Women have been trying to tell us about it. But we haven’t wanted to hear.
Let’s start with the facts. Police work is a noble calling. Those who join the force are among the very best of us: those with a strong belief in justice, and who want to protect vulnerable people. They believe in these things so much that they don’t just want to virtue signal about it on the internet. They want to do something.
In fact, they are willing to do something that puts their lives on the line.
Let’s start with another set of facts. Among these good men and women who proudly wear the uniform of law enforcement there lurk monsters. An alarming review by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, a police watchdog, has found that hundreds of police officers who should have failed vetting checks may be in the job in England and Wales.
Even when the vetting process turned up “disturbing information” — such as convictions for domestic abuse, robbery and indecent exposure, and sexual misconduct complaints — applicants were accepted. They have accepted pimps and people in whose families there is criminal activity, which they have lied about.
Naturally, attention has now turned towards the vetting process. It needs to be more finely tuned, politicians and police chiefs say. It’s what they always say.
But there is a puzzle. Why is it that in a job that attracts good people for the best of reasons are there so many bad ones? Why are the vetting systems never good enough? Women have been trying to tell us. It is exactly these places — these professions filled with our best — that most attract monsters. It allows them to do their secret work, preying on the most vulnerable, and it gives them a cloak too: the uniform of the good person. It gives them access and control in the very system designed to find them and stop them. It’s the perfect crime.
Women have been trying to tell us. But which women? I was struck by the clarity and perception with which Patsy Stevenson spoke about this on LBC. She had been arrested with great force at the Sarah Everard protest — she had been held to the ground by police officers, but someone had captured the moment on camera, meaning her face became the face of the incident.
Perhaps the reason this got attention in the first place, she explained patiently, is because she was white. She was a young professional white woman. Other women have been trying to tell us about this for years. But we haven’t listened.
Now we know, the police say. We will make our vetting system better. There must be a way to sort the vetting system — make it air tight, so this can never happen again. Before we weren’t completely aware of the problem, but we can use this information to solve it.
There’s another puzzle. Why in a job that attracts good people — and there are many more good people than monsters — and trains these people for years specifically to recognise criminals, what they do and how they operate, is the vetting system so very bad? And why do these monsters walk among them undetected?
It’s a mystery. Or is it?
Of course there are lots of possible explanations. It could be that once you are in a team with a strong reason to bond and a mission you believe in, you are willing to overlook behaviour among your team you would not in other places. Or it could be that a life spent studying the behaviour of those who commit crimes have actually made the police more broad minded about letting people with a history of crime into the force — some people, they might reason, can be redeemed if they just have something more to do, a mission they can believe it.
And so despite those years of traning and the attempts at safeguarding, yet again and again in these forces you see this cultural problem. Something is very wrong in the police.
Those in charge of the country’s biggest police forces — including the Met — have their work cut out like never before. They must fix this insidious and subtly difficult problem to restore public trust. In particular the new Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has the task of a lifetime on his hands. These police commisioners must prove themselves equal to this challenge. They would do well to start by listening to women.
