Metropolitan Police: Misogyny and Sexual Harassment

Diane Abbott Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on obtaining this debate. It is appropriate that we are having it on International Women’s Day.

Sadly, concerns about the level and extent of sexism and misogyny in the Metropolitan police are not new. The culture of the Metropolitan police and how they interact with the public has been of concern for many decades. I want to stress that saying that misogyny is endemic in the Metropolitan police force—as I believe it is—is not the same as saying that every single Metropolitan police officer is a misogynist. However, misogyny is too deeply embedded in the Metropolitan police force to ignore. There are too many examples of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia for the force to be excused, as it very often is, as just having a few bad apples.

It was interesting to read an interview with Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, who is now the national lead for violence against women and girls for the National Police Chiefs Council. She said that this idea that it is a “few bad apples” is wrong and that policing, like other jobs with access to power, could attract people who wanted to

“use their power in a corrupt and criminal way.”

She added:

“There will be some attracted into working in policing, because of the powers that it offers them, the powers to exert and coerce other people, particularly vulnerable individuals. I think we shouldn’t be naive to that”.

We saw the spectacle of the now-departed Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, who seemed to have difficulty in admitting that there was any problem at all, let alone to be willing to do anything about it. In response to her resignation, Ken Marsh declared he had no confidence in the London Mayor, but presumably he has every confidence in himself and his members. That comes despite the tally of awful incidents, which other Members have touched on. That includes, but is not confined to, the terrible death of Sarah Everard, the brutal treatment of the women who attended the vigil in her honour, and the culture that was revealed among police colleagues of Wayne Couzens, who raped and murdered her.

There are, of course, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, whose deaths were not initially investigated sufficiently by the Metropolitan Police Service, as their mother would argue. To add insult to injury, two police officers tasked with guarding their bodies took photographs of themselves with the bodies and shared them online among their colleagues.

Then there is the scandal of the culture at Charing Cross police station, which colleagues have touched on, and the treatment of one of my constituents at Stoke Newington police station, although I understand that she is also a Nottingham resident. The IOPC said that the Charing Cross report illustrates an ugly truth. Much of the investigation concerned messages passed between police officers on social media. The messages include:

“You ever slapped your missus? Makes them love you more.”

“I would happily rape you.”

“Getting a woman into bed is like spreading butter. It can be done with a bit of effort using a credit card, but it’s quicker and easier just to use a knife.”

It is worth noting that the messages were not just grossly sexist; they were often racist. They spoke about “Somalian rats” and Muslim “fanatics”; there were references to Auschwitz; and the word “gay” was used as an insult. Those findings are bad enough, but the scale of bigotry will never be known because the police officers who were being investigated deliberately deleted material relevant to the investigation.

In my constituency, the Metropolitan police had to apologise and pay compensation to a completely innocent woman, Dr Konstancja Duff, whom they arrested and strip-searched. As Members have heard, she was only trying to help a 15-year-old child with a Know Your Rights card. It is worth hearing how Dr Duff described her experience:

“I was pinned to the floor of a cell by three female officers. I had my hands cuffed behind my back and my legs tied together while they cut off my clothes with scissors. They ripped out my earrings, grabbed my breasts roughly while turning me over, and even touched me between my legs, apparently looking for genital piercings”

—remember, this is a completely innocent woman. She continued:

“During the search, I could hear them talking with male officers who were standing by the open door.”

Their derogatory comments included,

“Treat her like a terrorist, I don’t care”

and

“What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers”.

All of that was caught on CCTV. It took Dr Duff nine years to get justice, and she is an educated and relatively confident woman. How many other women are subjected to Metropolitan police sexism who do not have the confidence to pursue a civil claim? How can a police force that seems to be saturated in sexism identify and stop the next PC Couzens?

The IOPC said about Charing Cross police station:

“A culture developed that made it difficult to challenge oppressive comments and behaviour, and an environment that was hostile and felt unsafe for those who were the direct or indirect targets of the discrimination.”

