Adjusting his uniform, Rory Bibb glanced in the mirror before setting off to start his new job. "I feel ready," he told his video diary.

This was no ordinary first day. For the next seven months, Rory was employed as a designated detention officer at London's Charing Cross police station. He was also secretly working for Panorama, capturing shocking video evidence of misogyny, racism and officers revelling in the use of force.

The BBC had placed an undercover reporter within the UK's largest police force.

For responsible investigative journalists, the decision to undertake covert filming like this is never an easy one. Going undercover involves deception and intrusion as tools of public interest journalism, and to justify this there needs to be sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

And in Charing Cross police station, one of the capital's busiest, there was plenty to suggest that all was not right.

For any reporter, going undercover is an intense experience.

"Walking in on the first day, and going through those doors of a police station, it's literally the last place on earth you'd want to be wearing secret cameras," he told me.

He was under near-constant surveillance. Plus, he said, at all times, "you're around the people who do the investigating."

And so began a double life. As well as gathering evidence about the culture among officers, Rory had to undertake all the duties of a designated detention officer.

Rory was a journalism graduate who had worked in PR. He had completed an online application - not mentioning, of course, that he was working for Panorama - and passed vetting.

After a job interview, Rory, then 28, was accepted for a job as a detention officer in Charing Cross custody suite, helping to make sure detainees were fed, watered, and kept safe.

Before he started, Rory knew all about the station's reputation.

In early 2022, misogyny, discrimination, bullying and sexual harassment at the station were revealed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). Police officers were found to have joked about rape and exchanged offensive social media messages.

The scandal came less than a year after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer based elsewhere in the Met.

After a review of the force by Dame Louise Casey, it was found to be institutionally misogynistic, homophobic and racist. The Met Police said it had undertaken a major cultural turnaround and sacked bad officers.

Working with Panorama, Rory was backed by a very experienced BBC team which had carried out many other undercover investigations.

Unknown to his colleagues at Charing Cross, Rory came into work for almost every shift wearing specially constructed hidden cameras and recording........

© BBC