\n<\/p>\n
The Metropolitan police does not take all cases of violence against women seriously and instead \u201cdecides who matters\u201d, the mother of two murdered women has said.<\/p>\n
Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020, also said Britain\u2019s biggest police force was incapable of change. Two police officers were jailed in 2021 after taking photographs of the dead bodies of her daughters and sharing the images in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as \u201cdead birds\u201d.<\/p>\n
Commenting on the case of the sex offender Simon Levy, 40, who was left free to kill two women after police failings, she said: \u201cOne of the women that were murdered, because she was a sex worker, she wasn\u2019t taken seriously. They didn\u2019t look into her murder until he murdered a mother of four, and then they joined the two cases together.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow ridiculous is that. Once again, the Met is deciding who matters. Both those women\u2019s lives were important to their families, how dare they decide that they weren\u2019t going to look into that case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Levy, who this week was given a whole-life sentence for his crimes, was also convicted earlier this year of sexually assaulting 11 other women, 10 of them on trains and the underground in London between 2023 and 2025.<\/p>\n
Smallman said she had been in contact with the head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, after reading about the case. She told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme: \u201cAfter reading this case I sent a text message to Sir Mark and said: \u2018How many times are you going to stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt becomes a joke. The truth is, the Metropolitan police is too big for any senior team to be able to have a hands-on understanding of the day-to-day activities of that organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the Met was incapable of change because it was \u201ctoo big\u201d. \u201cI believe that Sir Mark Rowley wants to change the Met and wants to do things differently, but they haven\u2019t got a clue.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cWe are asking them to do too much, they haven\u2019t got the finances, it has become riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism, and they just can\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crime and policing minister Sarah Jones previously described Levy as a monster and said the failings that had allowed him to remain free were \u201cdeeply concerning\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jones signalled the government would allow the relevant institutions and police watchdog to establish what had gone wrong. \u201cThe fact that Levy was able to inflict such devastating harm after being freed by police and the courts is deeply concerning,\u201d she said. \u201cIt raises serious questions that require urgent answers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rowley denied that the Met had not done enough, saying: \u201cThe inference that the Met didn\u2019t try on this death is not true, the Met tried.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he said he did not understand why the Prison Service released Simon Levy after he sexually assaulted one of its staff members in jail.<\/p>\n
Levy was questioned by police about the assault five months after his release, which Rowley said was \u201ctoo slow\u201d.<\/p>\n
He told the Today programme: \u201cThat\u2019s one of the things we\u2019ve apologised for, but of course there are two mistakes in that: you\u2019ve got he was released on licence by the Prison Service, having sexually assaulted in prison one of its people, I don\u2019t understand that decision either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m prepared to come here and be accountable, we\u2019ve got two officers being referred to be investigated by the independent office of police complaints, we take our accountability seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rest of the system is not doing that. The Prison Service should not have released somebody who\u2019s indecently assaulting its staff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Metropolitan police does not take all cases of violence against women seriously and instead \u201cdecides who matters\u201d, the mother of two murdered women has said. Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020, also said Britain\u2019s biggest police force was incapable of change. Two<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51758,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1844,270,17858,8249,8835,15300,4611,17605,1551,3965,8761],"class_list":{"0":"post-51757","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-case","9":"tag-change","10":"tag-incapable","11":"tag-levy","12":"tag-met","13":"tag-metropolitan","14":"tag-mother","15":"tag-murdered","16":"tag-police","17":"tag-simon","18":"tag-sisters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}