Say her name, not his. It is such a small thing, an almost helpless gesture in the face of horrors. But Louise Casey’s decision not to name the killer of Sarah Everard, or the fellow officer recently unmasked as a serial rapist, in her devastating account of what went so very wrong inside the Metropolitan police felt like a sign that finally, someone gets it. She understands that this is a story about two men getting their kicks from wielding power over terrified women, who could not have done so without the swaggering rank and status conferred by a police warrant card.
You almost certainly know their names by now. But in the opening pages of her report, they are reduced to faceless nonentities, while she focuses instead on a story of female courage; how hearing Everard’s bereaved mother, Susan, speak about her daughter’s killer prompted a woman she had never met to disclose that she had been raped and tortured by a second Met officer from the same unit, leading ultimately to his unmasking as a multiple sex offender. Finally, the victims take centre stage, as for decades in the Met they plainly have not.
