A Mother's Warning: Why the Metropolitan Police Still Faces Questions Over Who Gets Protected
Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were murdered in a north London park in 2020, has said the Metropolitan Police "decides who matters" and is incapable of change, after the force's failings allowed a sex offender to remain free and kill two more women.
Smallman's intervention follows the conviction and whole-life sentencing — meaning the offender will never be released from prison — of Simon Levy, 40, from Tottenham, for the murders of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins, and for the violent rape of a third woman. Levy had been convicted earlier in 2026 of sexually assaulting 11 other women, 10 of them on trains and the London Underground between 2023 and 2025. He was left at liberty despite a record of escalating sexual violence, a failure Crime and Policing Minister Sarah Jones described as "deeply concerned." Jones called Levy 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 investigated until Levy killed a mother of four and the two cases were joined. That sequencing, Smallman argued, reflects an institutional habit of valuing some victims over others based on their perceived social standing.
Smallman said she sent a text message to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley after reading about the Levy case, asking how many times he will stand up publicly and apologise for failures in the Met. She described the force as "riddled with inactivity, corruption, misogyny, racism" and said it is too big for any senior team to have a hands-on understanding of its day-to-day activities.
The Smallman case itself remains one of the most damaging chapters in the Met's recent history. Henry and Nicole Smallman were stabbed to death by Danyal Hussein, who was jailed for 35 years in October 2021. The boyfriend of one of the sisters found their bodies in the park after police had failed to deploy sooner, a trial heard. Two Met officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, were jailed on 6 December 2021 for taking photographs of the dead women's bodies and sharing them in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as "dead birds."
Smallman has been a persistent public critic of the force since. In November 2022, she gave the incoming Met commissioner 100 days to address sexism and racism in the police. The Levy case now presents a test of whether anything has changed in the intervening years.
The broader context here is one of serial institutional failure with a cumulative pattern. The 2020 murders exposed both investigative delay and grotesque officer misconduct. The Levy case, separated by several years and a different set of victims, exposes what appears to be the same underlying fault: a failure to act on warning signs, compounded by a hierarchy of victim credibility that left a sex worker's death uninvestigated until a second killing forced the connection. Smallman's charge that the Met "decides who matters" is not merely rhetorical; the timeline of the Levy investigation lends it structural weight.
Whether Rowley responds publicly remains an open question. The Met has undergone multiple reviews and reform pledges since the Casey investigation era — a landmark external review led by Baroness Louise Casey that exposed deep-rooted dysfunction within the force — but Smallman's framing challenges the premise that reform from within is viable at all, given the scale she describes. Her argument that the force is too large for meaningful hands-on oversight by senior leadership raises a structural question that no amount of apologies, however frequent, can resolve.
