Camden’s borough solicitor Jason Stewart

CAMDEN’S new borough police commander told councillors that he “felt sick” when he watched a Panorama undercover investigation exposing the Charing Cross police station scandal.

Six officers – including a sergeant caught saying a prisoner deserved to be beaten up – have been dismissed since the programme revealed a toxic culture of misogyny, racism, and threats of violence.

Chief Superintendent Jason Stewart, the most senior officer in the borough, said on Monday he could not give a total guarantee that something similar had not happened in Camden – but added that the Met was changing its culture to make it easier for bad behaviour by officers to be called out.

“As I sit here today, I can’t say 100 per cent ‘no’,” he said.

“But I can tell you we are in every nook and every cranny of our BCU [borough command unit] and our boroughs, before Panorama and even more so after.”

Ch Supt Stewart was facing questions from the council’s Culture and Environment Scrutiny Committee on Monday.

Its chair, Councillor Awale Olad, had sought assurances about what was going on behind the station doors in Camden.

“When I watched that [Panorama] I felt sick and what made me feel particularly sick was the female detention staff,” he said.

“The reporter said ‘why didn’t you do anything?’ and they said ‘what can I do, he’s got stripes’. It absolutely can’t be like that. We are all equal as human beings. There is a rank structure but everybody should feel empowered to call out behaviour that is not correct.”

Ch Supt Stewart has been at the helm of the twin-borough force – Camden is linked with Islington for policing – for seven months.

Borough commanders are under pressure to ensure the Met’s response to a series of scandals about officer conduct progresses well.

The New Met for London plan followed an audit of the capital’s policing which led Baroness Louise Casey to conclude that the force was institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic, and in need of urgent reform.

Cllr Olad said he was aware that Panorama had been “getting a battering” following the editing of a speech by Donald Trump which led to resignations at the BBC – but that the investigation at Charing Cross had proved both useful and shocking.

Ch Supt Stewart, who grew up in Archway, said the Met was now “doing more checks on people’s backgrounds, looking at vetting and when you have environments like custody suites that have CCTV, looking at what technical solutions there may be to be a bit more intrusive.”

He said he did not think Camden police had problems “anything at the scale” of the Panorama documentary.

“We can’t be everywhere all the time but we can engage with our staff and be visible,” he said.

Asked by Cllr Olad how many officers had been sacked for misconduct in the past couple of years, Ch Supt Stewart said: “I know it’s several hundred for the Met, that probably equates to just into double figures for Camden.

“We have seen considerable officers exited over the last few years – the type of people who should never have been in the organisation.”