There is a question more and more Londoners are asking, even if they say it quietly at first.
Are there any Met Police officers who do not lie and cheat?
That is a brutal question. It is also not a claim that every constable is bent, dishonest or unfit for the badge. Plenty of decent officers still go out every day, deal with the worst parts of London, and do a difficult job properly.
But when scandal after scandal lands, when officers are convicted, caught lying, caught using unlawful force, caught abusing the trust placed in them, and when the Met responds with yet another promise to improve standards, ordinary people are entitled to wonder what exactly is going on.
The latest case is not some argument over a difficult arrest on a dangerous street.
According to the Met’s own account, PC Adam Sahel, attached to the Taskforce, confronted a junior colleague in the yard at Catford police station and sprayed him in the face with police-issued PAVA spray. Then, when supervisors began asking questions, he allegedly asked the victim to lie about it. He also suggested that the colleague had been crying or had injured himself.
That is not policing.
That is assault followed by an attempted cover-up.
And it goes to the heart of why public faith in the Met has been smashed to pieces.
For over 40 years, I have watched Westminster and the institutions beneath it learn one trick better than any other: never address the rot; manage the headlines. Something goes wrong, an inquiry is announced, a senior figure says the right words, and everybody is told lessons will be learned.
Then another scandal arrives.
This time it is a Met Police officer common assault conviction. Next time it will be something else. The public are expected to take each case in isolation, forget the last one, and never ask whether the pattern itself is the story.
It is.
What Happened at Catford Police Station?
The facts of this case are serious enough without exaggeration.
On 26 August 2023, PC Adam Sahel confronted a junior colleague in the yard at Catford police station. The junior officer was sprayed in the face with PAVA, a police incapacitant spray designed for use in situations where force is lawful, necessary and proportionate. This was not an operational confrontation with a violent suspect. It was one officer using the equipment against another officer.
The case went to trial at Southwark Crown Court.
On 5 August 2026, a jury found Sahel guilty of common assault. He had originally been charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm but was acquitted of that more serious charge. The common-assault conviction remains a criminal conviction, not an internal slap on the wrist.
The part that should concern every honest officer and every Londoner is what happened afterwards.
The Met says that Sahel asked the victim to lie because reporting the incident would be bad for Sahel’s career. It says he also tried to explain away the visibly irritated eyes of the junior officer by suggesting that he had either been crying or injured himself.
Think about that for a second.
A police officer is trusted to give evidence. Police statements can help determine whether someone is arrested, charged, remanded, acquitted or convicted. The public are repeatedly told that officers are trained professionals whose testimony carries weight.
Yet here was an officer convicted of assault after allegedly trying to get another officer to conceal what happened.
If an officer lies when his own career is at risk, what confidence should the public have when an officer’s account is the only account available?
That is the question nobody in the Met can dodge.
The Lie Is the Bigger Problem
The PAVA spray assault is bad enough.
The alleged attempt to cover it up is worse.
People can lose their temper. People can make a bad decision. Police officers work under pressure, see unpleasant things and sometimes have to use force. That does not excuse unlawful force, but it does explain why policing needs robust training, supervision and accountability.
Lying is different.
Lying is a choice made after the event. It is not heat of the moment. It is not fear. It is not confusion. It is a decision to protect yourself instead of telling the truth.
That is why the old line about a few bad apples does not wash any more.
The problem is not just whether one officer did something wrong. The problem is whether a culture exists in which officers believe they can get away with it, colleagues feel pressure not to report it, supervisors are expected to accept weak explanations, and the public only learn the truth after a court case years later.
In this instance, the junior officer and colleagues reported what happened despite the alleged pressure. They deserve credit for that.
But it should not require individual courage to make basic honesty happen inside a police force.
Honesty should be the minimum standard. It should be automatic.
The Met itself says there is no place in policing for officers who are dishonest and cannot meet the standards expected of them. Fine. Good. That is exactly right.
But Londoners have heard versions of that line before.
They do not need another statement about standards. They need to see standards enforced before the damage is done, not years afterwards when a conviction makes denial impossible.
Is This Just One Bad Officer?
No sensible person should pretend every Met officer is dishonest.
That would be lazy, unfair and plainly untrue. London has thousands of officers. Many will be disgusted by this case because it makes their job harder and their badge less trusted.
But the public are not being unreasonable when they look at the headlines and ask whether the force has a deeper problem.
There have been other serious cases. In February 2025, an IOPC investigation led to former Met officer PC Rajan Solanki being convicted after using unlawful force on a man handcuffed to a hospital bed. Body-worn footage showed Solanki using a choke-hold position and threatening to choke the man out. He was initially sentenced to 12 weeks in prison, later reduced on appeal.
That is not the same case as Catford. It is not the same officer. It is not the same alleged misconduct.
But it is part of the same confidence problem.
When repeated cases involve unlawful force, dishonesty, sexual offending, corruption, racism, misogyny or officers failing to challenge one another, the public stop seeing them as isolated. They start seeing an institution that has lost control of itself.
And frankly, can you blame them?
The Met’s own published figures showed that, as of February 2023, 131 police officers had been suspended in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct.
That does not mean 131 guilty officers. Suspension is not conviction, and allegations must be tested properly.
But it does mean there was a serious enough concern to suspend 131 serving officers over sexual-misconduct allegations. That is not a small issue. It is not a public-relations blip. It is a warning light flashing on the dashboard.
The public know the difference between an occasional bad officer and a force repeatedly finding people in its ranks who should never have been near a warrant card.
Who Is To Blame?
First, blame belongs with the individual officer.
PC Sahel was convicted by a jury. He will be sentenced and then face an accelerated gross-misconduct hearing. He is responsible for what he did, and no one else can carry that personal responsibility for him.
