A Mother Who Lost Her Daughters Says the Police Still Pick and Choose Who Matters
Mina Smallman, whose two daughters were killed in a London park in 2020, says the Metropolitan Police — London's main police force — "decides who matters" and cannot change, after the force's mistakes let a sex offender stay free and kill two more women.
Her comments come after Simon Levy, 40, from Tottenham, was given a whole-life sentence, meaning he will never leave prison, for murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins and for the violent rape of a third woman. Levy had already been convicted earlier in 2026 of sexually assaulting 11 other women, most of them on trains and the London Underground between 2023 and 2025. Despite this history of growing violence, he was not locked up. Crime and Policing Minister Sarah Jones called the failure "deeply concerning" and described Levy as a monster.
Smallman told The Guardian that one of the women Levy murdered was a sex worker and was not taken seriously by police. Her killing was not looked into until Levy killed a mother of four, and the two cases were connected. That order of events, Smallman argued, shows the police treat some victims as more important than others based on who they are.
Smallman said she texted Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley after reading about the Levy case, asking how many times he will publicly apologise for failures in the Met. She called the force "riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism" and said it is too big for any senior team to truly know what happens day to day.
The Smallman case itself is one of the most damaging episodes in the Met's recent history. Her daughters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were stabbed to death by Danyal Hussein, who was jailed for 35 years in October 2021. The boyfriend of one sister found their bodies in the park after police failed to respond sooner, a trial heard. Two Met officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, were jailed in December 2021 for taking photos of the dead women's bodies and sharing them in WhatsApp groups, calling them "dead birds."
Smallman has spoken out about the force ever since. In November 2022, she gave the incoming Met commissioner 100 days to fix sexism and racism in the police. The Levy case now tests whether anything has actually changed since then.
The broader context here is a pattern of repeated failure. The 2020 murders showed both slow police work and shocking behaviour by officers. The Levy case, years later and with different victims, shows what looks like the same root problem: the police did not act on warning signs, and a sex worker's death was not investigated until a second killing forced them to connect the two. Smallman's charge that the Met "decides who matters" is not just words — the timeline of the Levy case gives it real weight.
Whether Rowley responds publicly is an open question. The Met has gone through multiple reviews and promises of reform since the Casey investigation, an independent review led by Baroness Louise Casey that found serious problems throughout the force. But Smallman's argument goes further: she questions whether the police can fix themselves at all. Her point that the force is too large for senior leaders to truly oversee raises a problem that no number of apologies can solve.
