Both men were in good company. This week, a National Policing Statement was published documenting significant increases in recorded crimes of violence against women and girls and describing the epidemic as a “national emergency”. And at the start of this month, Peter Skelton KC, representing the Metropolitan Police in the “spy cops” public inquiry, apologised to the many women deceived into sexual relationships with undercover officers — echoing the terms of an apology delivered nine years previously to eight women I acted for in a civil claim against the Met. The apology in 2015 coincided with the commencement of a public inquiry into undercover policing spanning the period from 1968 to 2010, when the police spied on over 1,000 political groups for the undemocratic purpose of getting intelligence on organisations engaged in political protest. More than 50 women are now known to have been targeted and subjected to state-sponsored sexual deceit — many had relationships with men they viewed as their life partners. These women discovered not only that they had been deceived about the identity of their partners, but that this deception had been enabled and funded by the police.

The spy cops scandal is merely a snapshot of the endemic and corrupt history of policing that continues to the present day. From the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met police officer in 2021, to the prosecution of serial rapist, abuser and serving officer David Carrick, to the almost weekly stories of other officers prosecuted for violence against women — such horrifying stories of misogyny from within the ranks of those responsible for protecting women are nothing new. How will our newly elected Labour government tackle the multiple scandals that have rocked the most vital of institutions?

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”.

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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”.

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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.

What’s even more appalling is that Couzens had apparently committed indecent exposure twice: once in 2015 and once three days before Everard’s murder.

Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an unfortunate phrase a few months ago that there is the occasional “bad ‘un” in the service. She did go on to say that they are “intolerant” of violence and that they “​​work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours”. But the impression was given that the occasional bad ‘un is an inevitable part of the institution.

It appears to be rather more than one, for the record. Apparently, 27 serving Metropolitan Police officers have been convicted of sex crimes since 2016. At least one is still on the force as an unpaid special constable, having joined the Met after his conviction for indecent exposure. (A simple criminal conviction does not automatically bar you from joining the police.) Another Met officer, who worked in the same unit as Couzens, is facing rape charges this week.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Metropolitan Police has been accused of institutional misogyny — and of needing drastic reform. In the wake of an awful story, there is an understandable, human need to want to make sure it never happens again. Specifically, we feel the police should, of all professions, be the one without a single “bad ‘un”.

But it’s also worth remembering that, in the coming years or decades, no matter how well we vet police officers, you’ll read some horrible story like this again. Hopefully we can reduce the likelihood; perhaps even reduce it a lot. But the numbers involved are just too large for it to be realistic that we can bring it to zero. So we need to have some idea – with this, and with every movement campaigning for some social good, from public health to racial justice – of what success looks like. And if we want to aim for zero, then we have to be honest about what the costs of that aim are.

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Here’s why I think it will be difficult to reach zero: the numbers. About 120,000 sexual offences were recorded in England and Wales in 2017, of which 40,000 were rapes. That’s a huge undercount of the actual figure committed (the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimates the true figure at four million), but let’s use it.

Presumably some of those 120,000 were committed by the same people — there probably weren’t 120,000 recorded perpetrators — but even if we half that number, we still end up at about 0.1% of the entire population of England and Wales recorded as committing a sex crime each year.

Let’s take that 0.1%, and pretend that the whole population is equally likely to commit sex crimes. There are about 160,000 police officers in the UK. That means that if police officers commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population, you would expect about 160 sex offences committed by police officers every year.

I sincerely hope that police officers don’t commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population. But even if they only do it 1% as often, you would still expect one or two every year; easily enough to fill newspapers with appalling stories. At those rates, you’d expect even rarer crimes such as rape and murder once every few years.

So let’s return to the question: what does success look like?

This is a difficult conversation for any reforming movement.Because there are costs that come with demanding too perfect a victory.

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Take a topical example: Zero Covid. You can say what you like about the movement’s aims, but at least it was explicit about them: it called for the “elimination of the virus from the UK”. If there’s still a single case of Covid in your country, you have not achieved Zero Covid, and you keep trying until you have.

New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.

In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.

But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?

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Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.

To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.

If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.

Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.

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You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.

Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.

Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.

When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.

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I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.

Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.

Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.

The trouble is ‘Sandra’ wasn’t a student. She was a police spy who had been sent to gather information about the Women’s Liberation Movement. Sandra wasn’t even her name. One of her key targets, Diane Langford, now 79-years-old, has only now spoken publicly about how she was watched by at least six undercover cops who were part of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) formed after protests against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square in 1968.

SDS were set up to gather intelligence about groups that were organising public protest — ostensibly to assist with the more effective policing of such protest. But as evidence emerges it seems they served a wider purpose, gathering intelligence and potentially disrupting the activities of anyone who might be regarded as a subversive.

The way male police officers inveigled their way into protest groups was exploitative and callous: the gravest possible interference with their targets’ private lives. The officers posed as fellow activists with a lifelong commitment to whichever cause the groups were pursuing, with many forming intimate sexual relationships with the women, meeting family members and, in two known cases, even having children with the women they were spying on. In some cases the undercover officers had wives and families to return to on their days off.

It seems extraordinary that the authorities were so worried about the risk women posed to national security that they sent spies to gather information from children’s Christmas parties and jumble sales. But it would seem that this indeed was the case.

