The abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in 2021 caused an outpouring of grief, fear and rage. The reaction was compounded when it emerged that Wayne Couzens, who is serving a whole-life term in prison, had previously committed sexual offences that the police had ignored.
In her latest report on these events, Lady Angiolini frames sexually motivated crimes against women in public places as a “whole-society problem”. She exposes a shocking lack of action on earlier recommendations and reveals that basic facts, such as how many women each year are sexually assaulted or raped in public in England or Wales, are not in any single dataset.
The report recommends a national rollout of Project Vigilant, which protects women in the night-time economy, and Operation Soteria, which raises standards in rape and sexual assault investigations. Alongside a “clear-sighted and unrelenting” focus on predators, it rightly highlights early intervention and prevention, including education work with boys. Other recommendations include a clearer focus on women’s safety in planning rules and a call for ministers to respond more fully to the independent review on pornography.
Detailed recommendations on police recruitment, culture and policy will come later, as will findings about David Carrick, the former police officer convicted of 50 rapes. But police chiefs and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, must set out their responses to what has been uncovered so far. While Couzens and Carrick are in prison, we already know of grave shortcomings in the way that complaints against both men were handled by colleagues. While individuals must be held accountable whenever possible, systems and policies also need to change.
The deadly consequences of policing’s culture of impunity are also made clear in a new report on the Hillsborough disaster. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that 12 officers would have faced disciplinary cases of gross misconduct if they had not retired or died. Those named include Peter Wright, who was chief constable of South Yorkshire police in 1989 and responsible for fans’ safety, and officers who worked for the West Midlands force that failed to investigate properly the police’s role in the deaths of 97 people and the cover-up that followed.
While the 14 years taken by the IOPC to produce its report is hard to understand, by far the most damaging delay was in the two decades after the disaster. In the end it took the non-legal process known as the Hillsborough Independent Panel to get to the truth about police lies. The latest findings provide further backing for the new duty of candour being placed on public servants. Had this been in place at the time, police officers could have been penalised for not being open and honest. But while this vindication of their efforts has been welcomed by campaigners, it does not dispel their fury that not a single one of the officers involved has been convicted of a criminal offence, or faced disciplinary proceedings when they were serving.
What these two reports, issued on the same day, make brutally obvious is that the culture as well as laws governing policing must be overhauled. Accountability must become a guiding principle. It should not be up to traumatised families to ensure that deaths like those of the Hillsborough victims and Sarah Everard can never happen again.
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