Met Police Chooses Victims Who Matter, Mother Says

When the mother who lost two daughters to murder and two officers to corruption says your organization is incapable of change, you are out of excuses. We now have Mina Smallman’s definitive verdict on the Metropolitan Police, delivered in the wake of the Simon Levy case: the force “decides who matters.” This is not a critique of procedure. It is the diagnosis of a fatal, institutional disease.

According to the Guardian, Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were murdered in 2020, has concluded Britain’s biggest police force cannot be reformed. Her authority is unimpeachable. Her family’s tragedy was compounded when two Met officers were jailed for photographing her daughters’ bodies and sharing the images on WhatsApp, crudely labeling them “dead birds.” Now, seeing the Met’s handling of a serial predator, she sees the same malignant pattern.

“One of the women that were murdered, because she was a sex worker, she wasn’t taken seriously. They didn’t look into her murder until he murdered a mother of four, and then they joined the two cases together,” Smallman said. “Once again, the Met is deciding who matters.”

This is the lethal calculus.

The Smallman Blueprint: From Contempt to Catastrophe

The Simon Levy saga is a clinical study in this selective apathy. Levy, a murderer and serial sex offender, was released from HMP Brixton in April 2022 after sexually assaulting a female prison officer. The Met questioned him in June 2023 but did not charge him for the prison assault until October 2025. In that window, he attacked 13 more women, killing two. Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley points a finger at the Prison Service, asking why they freed him. It’s a telling deflection.

Smallman’s analysis cuts deeper. The police’s failure to prioritize the murder of a sex worker until a “mother of four” was killed reveals an operational hierarchy of victimhood. It shows that the grotesque behavior in her own case, treating murdered Black women as macabre trophies, was not an isolated horror. It was a symptom of a culture that allocates urgency and dignity based on prejudice. The initial, lackluster response to her own daughters’ disappearance, which the family had to force into action, was the first sign of this same hierarchy.

The Reform Charade and the "Too Big" Alibi

For years, the Met’s playbook after scandal has been public remorse followed by internal review. After Sarah Everard. After the Casey Review’s damning findings of institutional racism, misogyny, and homophobia. After the Smallman photos. Rowley now says he is “prepared to come here and be accountable.” But as Smallman observes, “It becomes a joke.”

She identifies the core, structural flaw that makes reform a fantasy: “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.” She believes Rowley wants change but concludes “they haven’t got a clue.” The force is “riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism” and lacks the resources to cope. In her view, size isn’t a challenge. It’s the alibi that perpetuates failure.

This isn’t a policing failure in the traditional sense. It is a failure of moral and operational governance on a scale that renders the organization unmanageable and unaccountable. The parallel is not in other police forces, but in other massive, crumbling institutions where public trust has evaporated. The call for more funding or more training is useless when the institution’s culture actively filters out those values.

The Comforting Lie of the "Good Officers"

The counterargument is always the same: What about the good officers? It’s a sentiment meant to stifle criticism. Of course there are dedicated public servants within the Met. Policing London is immensely complex and often thankless.

But this argument is now morally and functionally irrelevant. The issue is no longer the individual virtue of some officers. The issue is that the institution’s design and culture systematically protect the bad, enable the indifferent, and corrode the good until they conform, burn out, or leave. When the structure allows officers to snap photos of the dead and a serial predator to slip through gaps in plain sight, the presence of good people within it is a tragedy, not a defense. It just means the institution is also failing them.

True accountability looks different. It looks like Parliament finally accepting that a structure described as “incapable of change” by a principal victim must be fundamentally altered. It may mean legally mandating external oversight with prosecutorial power, or even breaking up the monolithic Met into smaller, more accountable units. It means removing the force’s power to triage victims based on bias.

We have moved past the point of asking the Met to reform. The task now is to build a system where the law, not a disgraced and gargantuan bureaucracy, decides who matters. When the mother of the murdered speaks with this clarity, the only responsible act is to listen, and then to dismantle.

Impact Analysis

• This verdict from a respected victim's family member challenges the fundamental legitimacy of Britain's largest police force and its ability to protect all citizens equally.
• The pattern of devaluing certain victims' lives creates dangerous operational gaps that allow serial offenders to continue harming the public without timely intervention.
• The commissioner's deflection of responsibility suggests systemic accountability failures that prevent meaningful institutional reform from occurring.