Nicola Bulley’s family now has a fresh agony to endure, now that the body found a mile from where she was last seen has been identified, seemingly confirming Lancashire police force’s original hypothesis: that Bulley was likely to have fallen into the river.
For Lancashire constabulary, however, being proven right will inspire no retrospective confidence in them – this entire sad period has spoken of a complete breakdown in trust between the public and the authorities, in this case the police.
Until relatively recently, everyone would have understood that during an active missing person investigation, official details would be scant, perhaps even deliberately misleading. If the police suspected no third party involvement, they still wouldn’t necessarily stick to a single hypothesis, still less announce it. If they did suspect a third party, they might not want to release details or theories that they could use later to establish culpability or force a confession. They would be mindful of the feelings of the family, and that would engender its own restraint and discretion. We would have had the social maturity to understand that, and curiosity would have been muted by empathy.
In the Bulley case, the opposite happened. Everything the police said with confidence led to a riot of speculation about all the other things they may not have considered. Everything the police left unsaid opened a vacuum, into which armchair detectives and keyboard warriors piled with conspiracies, speculation and fantasy. The glee and shamelessness of people broadcasting their vigilante investigations was chilling. One YouTuber, Dan Duffy, joined the search just to post a video of himself joining it, and was fined on a public order offence, which he also filmed. One TikTok account, Curtis Cool Stuff, posted a video of a man digging up woodland, and another of him roaming around a derelict house opposite the bank where Bulley was last seen. Another group of men had to be dispersed from the house, having travelled there from Liverpool.
The narcissistic urge to get closer to a prominent story by feeding false information to the police has always existed, but this time it was different, wildly amplified by social media, so that crank calls became viral conspiracy theories. The police were swamped with nonsense non-leads and interference, which wasted time and cut into the fundamental assumption of policing: that when an appeal is made to the public, it is for help, for witnesses. It should not mean that they will have to issue dispersal notices to the public to stop people breaking into neighbourhood gardens.
Equally depressing was the bile and vindictiveness directed at Bulley’s partner, Paul Ansell, on social media. Someone hacked his Pinterest account to fill it with explicit photos. This was vulture behaviour, callous and emotionally predatory.
Before we blame social media and the unlovely traits of attention-seeking and hysteria it rewards, there is a more important context. More people now lack confidence in the police than have confidence, according to YouGov. The proximal cause is the Metropolitan police – to whom the charge of institutional misogyny now feels like a mild description of the full story. These extraordinary failures – from not vetting officers to not investigating charges against officers, to the convicted rapists and murderers in its ranks – point to a culture not just of misogyny but of systematised and flagrant violence against women. Of course we hope that the Met is the outlier force rather than just the first lid to be blown, but the force has tainted policing across the nation. The restraint and discretion that would once have been an accepted part of policing is now viewed with the suspicion that the officers are just covering for each other.
In the midst of a culture of distrust and a sleuthing free-for-all, the Lancashire constabulary tried to retake control of the narrative: on 15 February, more than a fortnight after Bulley’s disappearance, it held a press conference to debunk “persistent myths”. Det Supt Rebecca Smith, the lead investigator, shot down the derelict house theory, the shabby red van hypothesis and all the other rumours that a third party was involved, for which she said there was no evidence. Newspaper columnists such as the Daily Mail’s Amanda Platell and Petronella Wyatt took the opportunity to critique Smith’s outfit, physique and whatever could thence be inferred about her character on social media. It’s a crowded field but this may have been a low point for traditional media. It has also been unedifying and sad to witness tabloid invitations to recreate Bulley’s last moments with “interactive maps”.
The worse judgment call on the police’s part at that point was to reveal that Bulley had an alcohol problem, in the midst of a difficult menopause. There was no call for that level of detail; it appeared to be introduced purely to discredit her as a rational actor and re-situate her disappearance away from the realm of mystery, back in the realm of the expected. It caused needless pain for those who cared about her, and reinforced the sense of institutional misogyny within policing as a whole.
Tragedy is never pretty, and rarely limits itself to those directly affected, often prompting questions about the social conditions that allowed it. But the turmoil around this case forces a very specific reckoning. This is what a lack of trust in this case between the police and the public looks like: a carnival of hysteria that hampers the investigation and is unimaginably cruel to the family.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
