Met faces its MeToo moment with anger over attitude of officers

When a man followed Corrine Priest home from a London underground station in November last year, she thought she had a watertight case for the police. She had several minutes of video showing the man following and aggressively arguing with her and submitted it when she reported him.

More than four months on, Priest, a theatre performer from Hendon, north London, offers an example of how frustrating many British women find it to report such behaviour and violence to police. It was five weeks before an officer took a statement and Priest has had no indication there will be further action.

The common nature of such experiences has fuelled an upsurge in demands from British women for better protection from a police and criminal justice system that many believe is growing worse at helping harassed, assaulted and murdered women.

The movement follows the murder earlier this month of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman who disappeared while walking home to Brixton, south London, from a friend’s house in nearby Battersea. Police have charged Wayne Couzens, 48, with her alleged kidnap and murder.

The fact that the man accused of killing Everard is a serving police officer has left London’s Metropolitan police facing its biggest crisis in years.

Its handling of a vigil for Everard on Saturday on Clapham Common, south London, compounded the sense of outrage, with officers accused of using heavy-handed tactics to try and disperse a large crowd that had turned out to pay their respects.

Just six months after the force was criticised for the way it policed last year’s Black Lives Matter protests and accused of “over-policing black communities”, Dame Cressida Dick — its first ever female commissioner — has faced fresh calls to resign.

So far she has seemed determined to ride out the Met’s #MeToo moment — prime minister Boris Johnson said earlier this week he had confidence in her — but she still faces a challenging set of inquiries into the force’s handling of the vigil.

Lee Jasper, a former policing adviser to Ken Livingstone, ex-London Mayor, attributed the Met’s particular challenges to the policing philosophy of Stephen House, the force’s deputy commissioner for operations, which stresses the importance of tactics such as stopping and searching people, rather than building community relationships.

“He’s known for his no-nonsense approach to policing,” Jasper said.

Everard’s disappearance prompted thousands of women to post accounts on social media of attacks and harassment they had suffered and the steps they took. A report published this month by UN Women and YouGov, based on a survey of 1,000 women, found that 71 per cent of women in the UK had experienced sexual harassment in a public space. More than 95 per cent failed to report it, thinking it would produce no action.

Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, said the case had made many women think about how they kept themselves safe and their apprehension of walking alone.

“The feeling of vulnerability will encompass almost all women,” she said.

Priest said she had felt the onus was on her to press the police into action even though she was already coping with the trauma of falling victim to crime. The Metropolitan police said they had received Priest’s report, that there had been no arrests but that inquiries continued.

“I got the sense that, in order to get justice or be taken seriously, I needed to really push and be a nuisance, which I think is such a shame,” Priest said.

Jacobs said policing had improved in recent years but remained “variable” when it came to dealing with sexual harassment and violence. 

“The criminal justice system doesn’t work when it comes to sexual violence,” she said.

Emily Hunt experienced one key problem in 2015 when dealing with police after waking up in a hotel in Bethnal Green, east London, with no recollection of how she got there. While Hunt, a public relations executive, believes she was drugged and raped, she encountered, like many women, sceptical police officers.

“A police officer said, ‘Sometimes these things happen’,” Hunt recalled of her experience of reporting the offence. “‘You get a bit drunk’.”

According to Hunt, officers took no statements from people in the bar where she met her attacker and waited two weeks to take statements from people in the restaurant where she formed her last memories before the attack and in the hotel where she woke up.

A man, Christopher Killick, 40, from Brent, London, was last year convicted of taking a video of her naked in the hotel without her consent but insisted they had consensual sex. The Metropolitan police acknowledged it had received a complaint about its handling of the case but said it had not been upheld.

Hunt, who is writing a book about her experience, pointed to research by Lesley McMillan of Glasgow Caledonian University showing officers in one unnamed English police force believed women reporting rape were lying about it between 5 per cent and 90 per cent of the time. An analysis of their files suggested only 3.4 per cent of the allegations they received were fabricated.

“They spent their time investigating me to discredit me,” Hunt said of the police.

Caroline Criado-Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men, said women frequently experienced dismissive attitudes when reporting harassment.

“There’s anger that no one seems to care, wants to collect the data, or wants to stop it,” she said.

Both the Conservative government and opposition Labour party have touted plans to impose longer prison sentences for sexual violence. Nottinghamshire constabulary has started to record misogynistic abuse as a hate crime. A range of new offences have been introduced.

However, campaigners and academics have pointed out that, with conviction rates so low for most offences, longer sentences pose little deterrent.

Miranda Horvath, associate professor of forensic psychology at Middlesex university, argued a key helpful step might be to reconstitute specialist rape investigation teams, which many police forces have abandoned because of funding cuts and operational fashion.

“What is often neglected is specialist dedication to a particular role, upskilling to focus on one area of policing,” she said.

However, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, which campaigns for women’s rights, expressed the widespread frustration that the outcry following Everard’s death was following the same pattern as that which followed revelations in 2017 about sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein, the film producer.

When those revelations prompted the #MeToo movement, she said, men had also pleaded ignorance of what was happening, while police had called the attacks isolated incidents and politicians had pledged to address it.

“Women are furious that this is happening again,” Bates said.