So many reviews, so much hand-wringing, yet misogyny in England and Wales’s police forces and impunity for offenders remains the norm
How do we get sexual predators out of the country’s police forces? It was one of the most urgent questions asked in 2021 when a serving police officer, PC Wayne Couzens, was charged with the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. In the first report of Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into this dreadful sequence of events, published in February last year, she made the eminently sensible recommendation that any individual with a caution or conviction for a sexual offence should be rejected during police vetting.
It seemed the very least that should happen, yet we’ve learned from Lady Angiolini’s second report this week that the recommendation has yet to be implemented. She reveals that it took 18 months after publication for police chiefs to agree a blanket ban on recruits who have convictions, and even then it wasn’t included in draft Home Office regulations issued in September this year.
Joan Smith was co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board from 2013-2021
