Met police incapable of change, says mother of murdered sisters after Simon Levy case

The Metropolitan police does not take all cases of violence against women seriously and instead “decides who matters”, the mother of two murdered women has said.

Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020, also said Britain’s biggest police force was incapable of change. Two police officers were jailed in 2021 after taking photographs of the dead bodies of her daughters and sharing the images in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as “dead birds”.

Commenting on the case of the sex offender Simon Levy, 40, who was left free to kill two women after police failings, she said: “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.

“How ridiculous is that. Once again, the Met is deciding who matters. Both those women’s lives were important to their families, how dare they decide that they weren’t going to look into that case.”

Levy, who this week was given a whole-life sentence for his crimes, was also convicted earlier this year of sexually assaulting 11 other women, 10 of them on trains and the underground in London between 2023 and 2025.

Smallman said she had been in contact with the head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, after reading about the case. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “After reading this case I sent a text message to Sir Mark and said: ‘How many times are you going to stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met?’

“It becomes a joke. The truth is, 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 said the Met was incapable of change because it was “too big”. “I believe that Sir Mark Rowley wants to change the Met and wants to do things differently, but they haven’t got a clue.”

She added: “We are asking them to do too much, they haven’t got the finances, it has become riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism, and they just can’t do it.”

The crime and policing minister Sarah Jones previously described Levy as a monster and said the failings that had allowed him to remain free were “deeply concerning”.

Jones signalled the government would allow the relevant institutions and police watchdog to establish what had gone wrong. “The fact that Levy was able to inflict such devastating harm after being freed by police and the courts is deeply concerning,” she said. “It raises serious questions that require urgent answers.”

Rowley denied that the Met had not done enough, saying: “The inference that the Met didn’t try on this death is not true, the Met tried.”

But he said he did not understand why the Prison Service released Simon Levy after he sexually assaulted one of its staff members in jail.

Levy was questioned by police about the assault five months after his release, which Rowley said was “too slow”.

He told the Today programme: “That’s one of the things we’ve apologised for, but of course there are two mistakes in that: you’ve got he was released on licence by the Prison Service, having sexually assaulted in prison one of its people, I don’t understand that decision either.

“I’m prepared to come here and be accountable, we’ve got two officers being referred to be investigated by the independent office of police complaints, we take our accountability seriously.

“The rest of the system is not doing that. The Prison Service should not have released somebody who’s indecently assaulting its staff.”

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.