Sadly, that has been the culture of too much of the Metropolitan police for too long. Change is long overdue. The new commissioner must be a reforming one and must not attempt to conduct business as usual or bring in merely cosmetic changes. The reform must be root and branch. Women—not just in London, but all over the country—depend on it.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins. I too congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important debate on International Women’s Day. I want to start with a quick reflection on our meeting yesterday with some of the families of sisters, mothers and daughters who have been murdered at the hands of men. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) brought them to Parliament. What struck me was how many different errors had been made across the system in many of those murders. There was a woman who had a history of domestic abuse, but who had had two glasses of wine, so the man was tried for manslaughter not murder because there was an assumption that she was in some way responsible for what happened to her. There was also somebody who was pushed out of a high block of flats and killed, but the man has not been charged, even though, again, there was a history of domestic abuse, because the assumption was that she may have had some drugs and it was all her own fault.

What strikes me about today’s debate is that when we talk about misogyny and sexual harassment in the police force, it affects not just those who were affected immediately by that incident, but the way we do policing across the board. There are so many cases where assumptions have been made about women because of ingrained misogyny and sexism and where that has led to them being murdered by their partners, when those partners should have been locked up years before. People are getting away with murder when they should be locked up, because of how the police are thinking about things and approaching their investigations. This is therefore an incredibly important debate.

We have seen a series of issues in the Met police over the last year, which sadly do not just touch on misogyny but go wider. Obviously, we had the events of last year and the horrific murder of Sarah, and others have spoken of what happened in the case of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. We have had the Daniel Morgan inquiry, which suggested institutional corruption in the Metropolitan police, and the Stephen Port inquiry, which, although inconclusive, certainly showed unconscious bias against people who are gay, and where assumptions were again made about their deaths. There are clearly cultural problems in the force.

Others have made the point that the problem goes beyond the Metropolitan police, and that is important because if we focus just on the Met, we miss problems across the country. There have been instances of misogyny and sexual violence in other forces, such as West Mercia and Dorset. We have seen the inappropriate use of social media in Sussex, Hampshire, Leicestershire and Police Scotland, so these issues are not confined to the Met. There is also a wider problem of violence against women and girls, which hon. Members have touched on today, including the very low level of prosecutions for rape and the number of women who just walk away from the system because they cannot cope with the delays and problems we have seen.

I want to focus on some of the solutions, and a lot of them come from Operation Hotton, which we have talked about. What is interesting is not just how it identified bullying, aggressive behaviour, discrimination, toxic masculinity and the banter used to excuse offensive behaviour, but its focus on the way the force was structured, which enabled that misogyny to occur. It focused on the nature of the work—the shift patterns, the isolation and this business of people acting up in an unofficial capacity, so that behaviours were completely unchallenged, which is key to some of the reforms we need to see.

We also heard of demeaning and intimidating actions towards police officers on probation, such as beckoning them with a bell or threatening to cut their hair or take their belongings; officers being shouted at; and women being sexually harassed or treated as the “weary female” when they raise issues. These things are all to do with leadership and management within the force, as well as the misogyny. I know we are talking about misogyny and sexual harassment, but the report also showed horrific racism and homophobia. It was the culture that enabled horrific behaviour across the board, and that is what we need to look at.

My questions for the Minister are therefore around what is going to be done about this. I think that everybody here thinks that something needs to be done. The Government have set up a couple of inquiries, which I am sure the Minister will talk about, but we need to go further and faster, and act more. With policing issues, the Home Office sometimes has a tendency to say, “This is a terrible thing and must not happen,” but it has a key role in leading a change in approach from the top, to make sure that these things do not continue.

We need to look at how we vet police officers. The 250-page document on how we vet them shows that they are vetted for their propensity to be blackmailed: do they have problems with their finances, or problems that would allow them to be blackmailed? The vetting is not good enough on who they are, what they have said on social media over the last five years, what they think and whether they should be with vulnerable people. Our vetting needs to be looked at.

Police training needs to be overhauled. Officers need ongoing training throughout their careers, including on anti-racism and on tackling violence against women and girls. When officers are first trained, they are not specifically trained on violence against women and girls, and we think they should be. We also need to end the inappropriate use of social media, which has come up time and again in all the incidents in the Met. The Government should look at taking action against those private WhatsApp messages.

We have the Dame Angiolini inquiry. The Labour party has called for it to be on a statutory footing, so that it has the powers it needs to go everywhere it needs to go. I ask the Minister to look at that.

[Ms Abbott]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it should be clearer to serving police officers that engaging in misogynistic or racist behaviour will be a bar to recruitment? Of the officers involved in the Charing Cross scandal, two have already been promoted.

