The Metropolitan Police has voluntarily referred its own handling of a letter received in January 2019 to the police watchdog, after a review of decisions taken when the letter arrived.
Commander Adam Slonecki, who leads the Met’s Protection Command, said the letter was addressed to the command, specifically its Fixated Threats Assessment Centre. The author suggested they were writing to raise concerns about the security of the Duchess of Sussex, but the letter itself contained no information specifically about security matters. Instead, it contained a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom.
Nothing in the Met’s statement suggests the Duchess of Sussex is accused of anything. She is mentioned only as the person whose security the letter purported to concern, and the statement gives no detail of the alleged offending, no alleged offender, no country and no author identity.
After the letter was assessed, it was passed to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for their awareness. The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies at that time.
In recent days, the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards carried out an initial review of the actions taken after the letter arrived in 2019. Following that review, a voluntary referral has been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
The referral covers two decisions: the decision not to inform other law enforcement agencies, and the decision to pass the letter to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The Met has also said it intends to make a number of referrals to relevant overseas law enforcement agencies in relation to the allegations contained in the letter. That process is under way and will be completed in the coming days.
The IOPC is the independent body that oversees complaints and conduct matters involving police forces in England and Wales. A voluntary referral is a step a force takes to put a matter before the watchdog itself; it is not a finding that any officer did anything wrong, and it does not by itself decide what happens next.
What happens next will therefore turn on the watchdog’s response to the referral, and on the overseas referrals the Met has said are under way. The Met has not published the details of the allegations in the letter.
The Met has made a series of announcements this week, including the arrest of a man over the Woolwich shooting, the naming of two men police want to speak to over a 2024 Bethnal Green rape inquiry, and the manslaughter conviction of a Battersea man over a pensioner’s death in Balham.
