Senior coroner Graeme Irvine ordered a PC and a sergeant to court on Friday morning (April 11) for a dressing down over what he called “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
He said the grieving family of a young woman believed to have taken her life faced having their grief prolonged because the Met flouted a court order and failed to produce vital evidence.
Unless the force could now “weave some sort of magic”, he said, her inquest would have to be delayed.
“I haven’t seen much magic over the past two years, to be brutally honest,” he said. “It’s not good enough.”
He said over the past two years, the quality of death referrals and evidence provision from the Met had collapsed and he wanted the force to know how “irritated” he was.
Unless an officer found themself “gripping the rail of the witness box” while being “shouted at by a coroner”, he suggested, “nothing is going to change”.
He warned the PC that the officers who failed to execute his orders would end up behind bars, not their bosses.
“It seems to me that you need to protect yourself,” he said. “If judicial orders are not followed, proceedings under the Contempt of Court Act can follow and that can result in people going to prison.
“That doesn’t apply to your sergeant. It doesn’t apply to your duty inspector. It applies to you.”
The hearing at East London Coroner’s Court concerned 23-year-old Anna Bellamy, found dead at her home in Howard Road, Upminster, on October 27.
In November, Mr Irvine ordered disclosure of evidence from the Met, ambulance service, Miss Bellamy’s GP and others.
“Everybody else has done their job,” he said. “The one outlier is the Metropolitan Police Service.”
He had ordered her electronic devices be interrogated for any evidence she intended to end her life.
But in a recent evidential review, “I found to my horror that the electronic devices have not moved from the police station. They have not been assessed by anybody and there doesn’t appear to be any movement on interrogating these devices.”
Ordered into the witness box, PC Muhammad Asad said: “That is my fault… There’s no excuse. Not for the coroners. Not for the family.”
“I’m grateful for your transparency and your candour,” replied the coroner. “I’m going to be very frank with you. The reason you’re here is not strictly because of this case or Miss Bellamy.”
“You’ve probably heard the phrase before, the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he continued.
“I am that camel and at the minute, I am very much heavily laden with lots of strands of straw of the failures of the Metropolitan Police Service to do their job.”
“We don’t do that here because we understand the day-to-day pressures that exist upon the Metropolitan Police Service in terms of staffing.
“But if this service continues to fail in providing adequate evidence to this court, that’s what is going to happen.”
He warned that if the Met’s digital forensics team did not “expedite” analysis of Miss Bellamy’s phone, “I will summons them and we will have a chat in court”.
He told PC Asad he would not refer him to the police watchdog, but ordered him to write to Miss Bellamy’s family “explaining what went wrong”.
“They deserve an explanation,” he said.
He told PC Asad’s sergeant, in the public gallery: “Go away and speak to the duty inspector and explain where you’ve been today, what I have had to say and what’s going to happen next unless there is a significant improvement.
“I have already been in touch with the borough commander about this case.”
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Superintendent Neal Donohoe said: “We deeply regret any distress this may have caused Anna’s family and offer our sincere apologies.
“I fully accept that we did not carry out the coroner’s request in a timely manner and have fallen short of the standards the public rightly expect.
“We have spoken to the coroner’s office and will resolve this matter as quickly as possible.”
The Met failed to comment on the coroner’s wider criticisms.