[Sarah Jones]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I have talked to the police about that issue and about whether misconduct proceedings, which I was about to come to, need to be improved.

Swift action needs to be taken. When there is misconduct, there are quite a lot of delays in the process. We need to make sure that there are clear management processes to stop misconduct being seen as “banter”. If someone is misogynistic—if it is clear from their social media what their views are—they have no place in the police. We hold our police to higher standards than other professions—quite rightly. That is what the police want; they want to be held to those standards, because they want policing by consent. They need the public to trust them, and that is what they would call for, too. We also need to look at whistleblowing procedures. I have spoken to police officers who say, “We have quite a good whistleblowing procedure, because some people come forward.” Actually, it is not working as it should, and we need to look at it again.

There are wider issues that would help the culture of the police, such as having specialist rape and sexual assault units in each police force, so that the force is more expert. We need to look at the number of women in policing. Only a third of Metropolitan police officers are women, and that changes the culture. As we know, and as hon. Members have said today, having more women in Parliament means that we have better debates, better policy making and better laws. In the same way, the Metropolitan police and other police forces would be better with more women.

There are many other issues we could talk about. My main point is that there are a series of practical actions that need to be taken—not just in the Met, but beyond—and it is the Government’s role to look at those. I thank all the women who have contributed, and our honourable male contributor, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I am honoured to be in a room of very powerful women whom I admire hugely and who have all made, in their own ways, excellent contributions today. They reflect how the House of Commons is shifting towards more powerful women and a better conversation. We need to make sure that the Metropolitan police and the wider police force do the same.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Abbott]

Does the Minister agree that in the recent past it has been very challenging for women to join the police force? I was very struck by a senior female police officer who told me that when she joined, not so long ago, part of the initiation ritual for new woman police officers was to drop their skirt and have another police officer stamp on their bottom the date on which they joined the police force. That culture is not so long in the past.

[Rachel Maclean]

We all share horror at that and the other incidents referenced by the hon. Member for Richmond Park . That is why we are taking the steps I am about to set out. We must remember that during the coronavirus pandemic in particular the police faced an unenviable task, which for the most part they approached with skill and professionalism. I know that from conversations with my local force in Redditch and I want to pay tribute to them as well. They had to help to enforce the rules the Government introduced with one crucial objective in mind: to save lives.

Members referenced the report published last month by the IOPC, which looked into the bullying and discrimination in Charing Cross police station. Those findings were shocking. The report described behaviour that is unacceptable and depicted an environment where such conduct was commonplace amid what can only be described as a toxic culture where leadership was sorely lacking. Policing and the Met must do better, and we are absolutely committed to raising the bar.

As the public would expect, when officers are found to have committed gross misconduct and are dismissed, they cannot re-join policing. We are also ensuring that initial police recruitment vetting practices carried out in each force, to which the hon. Member for Croydon Central referred, are rigorous. The assessment process addresses a candidate’s suitability for the role of police officer, including testing against core behaviours and values. When officers move force, they are re-vetted.

Members rightly pointed to problems with those processes, so I will talk about what the Government and the Met are doing. Restoring confidence is not just about how individuals are disciplined and vetted. It is also about making sure the kind of culture flagged up in the report is not allowed to take root. It is about ensuring those rotten elements in policing are rooted out and removed. We are taking action to address the issues we established the Angiolini inquiry, which started on 31 January. Obviously, Dame Elish has focused on the particular case of Sarah Everard’s killer, but she will consider whether the culture and places where he worked meant that alarm bells did not ring earlier. She will present the findings of that phase of the review to the Home Secretary later this year. In the second phase of the inquiry, we expect a light to be shone on wider issues across policing, including workplace cultures.

In October 2021, the MPS announced that it had commissioned Baroness Louise Casey of Blackstock to lead an independent and far-reaching review into standards of behaviour. She will also assess the extent to which the force’s current leadership, recruitment, vetting, training, communications and other practices effectively reinforce the standards the public so rightly expect.

Further, the Home Secretary has requested that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services—HMICFRS—inspects forces across England and Wales to judge their vetting in counter-corruption capabilities. We specifically asked the body to look at how forces identify and deal with misogyny and sexism in the workplace. We are working closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council to ensure professional standards in social media use for police officers—another important issue.