that the most basic requirements for policing have yet to be met,” said attorney Neil Hodgill, who is representing the families of the four victims.

He added that “most troubling” is that “inexperienced officers make critical decisions when responding to reports of deaths that can influence everything that follows in the investigation, with errors potentially preventing specialized homicide investigators from becoming involved.”

This included not performing basic examinations, not sending evidence for forensic examination, and not exercising professional curiosity while Porte embarked on his killing spree.

depends on luck

Barr said it was “difficult to be assured that the mistakes won’t ‘happen again'”.

“However, Meta’s problems with competence and professionalism run much deeper: often, they don’t get the basics right,” he said.

“Many officers told us that connecting deaths at the local level frankly relied on luck, there was no formal process for identifying similarities, and linking deaths, it relied on officers possibly talking to each other about deaths they dealt with,” Barr added. Exceptionally.”

Elsewhere, the report singled out scene mismanagement and a lack of “professional curiosity”, saying that the majority of records had “fundamental omissions”.

“Written witness statements, if taken at all, tend to be very brief and lack important detail,” the report said.

“There was little evidence that officers completed house-to-house investigations, took steps to determine the time of death or attempted to find out who might have had access to the premises where the deceased person was found.”

The report even described “cases in which money and drugs were found in the possession of a deceased person in the morgue, where officers were supposed to search them at the place of death.”

There were also notably poor practices in overseeing unexplained death procedures, including senior officers who did not show up to supervise cases even though that was Met policy, and some who had less experience than the officers they were asking to direct.

Mr Barr said: “Our examination has shown that history can repeat itself. That is why the Met must learn from its mistakes and act now on our recommendations, to keep all Londoners safe.”

photo caption,

Port met the victims online, including through the dating app Grindr, before luring them to his apartment where they were drugged and raped.

HMICFRS made 20 recommendations to the Met in six areas, including:

Ensure death investigation policy and guidelines are clear and accessible Improve the quality and scope of training available to officers and staff Increase the use of intelligence by officers responding to death reports

“Short us”

Met Police Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe said she was “disturbed by the findings” and that the museum had “initiated a process” to review cases of unexpected deaths to make sure “we didn’t miss anything”.

The force was “sincere in our desire to make real change to reduce the chance of a situation like this occurring again”.

“We know that we fell short in this case and the families did not get the service they need or deserve,” she said.

“It is important that we look again at this area to see what more we need to do to support families in such difficult times.

“We will fully consider the recommendations made by HMICFRS and ensure that they are not only fully addressed, but incorporated into our working practices.”

The families’ solicitor, Mr Hudgell, added: “It has become abundantly clear that this force cannot be trusted to make changes and improvements on its own and the government must step in and oversee appropriate change via this force.

“If this does not happen, the most serious perpetrators will slip through the net, and more innocent lives will be lost due to even the simplest police failures.”

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said he ordered the report, “because of my concerns about errors in the police investigation which meant that Stephen Port was not stopped at the time he should have been.”

We must confront the review of institutional homophobia published by Baroness Casey at the Met, and the operational failures of the force, which today’s report exposed.

“Every Londoner, regardless of gender, sexuality or race, has the right to have his allegations taken seriously by the police, and the Met must ensure the quality of its preliminary investigations is of a higher standard.”

Additional reporting by Daniel DeSimone

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