Can the police in Britain be trusted? It’s a question increasingly asked because of the growing number of cases where police officers have been found guilty of wrongdoing.
Around one in 100 police officers in England and Wales faced criminal charges, including for sexual offences last year alone – an appalling statistic.
The kind of criminal charges faced by police officers can range from misconduct in a public office and sending grossly offensive messages on a public network to more serious offences including assault, sexual offences and even murder.
The new data comes amid a growing number of cases of serious criminality by officers. One example was former Met officer David Carrick, jailed for life after he raped, assaulted and inflicted “irretrievable destruction” on at least 12 women.
In 2021, another serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, used his police ID and handcuffs to kidnap, rape and murder 33-year-old Sarah Everard. Police missed clear chances to identify Couzens as a potential sex offender and a danger to women in the days, months and even years leading up to Everard’s murder.
In my book, the vast majority of serving police want, and do, a good job in trying to protect the public from criminals, but there are a growing number of bad apples and the problem is trying to identify and get rid of them before they do real harm.
So, what has gone wrong? I think the problem started more than a decade ago when the police force along with virtually every other aspect of everyday life in the UK were subject to Tory spending cuts.
Fewer coppers on the streets meant criminals believed they stood more chance of getting away with their crimes undetected. Fewer officers meant less crimes were investigated – and there were howls of protests when police said they were no longer able to investigate “minor” burglaries.
The government responded by allowing recruitment into the police forces around Britain. That got the numbers up, but resulted in more bad apples getting into uniforms and the number of police officers still in post having criminal records is staggering.
There’s an old saying “it takes a thief to catch a thief” but I´m sure that the British public would be far from happy to know that a police officer they may be talking to was a convicted thief, or worse.
What has prompted me to write this article is the appalling case of a young woman, under the influence of drugs, put in a cell, strip searched and left topless for hours, and for part of the time was unconscious., she believes she was drugged.
The next day she found signs of sexual injury and demanded CCTV footage. Some was provided but, surprise, surprise, some was missing. She believes the police are involved in a massive cover-up.
The case was highlighted by a special Sky News investigation last week. Incredibly the next day came news of the release of a man who had spent 17 years in jail for a rape he did not commit. He protested his innocence repeatedly, and this resulted in him spending many more years in jail. If he had admitted he had committed the offence and shown remorse he would have been released on licence years earlier. There should be an urgent review of this.
His incarceration was due to total police incompetence. A review finally revealed DNA on clothing from a totally different man.
I personally know of a man who broke up with his girlfriend who was so embittered she made up alligation after allegation that her ex had raped her. He would be arrested at all hours and questioned at police stations. It went on for months, until finally, police established that the woman was unstable and concluded she was making up the allegations. That should have been properly investigated far quicker.
Police have always had a huge task establishing fact from fiction and that’s why we need highly trained officers and experts behind the scenes to get it right first time and prevent miscarriages of justice – and of equal importance, enough of them to ensure that every crime is properly investigated.
In my career as a journalist I have known, and have had an excellent rapport with countless police of all ranks. But now I am going to share with you the time when I had to take on the Chief Constable and Chief Superintendent hell bent on seeing me out of my job.
I was in my mid-20s, recently taken charge of a district office, struggling to pay the mortgage and my first born was on her way. .
In my home town is a theatre with 20-minute car parking restriction outside. One evening the mayor attended the fist night and parked outside, as did several other drivers. An over-enthusiastic copper put parking tickets on all the cars, including the mayor’s.
Then I discovered the chief superintendent had dismissed the mayor’s ticket – perhaps they were in the same Masonic Lodge! Anyway, my news editor asked me to find out whether the chief super had dismissed the tickets of the other drivers., so I asked him.
His response was to say he would not answer me, but would if he received a letter from a local resident – stupid or what?
I asked the chairman of the local residents association if he would write a letter, which he did, but unbeknown to me he wrote under a pseudonym. The next thing that happened was the chief super summoned me to his office to tell me he had sent police to every house in the road given in the letter and the writer could not be found. He then accused me of writing the letter and told me he was talking to the Chief Constable to get me banned from every police station in the county.
This effectively would have ended my career. I protested I did not write the letter, but he did not want to listen.
In desperation I telephoned the residents association chairman and explained what had happened. He said he would call the Chief Constable and “rip him off a strip”. This he obviously did because my editor in chief called me to say the police had climbed down and would I pay a visit to the chief super and “make up!”
Well, I went to see him and told him he could have ruined my career. I asked him if he cared, and he said “no, I was determined to maintain the good name of the police and knew if I answered there would be problems.” Good name? Ha, ha!
Sadly, I was not the newspaper editor at that time. If I had been, the sorry saga would have been on the front page with the headline “Is this the sort of police force we want?”
Because, if senior police were prepared to callously stitch me up, just imagine what they would do to others.
The rank and file police in the station obviously knew what had been happening, and whenever I set foot in the station, I found they were all so very kind to me – so some good came from it, but I must have aged about 10 years!
