'Significant number' of police officers should never have been recruited, inspector says

New Scotland Yard - Neil Hall/Shutterstock

Around one in 10 police officers should never have made it through the vetting stage, a senior police inspector has said.

Inspector of Constabulary Matt Parr said there was a “widespread and historic” problem of failing to adequately assess new recruits.

He claimed that policing had “smelt the coffee” and “woken up to the scale of the problem”, in the wake of recent scandals.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: “When we reported back in November about vetting across the country, we looked at hundreds of officers that had joined the police.... about 10 per cent of them should not have got through vetting.

By Will Bolton.

Full story at Yahoo News.