“Kelly” joined the Metropolitan Police in 1984. As a young constable, she recalls working nights with an officer who was openly regarded as “a known pervert”. His antics were seen as amusingly eccentric, rather than downright sinister. “We’d sit in our panda car,” Kelly tells me, “and announce it was time to change gear. I’d look down, and his erect dick would be out of his trousers. Of course, he expected me to touch it.” When I asked her how she responded, she said: “I told him to fuck off.”
Nothing was ever done about that officer. Kelly, generously in my view, thinks his behaviour was emblematic of wider societal attitudes to women, in a force staffed by men who grew up in the late Fifties and early Sixties. By the time I joined the police, in the early Nineties, things had changed. My female colleagues reported how, yes, some of their fellow officers might “try it on” — but few suffered anything like Kelly’s ordeal. Yet, during my service, I saw a recurring problem with harassment. More than once, this involved officers who thought their rank protected them from scrutiny.
For the Metropolitan Police — Britain’s largest force — internal discipline means playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. In a sense, that comes with the territory. From false overtime claims to selling information to criminals, policing offers temptations for men and women hungry for fruit from the poisoned tree. Many officers taking this path drift down it due to financial or personal troubles. Many have issues with performance and attendance. This often overlaps: Wayne Couzens, for instance, was horribly in debt. This is usually a red flag for anti-corruption investigators.
Against all this are those officers patrolling the orchards where poisoned trees grow — the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), the “AC12” of fictional Line of Duty fame. DPS, to the average copper, is an unwelcome mixture between HR and Darth Vader. After joining DPS, where I ultimately served for five years, my invitations to office lunches and retirement drinks dropped off a cliff. At a police social club, I was once introduced to a retired detective. My posting to DPS came up in conversation. “The Funny Firm?” he growled. “I didn’t talk to those cunts when I was in the job, and I’m not talking to them now.” Then he walked off.
Policing, as I often say, isn’t a popularity competition. What happens, though, when those policing the police pluck an apple from the poisoned tree? One recent case provides a shocking example of what happens when sexual misconduct and internal affairs collide. Earlier this week, five Met officers were arrested for allegedly suppressing allegations of sexual assault against a senior officer by a junior colleague. One is a detective inspector — from the DPS.
This raises difficult questions. Has the Met, after the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick scandals, adequately dealt with issues concerning sexual misconduct? I’m being rhetorical here: it clearly hasn’t. The report by the Government’s roving inquisitor of choice, Baroness Casey, was excoriating about New Scotland Yard’s culture of sexism. Then there’s the DPS itself. Whatever the alleged cover up says about policing’s ability to self-regulate, it likely isn’t good. Nor are these problems limited to London. To a lesser or greater extent, every force has similar problems. The complicity of officers, especially in Northern English forces, in the grooming scandal is only beginning to come to light — but I suspect the worst is yet to come.
During my own stint at DPS, I worked on proactive operations against corrupt officers. I saw firsthand how clunky and dysfunctional police misconduct procedures are. One example among many is how policing complicates what should be straightforward HR matters — taking a work car home without authorisation or throwing a sickie — by treating trifles like potential crimes. Some of these problems are cultural and structural, “making the job work” by cutting cumbersome procedural corners. Others are legal, such as the thicket of human rights, equality and employment laws governing poor performance.
Yet when it comes to allegations of sexual assault, policing is particularly vulnerable. Like other traditionally male-dominated professions, the police has a tradition of macho, laddish culture. Then there’s the dynamic of rank and hierarchies, alongside a long and stressful working environment. It’s no surprise many police marriages are volatile, with many ending in divorce. Workplace affairs aren’t uncommon. As a DPS officer, I would log onto the intelligence system on a Monday morning, which would invariably reveal officers arrested for domestic disturbances, occasionally by over-enthusiastic county cops with no great affection for the Met. The November-to-January complaints generated by police Christmas parties constituted a DPS crime hotspot. Indeed, the alleged misconduct in that Met case supposedly happened at a festive drinks.
“Like other traditionally male-dominated professions, the police has a tradition of macho, laddish culture.”