The scandal of police spy abuse broke ten years ago, when the Met tried to explain away the Mark Stone affair as the action of a lone rogue officer – he had been spying on a woman in the climate change movement who became his lover. His conduct was described by the Met as unacceptable. However, the uncovering and naming of Mark Kennedy encouraged more women who had been targeted to come forward. The overriding feeling was that the surveillance had come close to abuse. The collective battle by these women put the lie to the rogue officer theory and laid the foundations for an allegation of institutionalised sexism.

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The Sarah Everard case and the ensuing public outcry about the misogyny within the police force is but one example of the failure of police to get rid of locker room culture. Last year, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) filed a super-complaint to the Police Inspectorate highlighting systemic failures women are experiencing when reporting domestic abuse perpetrated by police officers and others employed by the police.

According to the evidence amassed by CWJ, the culture of “institutionalised sexism” within the police condones and trivialises violence against women. Cited are the levels of sexual harassment reported by police employees, concerning levels of power abuse by police officers for sexual gain, and high numbers of reports of sexual assault by police officers who then face no sanction. Women who report such cases have very little trust or confidence in the police when they seek help because their abuser is part of the system intended to protect them.

In 2015, following the startling revelation that the Stephen Lawrence family had also been targeted by the SDS using unorthodox methods, the then Home Secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry with an aim to get to the truth about undercover policing across England and Wales since 1968, and provide recommendations for the future. It took the inquiry five years to gather evidence and eventually, amid worries about protecting former undercover operatives from exposure, the first public hearings took place last November. They are ongoing today.

It has gradually emerged through the hearings that a range of women’s groups were reported on during the course of the SDS’s deployment, including Greenham Common Women’s Support Group, the Spare Rib collective, Women in Ireland, Women Workers League, and Brixton Black Women’s Group. Langford was aware that she and comrades in a Marxist-Leninist study group had been spied on in the early 1970s by an undercover cop using the name Dave Robertson, who was rumbled when he was recognised by a friend of hers as a police officer. Then, sometime in the 1980s, she tried to get a visa to go to the United States: “I went to the US Embassy, was taken to a cubicle and this guy took out an enormous file and dumped it on the desk and said, ‘ma’am, you are not a fit person to go to the USA’.” It’s true Langford was a high-profile activist — she had set up the Women’s Liberation Front with her partner Manu Manchanda. But was she really a danger to national security?

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Definitely not, claims Langford. She thinks they were targeted following a bomb explosion at the Miss World competition in November 1970. Langford was one of 150 women who attended the first NWL conference at Ruskin College, where plans for a protest at the beauty competition were drawn up.

Sandra, who was deployed as an undercover officer between September 1971 May 1973, told the Inquiry that she remembers very little detail about her time spying on the Women’s Liberation Front. “As far as I recall, I was just instructed to attend a meeting: to look, listen and feedback any plans, including demonstrations or potential disorder.”

“I was there to observe people come who we regarded as being on the fringes of society,” she continued. “They all conducted themselves within the bounds of the law.”

As Langford insists: “there wasn’t any decent intelligence to get. Everything that we did was in the public anyway, so they could have just bought a women’s liberation newsletter or gone and picked up a leaflet from the local leftist cafe.”

Reports submitted to SDS by Sandra and other undercover officers confirm this. But they don’t show the police in an exemplary light. They expose some deeply offensive attitudes, without determining whether or not the infiltrated groups posed any danger to national security.

One report on a women’s group meeting in 1976 describes a member as having, “a typically Jewish lilt to her … and rather prominent nose, always scruffily dressed in blue jeans and T-shirt (without a bra).” Another from the same year: “A negress was in the audience”, and a gay man was described as having an “effeminate manner”.

Sandra’s report on the National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1972 states: “Lesbian friends in particular made exaggerated and noisy displays of affection openly kissing and hugging each other. These displays were common-place throughout the conference, and it was not unusual to see two girls entwined in a corner.”

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Although aware that a number of male undercover cops had previously targeted groups she had been involved in, Langford never knew she was being spied up on by Sandra until a researcher with the Undercover Research Group read Langford’s blog about Dave Robertson.

The researcher told Langford that a female officer had also been involved and that Langford’s name was on a number of her reports to SDS. “That was the first time I heard of Sandra,” says Langford. “I felt completely soiled and disgusted, and felt as if I had to handle the evidence files with tongs when I had to read through it,” she says. “This woman had been in my house where I lived with my child and my partner, and around all my personal belongings. I felt totally violated.”

For Langford, there is no doubt that her life has been affected by the past actions of the SDS. “I’ll never know what career opportunities were denied to me, or what other barriers have been placed in front of me during my life. I’ll never be certain whether unpleasant incidents, for example, being denied credit or visas, or break-ins at my home, were connected to the surveillance I was being subjected to.”

As more evidence emerges it is now clear that the operations of the SDS were the well-kept secret lurking behind a pretence of an open liberal democracy — where anyone expressing dissent and opposing the establishment, from environmental and animal rights activists to trade unionists and Left-wing MPs, from anti-apartheid campaigners and peace activists to black justice campaigns and women’s liberationists, could he subject to a form of spying that at its most extreme included officers forming long-term intimate sexual relationships with targets. The discovery of this deceit has caused targets long-term psychological harm; it is a grave violation by agents of the state.

The SDS has long been disbanded, and the Inquiry will hopefully lead to greater police accountability, but root and branch reform is needed before trust in the police is restored. “It’s harrowing to learn of the pernicious attitudes of officers masquerading as comrades and sisters who inveigled their way into our homes, families, meetings and lives,” says Langford. “The betrayal of trust is unforgiveable.”