Will the police ever protect women? Their culture of loyalty has stymied reform

I wrote about the long history of police abuse and corruption in my recently published book, Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men, which focuses primarily on the female victims of the institution and draws on my career as a solicitor. I fought high-profile cases: from the nine-year battle by two of the victims of serial rapist John Worboys to the struggle for justice by the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot dead by the Met.

These legal cases exposed abject failures in policing and established a legal precedent by which the police, previously held to be immune, are under a duty to conduct an adequate investigation of serious violent crimes. I also instructed prime minister Keir Starmer, when he was a young barrister, in cases involving police misconduct. He was an active member of the Police Action Lawyers Group which sought to hold police officers accountable for misconduct; he went on to set up the Northern Ireland Police Board in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement; and was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions where he oversaw initiatives that, for a while, led to an improvement in the prosecution of sexual offences. As I see it, Keir Starmer couldn’t be better equipped to understand the underlying problems. But it remains to be seen whether his government will limit itself to police reform or to radically rethinking the institution itself.

And it’s undeniable that the rot runs deep. In submissions made last year to the undercover police inquiry, reference was made to the “Police in Action” report published in 1983. Commissioned by the then-head of the Met police, Sir David McNee, the report sought to conduct an independent study of “relations between the Metropolitan Police and the community it serves”. At the time the 1983 McNee report was published, it was noted that only 9% of police officers were women. It was, in fact, unofficial Met policy to keep the proportion of women at about 10%, even though this amounted to unlawful discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. In a section entitled “Sex, women, sexual offences”, the report found that policemen’s attitudes towards women and victims of sexual abuses amounted to a “cult of masculinity”, and, moreover, that “a certain pattern of talk about sex and women is expected”.

The level of institutional police sexism that both the 1983 report and the spy cops scandal exposed reveals a direct link with recent accounts of Met police misogyny today — they clearly did not appear from nowhere. The “Police in Action” report described police culture in terms which echoed Baroness Casey’s excoriating review of the Met published last year. From a woman who declared herself “fundamentally pro-police” in the report, the findings were extraordinarily damning. She claimed the Met was failing on so many levels that the crisis was existential, flagging the widespread bullying, deep-seated homophobia, and routine sexism and misogyny. “Public respect has fallen to a low point,” she wrote. “The Met has become unanchored from the Peelian principle of policing by consent set out when it was established.”

So, what can be done? Baroness Casey highlighted in her review a phenomenon she called “initiativitis”, where the police are constantly announcing new initiatives but don’t follow through — that is to say, nothing changes. I responded to the review on behalf of the legal charity that I founded in 2016, the Centre for Women’s Justice: “The only way forward to restore the rule of law is to start re-imagining how policing can serve all citizens.” I specified one of the critical issues with policing, namely “the culture of loyalty which militates against self-criticism, against whistle-blowing and allows collusion and silence”. The path to change would start with “hearing the voices of survivors and others at the hard edge of policing… There needs to be real accountability built into the system for those failing to address the problems and there must be adequate powers to ensure recommendations are followed.” Until then, “nothing will change”.

The Centre for Women’s Justice aims at holding the state to account around violence against women. In 2018, we became a designated body able to make police super-complaints, enabling us to raise issues on behalf of the public on harmful patterns or trends in policing. In March 2020, we submitted a super-complaint highlighting systemic failures in the investigation and regulation of police-perpetrated domestic abuse. Our report received significant public interest, which was boosted the following year after the murder of Sarah Everard. More than 200 women came forward to describe their own experiences of police officers abusing their powers to control women they are in relationships with and to highlight the inadequacies of police forces across the country to tackle this serious criminality within their own ranks.

The charity has already made proposals for legislative reform to make policing more accountable. If the new government wants to tackle the current and repeating crises in policing, they must act quickly and radically to address the serious loss of trust in the police. Consideration must be given to requiring the 43 separate police forces across the country to be subject to an overarching regulation framework.

Now is the moment when an intelligent government equipped with an understanding of the importance of building accountability mechanisms can and must take the bull by the horns and do something radical to restore true policing by consent. When confronting the endemic corruption, misogyny, racism and homophobia in the police, some may call to defund the police. However, if we are also concerned with protecting victims and holding their perpetrators accountable, we need a functioning institution that can perform this crucial task.

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Harriet Wistrich is an English solicitor who specialises in human-rights cases, particularly those involving women. She is also the author of the book Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men.

HWistrich