But individual responsibility is not the end of the matter.
The Met leadership is responsible for recruitment, supervision, discipline and culture. That is what leadership means. You do not get to take the title, salary and public authority when things look good, then shrug when the force keeps producing scandals.
Chief Superintendent Chris Green said the Met Taskforce had worked to improve culture in recent years, including changing leadership in some units, improving training and focusing on standards and values.
Again, that sounds fine. But it also raises an obvious question.
Why did the culture need changing?
And how does London know that it has changed rather than simply been reworded in a press release?
Then there is political responsibility.
The Mayor of London has responsibility for policing oversight through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. The Home Secretary has national responsibility for policing policy and standards. The London Assembly exists partly to scrutinise the Mayor and the capital’s institutions.
So when the Met is repeatedly hit by misconduct cases, nobody should be allowed to play pass-the-parcel.
The officer blames pressure.
The Met blames a rogue individual.
The Mayor says reforms are under way.
The Home Office says it is monitoring the situation.
And Londoners are told to carry on paying more tax, accepting less visible policing and trusting a system that seems incapable of policing itself.
That is not accountability.
That is bureaucracy covering bureaucracy.
What a Serious Country Would Do
A serious country would begin with a simple principle: the police must be held to a higher standard because they hold powers ordinary people do not.
They can stop you in the street.
They can search you.
They can arrest you.
They can use force against you.
They can write statements that affect whether you are prosecuted.
They can give evidence in court.
That power only works if the public believe it is being exercised honestly.
So a serious country would stop pretending that post-scandal apologies are reform.
It would require robust, independently audited vetting before officers are recruited. Not box-ticking. Not references that nobody rings. Proper checks that identify dishonest, violent, corrupt or predatory people before they get access to police powers.
It would make misconduct outcomes fully transparent, subject to legitimate privacy and legal restrictions. The public should not have to rely on scraps of information leaking out years later.
It would impose clear consequences on supervisors and managers where proven failures of oversight are found. Not every bad officer proves a manager was negligent. But where warning signs were ignored, complaints were buried or standards were allowed to collapse, there should be accountability above the constable level too.
It would protect whistleblowers inside the force. The officers in the Catford case who reported what happened did the public a service. A decent police force should make it easier, not harder, for officers to report wrongdoing.
And it would stop treating every critic as anti-police.
There is a huge difference between hating the police and demanding a police force worthy of public support.
The people who most want honest, brave and competent policing are often the people most furious when the badge is disgraced. They know that when trust goes, decent officers suffer first. The public become wary. Witnesses do not come forward. Victims hesitate. Criminals benefit.
That is why honesty inside policing is not some optional virtue. It is operationally essential.
What Ordinary People Can Actually Do
Most people are not going to reform the Met from their kitchen table.
But people can refuse to be fobbed off.
Start by paying attention to the detail. Do not just read the headline and move on. Ask what happened, how long it took to investigate, whether there was body-worn video, whether previous complaints existed, and what disciplinary action follows.
Use your MP, London Assembly member and local councillors. Write to them. Ask direct questions. Do not write an essay they can ignore. Ask for a clear answer.
For example:
- What is being done to protect officers who report misconduct?
- How many misconduct cases have resulted in dismissal?
- How many officers remain on restricted duties while cases drag on?
- What independent auditing exists for vetting and internal investigations?
- What consequences follow when supervisors fail to act on credible warnings?
Keep copies of their replies.
Political people are very good at talking. They are less comfortable when their words are kept, dated and brought back out six months later.
If you have direct evidence of police misconduct, use the proper complaints process and keep your own record of every contact, date, name and reference number. If the matter is serious, seek legal advice. Do not rely on somebody verbally promising that it will be dealt with.
Most of all, do not let anyone shame you into silence by pretending every criticism of the Met is an attack on every officer.
It is not.
Demanding that the police tell the truth is not anti-police.
Demanding consequences for officers who assault and lie is not anti-police.
It is pro-law.
And if the law means anything, it has to apply with particular force to the people empowered to enforce it.
The Question the Met Must Answer
The Met Police officer common assault case at Catford is about one officer and one junior colleague.
But it is also bigger than that.
It is about whether the Met understands that the public have run out of patience with excuses.
An officer assaulted a colleague with police-issued spray. A jury convicted him. The Met says he then lied and tried to get the victim to lie.
The proper response is not to ask the public for more trust.
The proper response is to earn it back.
And that means the Met answering the question Londoners increasingly ask:
How many more officers have to be caught assaulting, lying, cheating or abusing their position before the people in charge accept that this is not simply a series of unfortunate headlines?
A police force cannot demand honesty from the public while tolerating dishonesty in its own ranks.
A police force cannot preach standards while repeatedly discovering officers who appear to have none.
And a country cannot call itself properly governed when the institutions entrusted with the law keep acting as if the rules are for everybody else.
London deserves better than another statement.
It deserves a Met where decent officers are protected, dishonest officers are removed quickly, and the public no longer have to ask whether there are any officers left who simply tell the truth.
FAQs
What was PC Adam Sahel convicted of?
PC Adam Sahel was convicted of common assault after spraying a junior colleague in the face with PAVA spray at Catford police station.
When will PC Adam Sahel be sentenced?
He is due to be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on 23 September 2026.
Did the Met officer try to cover up the assault?
The Met said Sahel asked the victim to lie and suggested false explanations to colleagues for the victim’s irritated eyes.
What happens after a Met officer is convicted?
Sahel is due to face an accelerated gross-misconduct hearing, which can result in dismissal from the police service.news.
Does criticism of the Met mean all officers are dishonest?
No. Individual cases do not prove every officer is dishonest. But repeated proven misconduct cases justify public scrutiny of leadership, vetting and internal accountability.