The Metropolitan Police “failed” to persuade Londoners it was “ruthless” in maintaining high standards in the past, the force’s commissioner has said.

When asked by Nick Ferrari on LBC whether “the bad cops” would be rooted out during his tenure, Sir Mark Rowley said: “You will never have an organisation of over 40,000 people that’s perfect.

“I think the test that you ought to give me is: ‘Am I going to be able to persuade the public of London that we are appropriately ruthless in guarding our standards?’, because that’s the test that we failed on.

“Over the next couple of years you will see all the evidence you need to that we are appropriately ruthless.

“If we are arresting an officer today for something horrific, that won’t come to court maybe for two years.

“There’s going to be a long tail, but convincing London that we are serious about this will be much quicker than that.

“I don’t want us to dominate the headlines the whole time, I’ve got hundreds of problematic officers I need to sort out.”

When asked whether there were hundreds more such officers yet to be detected, Sir Mark said he was not going to “make up numbers”.

He also revealed he does not know the detection rate for burglary, which is 4%, “off the top of my head” when asked by Mr Ferrari.

Sir Mark said: “I don’t have every detection figure off the top of my head.”

When told the figure – with Mr Ferrari adding he understood that the detection rate should be 30% to 40% – the commissioner replied: “It’s not where it needs to be.

“I think burglary detections on people’s homes is much higher than that. I think that figure is the wider that counts everything from a shed being broken into through to a high-value burglary.

“We are now attending every burglary of someone’s home.”