Dame Elish Angiolini was tasked by Priti Patel, the then home secretary, to conduct an inquiry into the horrendous March 2021 abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens. Last Thursday, two years later, her 347-page report was published. Angiolini, a former lord advocate of Scotland, praised Everard’s family for “grace in their suffering”, and then she issued the bluntest of warnings.
“Without a significant overhaul there is nothing to stop another Wayne Couzens operating in plain sight,” she said. The rhetoric of transformation, apology and change falls easily from the lips of senior police officers. Last Thursday, for instance, Sir Mark Rowley, Met police commissioner, issued “an urgent call to action”, having earlier launched Operation Onyx, “the strongest doubling down of standards for 50 years”. It has reinvestigated 689 officers and revealed that 161 Met officers have criminal convictions. Yet the extent of the crisis that the Met and other police forces face is that for decades, while the outer skin is shed as a result of half-hearted reforms, the rotten flesh remains, threatening to contaminate even those who serve with the highest levels of integrity.
How many more women and girls must be abused, their requests for help ignored? (A second part of the Angiolini inquiry investigates Met police officer David Carrick, who committed 85 offences, including 48 rapes, over 17 years). How many more crimes will go undetected because of what Angiolini calls police “apathy and disinterest” overseeing “lethargic investigations” that are of “poor quality and inadequate” in a “deep-rooted culture”.
Since the 1950s, the police have moved in the public eye, fairly or unfairly, from “PC Plod” to “pigs”, to bent as a boomerang (“I do have a minority of officers who are corrupt, dishonest, unethical…” said Sir Paul Condon, Met police commissioner in 1997), to institutionally racist, following the killing of Stephen Lawrence, to dangerously misogynistic, adversely marking the lives of women including Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman and Sabina Nessa. Only last year, Dame Louise Casey, in her review of standards at the Met, said it had thrown protection of women, “out of the window” and called the force “institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic”.
New broom after new broom has allegedly swept away “the rotten apples” among the boys (and far fewer girls) in blue only for the toxicity to bubble up again because, as the Women’s Equality party told Priti Patel in a note in 2021: “It’s not one bad apple. It’s the whole fucking orchard.” It may not be the whole orchard but what is clear is that the reformers need better tools to restore public faith and find a convincing response to the question, “Who guards the guards?”
Angiolini has made 16 recommendations. They could make a difference (but who will be in charge of monitoring progress?). Her report charts Couzens’s almost 20-year history of sexual offending, working in three police forces. She describes his “unmanaged indebtedness, predilection for extreme pornography and a vile sexualised expression of his sense of humour”; a cornucopia of red flags, almost all ignored.
Her recommendations include improved recruitment and vetting, better police training on violence against women and girls (again), and taking the sexual offence of indecent exposure far more seriously. Couzens had exposed himself masturbating only days before killing Sarah Everard.
Women’s organisations have been calling for many of the proposals for years, especially the need for police to better understand risk. Currently, risk is too often interpreted as imminent physical danger and even then women are disregarded. Only last week, Marcus Osborne was jailed for life for killing his former partner Katie Higton and her boyfriend, Steven Harnett. Higton, 27, had repeatedly warned West Yorkshire Police that Osborne had threatened to slit her throat.
If prevention of injury and loss of life is the aim, “low” risk is the red flag that should trigger action and rarely does. Couzens wasn’t “just” a flasher, he was a killer in training on a trajectory that could and should have been halted.
In 2020, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Centre for Women’s Justice, a tiny charity that has been a major catalyst in exposing police conduct, brought a super-complaint against the police. The Independent Office for Police Conduct and others investigated and agreed there were “systemic deficiencies in the police response to cases of police- perpetrated domestic abuse… misconduct hearings are not always being carried out when they should be, or conducted appropriately.”
Here is the crunch. The police themselves. As a result of Operation Onyx, 51 Met officers were dismissed “or would have been if they hadn’t resigned or retired” (on full pension). How is that accountability? Why aren’t there prosecutions? The Casey review found one officer responsible for 24 instances of behaviour linked to sexual misconduct, each considered separately, the pattern missed and he remained in post.
Accountability is absent; there are few real consequences. At the top, senior officers should be prosecuted and punished with loss of pension and jail terms if change fails to happen; while, for other ranks, there should be a statutory responsibility to report the kind of behaviour that earned Couzens the nickname “the Rapist”.
In 1968 American psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, researched what they eventually called, “the bystander effect”. They described why numbers of people stand by rather than help an individual in crisis. Now, bystanding includes those who fail to speak out against bullying, racism and misogyny. As long as our police forces fail to root out perpetrators, bystanders and the apathetic, they don’t deserve the public’s trust or its taxes.
• Yvonne Roberts is an Observer columnist
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