Following the verdicts in Levy’s case, the Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police and Crown Prosecution Service admitted failings in how they dealt with the serial sex offender
The Metropolitan Police decides which victims “matter” and fails to take all cases of violence against women seriously, according to the mother of two murdered women.
Mina Smallman’s daughters, Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, were stabbed to death while celebrating a birthday in a park in Wembley, north west London, in June 2020.
Two officers were each jailed for sharing photographs of the sisters on WhatsApp, describing them as “dead birds” in the messaging groups.
Regarding Simon Levy, 40, who was left free to kill two women and rape a third after a string of police failings and was sentenced to a whole-life term on Wednesday, Ms Smallman claimed: “One of the woman 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.”
Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police commissioner, said that the case was “treated as potential murder” even without a cause of death from a pathologist.
He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “There were six people forensically linked to the victim, six people arrested including Levy. We were trying to understand what had gone on, without a pathologist saying this was murder.”
Following the guilty verdicts on Friday, the Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police and Crown Prosecution Service admitted failings in how they dealt with Levy, who was on bail as his attacks on women escalated to double murder.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said it had served a gross misconduct notice on a Met Police constable and a misconduct notice on a detective sergeant.
Scotland Yard has also issued a plea for any more survivors of sex attacks by Levy to come forward to police.
Ms Smallman said she had contacted Sir Mark after she read 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. It’s a joke.”
Ms Smallman said the Met is not able to change because it was “too big”.
She added: “I believe that Sir Mark Rowley wants to change the Met and wants to do things differently, but they haven’t got a clue.”
“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.”
Levy’s prolific sexual offending spanned the period between 2018 and 2025.
He was jailed in 2021 for groping two women in the summer of 2018, one at Notting Hill Carnival and the other at a party in Camden.
Levy was arrested by BTP in November 2024 for sexual assaults on the Tube, but delays in organising an identification parade until the following April left him free to carry out the rape and first murder.
Sir Mark apologised for the Met’s failings with regard to Levy’s case but said “the public debate needs to be better informed”.
He also defended the force’s “transformation” in how it deals with sexual offences.
He told Radio 4: “We’ve done extraordinary things and we’ve gone from solving the fewest proportion of rapes in the country to solving the highest proportion of rapes in the country. It’s been a massive transformation and I’m proud of what our teams are doing day in and day out.
“A much sharper focus on offenders, much more support for victims. We’re getting it right far more often – and more often than pretty much any other force in the country.
“But we’re not getting it right the whole time. We’ve already apologised for things that we’ve got wrong on this case, but I do think the public debate needs to be better informed.”
The commissioner also criticised the prison service and said he does not understand why it released 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 Sir Mark said was “too slow”.
He said: “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, we’ve 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.”