Met Police officers face racism probe over Wimbledon school crash handling

Eleven Metropolitan Police officers are under investigation over alleged racism and misinformation in how the force handled a crash that killed two eight-year-old girls at a Wimbledon prep school.

According to PA Media via The Independent, the Independent Office for Police Conduct has opened an inquiry into complaints from the families of Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau, who were killed in July 2023 when a 4x4 struck The Study Prep school in south-west London. The IOPC said four serving officers, including a commander and a detective chief inspector, are being investigated for gross misconduct, with other officers under misconduct-level investigation.

The case has already moved through one of the system’s familiar loops: police investigated, prosecutors declined to charge, then a reinvestigation began. The Metropolitan Police said in June 2024 the driver, Claire Freemantle, would face no criminal charges after an epileptic seizure was cited. She was later rearrested and released on bail, and the Crown Prosecution Service now says it is still considering “further factors” before reaching a charging decision.

What the watchdog is now examining is less the crash itself than the institution’s conduct around it. The IOPC said the complaints relate to the force’s “management and direction” of the investigation, the conduct of the investigation team, and the way officers engaged with the victims’ families. It is also investigating allegations that officers provided “false and misleading information” and whether the treatment of those affected was influenced by their race.

That focus matters because credibility in policing often rests on process rather than outcome. When decisions are justified by medical explanations, legal thresholds, and internal reviews, families rarely have access to the underlying file and must infer diligence from how they are spoken to and what is disclosed. If information was wrong, incomplete, or shaped to close off questions, the harm is not only emotional; it also makes later oversight harder, because the paper trail becomes contested.

The timing adds pressure. Prosecutors wrote to the families that they expected to announce whether they had reached a charging decision by the end of April, and the families were due to meet the CPS for an update, the Independent reports. Parallel tracks—criminal charging decisions on one side, misconduct and discrimination inquiries on the other—can stretch the period in which no definitive account is publicly settled.

The crash scene itself remains the fixed point: two children died at their school in July 2023, and nearly three years later the question of what happened, and how authorities handled it afterward, is still being litigated in process.