Operation Jorica

Operation Jorica was an internal Metropolitan Police Service review of vetting and hiring practices examining the decade prior to April 2023. Its report was published in January 2026 and presented to the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee. The review was initiated by Commissioner Mark Rowley following a series of high-profile misconduct and criminal convictions involving serving Metropolitan Police officers, including the conviction and imprisonment of Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 and the conviction of David Carrick in 2023.

Scope and Methodology

The review examined the vetting records of 5,073 recruits who joined the Metropolitan Police during the ten-year period ending April 2023. This covered the entirety of the national Police Uplift Programme (PUP), which ran from July 2019 with the aim of adding 20,000 officers across England and Wales by March 2023. The Metropolitan Police's PUP target was 4,557 additional officers, creating significant pressure on the vetting unit's throughput capacity during the programme's peak years of 2020 to 2022.¹

Key Findings

The most operationally significant finding was that nearly 90 per cent of the 5,073 recruits reviewed had not been subjected to special branch counter-terrorism screening as part of their vetting. The review attributed this gap to the pace and scale of recruitment under the PUP, combined with pressures to improve workforce diversity and respond to rising violent crime in London. These pressures led, in the review's language, to "deviations from national vetting guidance and police regulations."²

The review also found that 505 individuals had been refused jobs as a result of the vetting process but that 114 of those refusal decisions had been overruled by a diversity panel.

Of the recruits who remained with the force after the review, 39 required full re-vetting. Eight of that group were referred into the Police (Vetting) Regulations 2025 process, which can result in removal of vetting clearance and dismissal.³

Hannam Vetting Failure

The Hannam vetting failure in 2017 pre-dates the PUP period reviewed by Operation Jorica but is directly relevant to its findings. Benjamin Hannam applied to join the Metropolitan Police on 19 July 2017 and subsequently passed vetting despite being a member of National Action, a proscribed terrorist organisation. The vetting unit did not seek a school reference, and the Iron March forum database that would have established his extremist online activity was not publicly available until November 2019. The HMICFRS thematic inspection published in 2022 and the Operation Jorica review together represent the institutional post-mortem on the vetting conditions that allowed Hannam's employment.⁴

Institutional Response

The Metropolitan Police response to Operation Jorica included the implementation of the Police (Vetting) Regulations 2025 across all force vetting decisions, investment in technology-assisted vetting tools, and re-vetting of all officers identified through the review as having received clearance under the weakened procedures documented. The force described the period covered as producing "the biggest clear-out in the force's history," with more than 1,500 officers and staff exited over the three years preceding the report's publication on grounds of falling short of conduct standards.⁵

The London Assembly Police and Crime Committee received the Operation Jorica report in January 2026 as a formal agenda item (document reference 06a). The Assembly's formal written questions to the Mayor on Met officers and banned far-right groups, raised in April 2021 following the Hannam conviction, were an earlier iteration of the same accountability mechanism.⁶