{"id":706692,"date":"2026-07-23T07:41:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T07:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/706692\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T07:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T07:41:10","slug":"police-officer-was-violent-rapist-who-attacked-women-over-14-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/706692\/","title":{"rendered":"Police officer was violent rapist who attacked women over 14 years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Couzens is a former Metropolitan Police officer serving a whole-life sentence for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He abused his police role to stage a fake arrest, highlighting severe vetting failures and multiple failed opportunities to uncover the risk he posed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">ACC Ratcliff said the comparison was unhelpful and that no red flags were missed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She said: &#8220;At this stage, we&#8217;ve got no evidence to suggest [missed red flags] is the case, but we absolutely keep that under review because one of the things that we have to do from inquiries of this nature is make sure that we capture and we take on board the lessons learned.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The assistant chief constable insisted the vetting landscape in Police Scotland is &#8220;markedly different&#8221; to when Greer joined Strathclyde Police in 2009, and that Greer would not pass vetting checks today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">There are still 1,000s of images recovered from Greer&#8217;s devices that have to be sifted through, and it is understood he used multiple pseudonyms and phones to carry out his sexual transactions.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Specialist officers have been drafted in from other units to bolster the anti-corruption unit, including from the major incident team, and the inquiry is expected to take many months.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Greer will never be brought to justice but police say they are determined to establish the full picture of his offending.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">ACC Ratcliff said: &#8220;If there is anyone who believes that they may have been a victim of Alan Greer, we would urge them to have the courage and confidence to come forward and tell us about it. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They can be assured that we will listen, and that we will investigate, and we will do our best to make sure that they get the support that they need going forward.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Production\/additional reporting: Kevin Anderson and Carla Basu<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">If you want to contact Mark about this story, email him at mark.daly@bbc.co.uk<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">For support and information on the issues raised in this article, visit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/actionline\/\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">BBC Action Line<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Couzens is a former Metropolitan Police officer serving a whole-life sentence for the rape and murder of Sarah&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-706692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}