Why the BBC went undercover in the Met Police to investigate claims of racism and misogyny

In the programme aired on 3 March, viewers saw footage filmed by Rory of officers discussing strip searching female detainees, and talking in a sexually explicit way about a woman they had just arrested. And police officers were also filmed making racially offensive comments.

One incident showed an officer punching a teenage detainee in the face: “I thought he might have deserved it for the way he was fighting, but that’s just my opinion,” the officer tells a colleague. On another occasion, officers talk about a detainee with a noticeable disability and make disparaging comments about him – including spraying him with deodorant.

The Met said these comments “were completely unacceptable and have no place in the policing of London”

The police didn’t did not spot what Rory was doing, but – after the footage was shown to the Met – five officers were moved from front-line roles. Sgt McIlvenny, who was filmed making crude remarks and punching a detainee, has been suspended and is facing disciplinary charges.

The Met Police Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, said: “This conduct represents a terrible personal moral failure for one particular sergeant and some of the other staff within his team.”

Senior officers are now reviewing the circumstances in which officers work and are taking immediate steps to improve recruitment, training, and supervision, to try to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

The Met says it has undertaken a forensic analysis of all shifts in question and interviewed 1,000 people, including all those present at the station when the incidents occurred, and that some officers received further training as a result.

In a statement to Panorama, Commissioner Dick said: “I am profoundly sorry about the distress that some of the exchanges and actions captured by the undercover reporter will have caused those who experienced it and those who followed our journey to change policing culture for the better.”

For Rory, the investigation represents a great professional success – but also an emotional toll. He is now working undercover with the BBC on other assignments, which for his journalist colleagues means another long, intense investigation.

But for Rory, it also represents something personal. “I feel like I have been in the Met; I have lived it, breathed it, for 40 hours a week for seven months. I have shown the public what’s been going on inside a police station.”