One senior police officer said serial predator David Carrick ‘was one of us – like it or not’.
Trust in policing is “hanging by a thread” after the David Carrick case, senior officers have warned.
One chief constable described this week as “one of the darkest” in decades for the profession.
It comes after the Metropolitan Police admitted it “missed opportunities” to catch Carrick.
Carrick has pleaded guilty to dozens of rape and sexual offences against 12 women committed while he was a serving officer in the Met Police.
The 48-year-old “used the fact he was a police officer to control and coerce his victims”, the Met has said.
Lucy D’Orsi, Chief Constable of British Transport Police (BTP), said the Carrick case had kept her awake at night and called for major reforms to vetting procedures.
In a blog post, she wrote: “David Carrick was a criminal with a warrant card. But it’s easy to say he wasn’t one of us. He was.
“And that’s why it feels so shameful that he was free to abuse women for so long without the alarm bells being heard.”
She called for new checks to automatically flag if an arrested person is a police officer, warning that under the current system DNA and prints are not checked against police databases for matches.
The Met has confirmed that Carrick came to the attention of police over nine incidents, including rape allegations, between 2000 and 2021.
The BTP chief said “others could fall through the cracks and go on to do harm” without changes.
Humberside Police’s Chief Constable Lee Freeman said “I genuinely believe that the future of policing by consent is under threat” in a stark message to fellow officers.
He wrote on the force’s website: “It used to be unthinkable that such crimes could be committed by a serving member of a police force, but sadly, I think that for some members of the public, this behaviour is no longer considered unbelievable.”
On Carrick, Mr Freeman added: “He was one of us – like it or not.”
Chief Constable Sir Iain Livingstone, head of Police Scotland, said Carrick “should never have been in the police service” and called his offending “despicable”.
Speaking after he was knighted at a ceremony in Edinburgh this week, he said officers need to earn the public’s trust “every single day”.
Carrick was sacked by the Met on Tuesday after pleading guilty to two decades of brutal offending against a string of women.
He used his status as a police officer to continue offending until October 2021 when a victim came forward to report him.
The investigation that followed uncovered an “unprecedented” string of crimes and his employer was forced to admit it “should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation”.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has launched a review into police dismissals and warned that more shocking cases may come to light amid renewed scrutiny.