Despite these cultural pressures, of course, we rightly hold police officers to a higher standard. Managing coppers therefore requires strong line management — what we used to call leadership. Those line managers require unwavering support from their seniors too. This is where, too often, the system fails. At this point, the Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s dictum springs to mind: “I’ve never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” The new cohort of police leaders, many of whom are women, talk a good job on change. Yet they struggle to deliver, preferring to attend conferences and giving speeches, rather than work the hard yards by developing a culture of leadership, one based on operational experience rather than virtue-signalling.
I recall a conversation with another female colleague, a retired detective inspector. A tough woman, a proud daughter of Essex. We were discussing “handsy” male officers. The former detective inspector had moved to a management role in the private sector. “It’s so bloody simple compared to the police,” she told me. “A bloke says or does something out of order to a female colleague. We either reprimand or sack him, depending on the circumstances. In the police, we can’t see the wood for the trees, everything becomes a major investigation.” Even today, despite numerous overhauls, policing’s bastardised misconduct apparatus retains paramilitary elements, with officers scurrying off for the job’s version of a court martial. I’ll never forget watching a constable vomit over his tunic on Vauxhall Bridge, shortly before his Central Discipline Board. Neither are police officers HR managers, which is possibly why minor, and not so minor, transgressions are sometimes ignored.
As for actual police HR, in my experience most staff were perfectly competent, albeit more focused on performance than actual misconduct (though there were outliers: including one woman known as “Claymore Mine” because she was anti-personnel). Then HR was cut like everything else, outsourced to contractors trying to manage complex cases via a telephone help desk. And so officers distrust HR decision-making, especially when some do experience tactical and malicious complaints, including from colleagues. This is why many argue complaints deserve forensic scrutiny for matters which — say in a supermarket — would be dealt with by HR. It is in this gap where potential sex offenders fester and, like Carrick, prosper.
Another issue is one that dogs other areas of policing. Dealing with workplace misconduct is DPS’s version of neighbourhood policing. And, like neighbourhood policing, it’s something of a Cinderella, devolved to local support teams. The real focus, during my time on DPS, was on organised crime, corruption and the most serious cases of misconduct. Our tactics and methods were seen as disproportionate. In the few cases where we proposed covert operations against officers accused of sexual misbehaviour, managers often considered them too risky. I also worked with coppers who, in confidence, reported wrongdoing. Most refused to provide written evidence for criminal proceedings. That culture will only change when leaders lead by example.
So what can the Met realistically do? After the Wayne Couzens scandal, it sought to investigate what it considered a toxic culture by setting up a new squad. “Forming a new squad” is a perennial way for police managers to pour old wine into new bottles. A new confidential reporting system and “WhatsApp squad” is all very well, but if the mechanism for following up on intelligence doesn’t work then what’s the point? The Met’s new squads will find some scalps. There’s certainly no shortage of low-hanging fruit. I doubt, however, that they will catch, identify or deter the worst offenders without a more intrusive strategy, of the sort the Met launched in the Nineties to identify racism.
The Met is in a genuine bind. Ten years of scorched-earth austerity, followed by a rapid uplift of staff, has created a young, inexperienced workforce led by young, inexperienced sergeants and inspectors. To save on training costs, meanwhile, the Met backfilled specialist posts like firearms from other forces. I suspect this is how Wayne Couzens, who came from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (responsible for guarding power stations) ended up serving on the Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection Group. And yet, still, nothing changes.
Sexism, like racism, exists in wider society. And some of that will, inevitably, percolate into the police. There, the problem becomes horribly magnified. The answers, then, are both tough and unglamorous. They involve cash-strapped forces investing in better recruitment, vetting and training. That would help make policing a more attractive career, widening the pool of quality candidates: urgent enough when some officers now need English lessons before they can even take a statement. And, yes, constant vigilance is needed too. As my superintendent on DPS used to say, “sometimes, you have to nail the crow to the barn door, to serve as a warning to the others.” Perhaps it’s time for police officers, especially those at the top, to issue their sergeants with hammers and nails.
