SCOTLAND Yard warned yesterday that it is prepared to use undercover operations and financial investigations against officers suspected of corruption.
It launched a hot line - "The Right Line" - for officers in the Metropolitan Police to report their suspicions.
The line will also be open to Met civilian staff.
Intelligence gathered from the callers will, if it shows possible corruption, be used as a basis for operations by the Met's revamped Complaints Investigation Bureau, which will concentrate on serious allegations. As regulations forbid officers from making anonymous tips, callers will be encouraged to identify themselves but will be promised confidentiality.
The Yard says it will reserve the right, if the caller gives evidence which is critical to a prosecution, to persuade that caller to act as a witness.
Sources, however, said they expected such cases to be exceptional and that most calls would cover suspicions which could remain confidential.
Two pro-active CIB teams - so-called because they will act on intelligence rather than react to events - will "target officers suspected of theft, corruption, improper association with criminals or other serious breaches of criminal law".
Other forces are known to be monitoring the Met initiative.
Commander Ian Quinn, the director of CIB, said: "We will be using the modern methods we would think of using against criminals generally to pick up and collate intelligence and target officers to arrest them or relieve them from duty."
He said sting operations and the use of officers working undercover would be possible but stressed that they would have to be justified by evidence.
There would not be random checks on officers' finances but financial investigations might follow as part of an operation.
"We won't be spraying temptation in front of every officer but, if we suspect someone, we will test their integrity with whatever means we see fit."
Brian Hayes, the Deputy Commissioner, said the Crown Prosecution Service and the Police Complaints Authority had been consulted "and we would make sure we were not overstepping the mark in terms of acting as an agent provocateur".
"This is not a response to a major problem of corruption. We are not into what happened in the 1960s and 1970s.
"But there are always cases cropping up in a service as big as this and we always want to be in there as quickly as possible and clean it up," he said.
Callers will be given three options - to talk to CIB about corruption, to the Fraud Squad about suspected fraud or to a team dealing with breaches of internal procedure.
Sections in each of the Met's five areas will deal with lesser complaints.
The Police Federation has expressed concerns that the line may be used by criminals to make malicious calls but Mr Quinn said the CIB would be always keep this possibility in mind.
The initiative is not being linked to any case, though there was some discomfort at the Yard over John Donald, a Met detective seconded to the South East regional crime squad, who was jailed for 11 years for corruption earlier this year.
The Donald prosecution followed a BBC Panorama programme about corruption. The Yard said it wanted investigative journalists to bring evidence of police malpractice to it "sooner rather than later" so it could act.
It was made clear that the selling of information to the press by officers might be regarded as corruption, even if money did not change hands.
However, Mr Hayes stressed that the initiative was not against officers talking to the media.
