Something stinks about the culture of contemporary British policing

Editorial: For far too long rape, sexual assault and sexually inappropriate behaviour has been treated as either serious but too difficult to prove (and thus expend resources on), or too trivial to bother about (and thus spend time and effort detecting)

Ex-Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens was handed a whole-life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard (Getty/iStock)

As if to prove their structural and cultural failures, the advice from the Metropolitan Police to women concerned about their safety in the presence of a lone male police officer after the murder of Sarah Everard is to shout, bang on a door or wave down a bus.

It is a ludicrous thing to suggest, impractical and ineffective, and insulting with it. Late at night it is likely that there will be no response from a householder, no bus handily passing by the potential killer, and no one to hear you, the victim, scream. Even if there were, the usual response, guided by police advice, is not to get involved, call 999 and wait for the police to arrive – by which time an abduction would be over.

Of course, incidents involving police officers even remotely like what befell Ms Everard are vanishingly rare; but less serious incidents of violence and assault are much more commonplace. Whether the threat comes from uniformed police, plain clothes officers, people impersonating police officers or anyone else, the onus should not be placed on women to ensure their own safety in this way.

The statements by the Metropolitan Police were typically clumsy and insensitive, and came close to victim-blaming. They revealed something about the culture of the police that is extremely worrying. The tendency to aim advice at women, almost as if to provide a pre-emptive alibi for police failings, suggests that the safety of women and girls is not being taken seriously enough by the wider criminal justice system.

For far too long rape, sexual assault and sexually inappropriate behaviour has been treated as either serious but too difficult to prove (and thus expend resources on), or too trivial to bother about (and thus spend time and effort detecting). The incidence of successful rape convictions is so low as to invite the charge of institutional misogyny.

Keir Starmer may protest that when he was director of public prosecutions he demanded action, but there’s little evidence that he or his successors have made much difference to the statistics. Regarding offences such as indecent exposure, the case of Wayne Couzens is instructive. Years and days before he committed his premeditated crimes against Sarah Everard, he indecently exposed himself, most recently inside a McDonald’s restaurant. It was not some pervert in a remote corner of a park, but a police officer in the middle of a busy place, in a city covered by CCTV cameras.

It is a mystery as to why Couzens did such a reckless thing, given what he had so meticulously planned, but perhaps he had a shrewd idea that his colleagues wouldn’t take it seriously. He was right. The same goes for sexual molestation and indecent exposure on public transport. The culprit is being filmed, yet nothing seems to happen. It is no use telling people – women, in fact – to take public transport because it is safer, only to find themselves trapped inside a carriage with a threatening male. It is grotesque.

The police may protest that they have not the resources to deal with every so-called “flasher”, just as they don’t attend every burglary. But that is to misunderstand the human hurt caused by the crime, and the fact that some relatively low-level behaviour of this type can escalate into even more grievous assaults. It is undoubtedly true that the police lack resources, but they can still give certain types of crime the attention they deserve, and avoid giving the impression that they think it is mostly the victim’s fault anyway, just for having the audacity to go out for the evening.

Certainly, the laws and penalties about indecent exposure and the like could be strengthened, and some prosecutions undertaken to deter others. There are also disturbing reports of homophobic and racist messages that Couzens swapped with his colleagues. It is a shameful business that sheds the same kind of unflattering and damaging light on the police (because it is unlikely the Met is unique in this respect) as the Stephen Lawrence scandal did almost three decades ago, and the discovery of endemic corruption in Scotland Yard a half a century ago.

Couzens was a monster, and it is fair to add, as the trial judge did, that the subsequent investigation into his crimes was professional and effective. However, there were many depressing revelations that surfaced about the culture and ethos of contemporary British policing, and a lot of it stinks.