My stalker said he’d kill me – but the police just laughed at his d*** pics

There is a well-documented correlation between acts of exposure and more serious crimes, says Emily Sheffield – so why are the police still failing women?

Emily Sheffield: ‘My stalker wrote how he was going to lie in wait in the dark until I got home to attack me’ ( (Alamy/PA))

In my late twenties, I had a stalker. Somehow, he obtained my home address and sent repulsive photographs of his genitalia. These were accompanied with threats to rape me, then knife me to death and murder my boyfriend. He wrote how he was going to lie in wait in the dark until I got home to attack me. Can you imagine how that feels?

When I first reported it at the local police station (remember those?), they took the Polaroids he’d sent and passed them around the office for colleagues to laugh at, while I stood at the front desk, my mouth open in shock.

That happened in the same year I flagged down a passing police car with two male officers inside, to report a flasher that had, seconds before, chased me down the street, trying to ejaculate on me.

Their response? They collapsed in giggles, despite my obvious distress and anger. You would hope, many years later, police responses would have got better.

But five years ago, I reported a man openly masturbating in his car at 6pm close to where young teenagers were returning from school. The police didn’t manage to catch him in the act – so their reaction was to call me to question the veracity of what I had seen, ignoring the fact it doesn’t take long to zip up your trousers when the flashing blue lights descend. (I extracted an apology weeks later.)

There is a well-documented correlation between acts of exposure and far more serious crimes. Before Sarah Everard was abducted, brutally raped then murdered by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, her attacker had been reported eight times for indecent exposure. Wayne Couzens’s history of alleged sexual offending and preference for extreme violent pornography started two decades before he stopped Everard on a south London street and, using his police warrant card, handcuffed her.

The visceral anger, upset and distress that so many felt at her sadistic and preventable killing in 2021 remains one of the most extraordinary memories I have of being editor of the Evening Standard during that period.

The catalogue of failures that had led to Couzens ever being in a position of trust was sickening – and felt like nothing had changed in 20 years.

Once he was put behind bars for life, we were promised radical change. Politicians filed out to say that violence against women was their top priority. The mayor of London Sadiq Khan vowed to clean up the Metropolitan Police. I argued at the time that some events were so horrific that they could, like the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence almost three decades earlier, act as a real catalyst for institutional change.

And yet here we are, more than three years later, reporting still on the murders, rape or sexual abuse of women, either by serving officers, or crimes that could have been stopped if the police had acted on the information given to them by women.

This week, we learnt that four Met police officers are under investigation for misconduct after two vulnerable Black women were murdered by a violent sexual predator known to them.

Naomi Hunte, aged just 41, was found in her flat in Woolwich, southeast London, in 2022, with a stab wound in her chest.

She had reported her murderer, Carl Cooper, to the police multiple times for domestic violence, harassment and stalking. He had been arrested, then bailed.

It gets worse. After killing one woman and getting away with it, Cooper entered into another relationship, with Fiona Holm, aged 48. She also reported him to the Met in April 2023, after he stabbed her with a screwdriver. (Can you imagine a more vicious instrument to use against a woman?)

But that investigation was closed without Cooper facing charges. The officers involved had also failed to warn Holm that he was still a suspect in the Hunte murder case, that he presented a real danger to her.

Her body has never been found. When she was reported missing, the police took two weeks to launch a search.

Cooper, 66, is finally serving a life sentence for both murders. I wish I could write that this was one sad, tragic instance in an otherwise now-changing organisation. But we know it’s not.

Earlier this year, a serving officer who was recruited into the Met only months after Everard’s murder, somehow bypassing all vetting, was sentenced on 13 counts of raping a woman and a child, as well as kidnap. Cliff Mitchell was caught only when a passer-by saw his female victim running through a street in southwest London, shouting: “He’s going to kill me!”

Over the best part of a decade, Mitchell had carried out more than 50 sex attacks against two female victims, using his status as a police officer to silence one, and claiming that no one would believe her if she were to report the abuse. Before he began his Met training in 2021, he had been investigated for six counts of rape against a child.

Why were there no red flags when he applied to join the force? We were promised after Everard that vetting procedures would be improved. Well, clearly not, given that Mitchell joined four months after her murder. Were the Met so desperate for a recruit that they didn’t properly check his history?

And let us not forget the victims of David Carrick, one of this country’s most prolific rapists, who was another serving officer. Similarly to Couzens (who was known to his colleagues by the nickname “The Rapist”), Carrick’s actions were first passed off by the Met’s most senior representatives as that of a “bad apple”.

Or the two Met officers, now jailed, who, for their own amusement, took and shared photos in WhatsApp groups with other officers, of sisters Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, who had been stabbed to death in June 2020. Stationed to guard their bodies, they referred to the women as “dead birds”.

We have had one report after another about the Met, each one more damning than the last. We are told time is needed. But every incident plays out the same.

A year ago, Louise Casey, Baroness Casey of Blackstock delivered her coruscating report on the Met, rightly damning our largest police force as institutionally misogynistic, racist and homophobic. She said at the time that the task for commissioner Mark Rowley was like “climbing Everest in flip-flops” because of the scale and level of denial in the organisation.

Then in February this year, we heard from Elish Angiolini, the lawyer leading the inquiry into Couzens. She was also utterly damning, and urged authorities to take immediate action and implement her 16 recommendations – for “without a significant overhaul, there is nothing to stop another Couzens operating in plain sight”.

As if we needed any more evidence of what needs to be done, the Centre for Women’s Justice this week published a condemnatory new report, based on hundreds of interviews with victims. It shows how, across the country, male police officers who have been accused of domestic violence are not only escaping investigation – but being promoted.

Some positive changes have, of course, been made. There are now far more women in senior roles within the police, and in rape and sexual assault cases, the mindset is now to investigate the perpetrator, rather than the victim for anything that might damage a prosecution case.

But what can possibly be the reason for the police executive blocking the licensing of police officers, which would require personnel to undergo testing every five years to ensure they are still fit to serve?

Yvette Cooper, as the new home secretary, this is now on you. It is time to ignore the politics and battle those within the police service who make empty claims about reform, and then wriggle away from radical change. No more words, half actions or empty promises.

It is time the Met stopped putting themselves first, and the battered, sexually abused victims second.

Please donate now to the Brick by Brick campaign, launched by The Independent and charity Refuge, to help raise £300,000 to build a safe space for women where they can escape domestic abuse, rebuild their lives and make a new future. Text BRICK to 70560 to donate £15

The national domestic abuse helpline offers support for women on 0808 2000 247, or you can visit the Refuge website. There is a dedicated men’s advice line on 0808 8010 327