During Thursday’s meeting, the police commissioner set out details of a national review of child exploitation cases, which has prompted recent political debate.
Sir Mark said a data search had initially identified about 9,000 historic cases in London that might fall under a national definition of group-based sexual offending, which includes any case with two or more suspects and at least one victim.
He also said that figure had been widely misinterpreted as 9,000 grooming gang cases and had led to “unbalanced reporting”.
He said the definition used by the national audit was far broader than the public understanding of grooming gangs and covered intra-familial offending, institutional abuse, peer-on-peer cases and online exploitation.