Are the police more bothered about offensive comments by female officers than actual abuse by male officers?

I wrote for yesterday’s Times about the catalogue of police failures that left Simon Levy free to murder two women last year, and the sharp contrast between the institutionally-lax attitude police forces seem to have towards male officers who stand accused of abusing women, and an experienced female detective who found herself summarily dismissed for gross misconduct as a result of alleged comments about men, most of which she denies making. I want to expand on those thoughts here.

It is enraging to read about how Levy evaded justice in a way that meant he could go onto kill women. To be fair to the police, the courts and the crown prosecution service also have a lot to answer for: despite committing multiple sexual assaults on public transport, Levy was repeatedly bailed, and was extraordinarily released early from prison halfway through a sentence for sexual assault, despite having sexually assaulted a female prison officer. But the Met and the British Transport Police repeatedly failed to properly follow up and investigate Levy’s crimes, and the Met inexpliably downgraded him from a high- to a medium-risk sex offender on his release from prison.

The case suggests that years on from horrific Met failures that enabled one of its serving officers to murder Sarah Everard, and John Worboys to carry on raping from his black cab, there are still parts of the police that do not understand patterns of male sexual violence, and the way in which some rapists and murderers progress from sexual assaults to more crimes like rape and murder.

There is also ample evidence that the police have not got much better - if at all - at rooting out domestic abusers from within their own ranks. Some of the cultural problems in policing will be a product of the people it naturally attracts: plenty of decent folk who are motivated by keeping our streets safe, but also bad men who want the domination, power and control that policing can offer. How did a murderer and rapist like Wayne Couzens end up in the police force? First, because the police are not good enough at rooting these men out through the recruitment process. And second, because there is not a culture where unacceptable behaviour by serving officers is uniformly reported by their peers and seniors. Couzens was nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by his colleagues because of his attitudes towards women. Research by charities such as the Centre for Women’s Justice and Refuge highlight just how bad the police still are at disciplining men within their own ranks who are accused of abusing women. In fact, when female police officers are reporting their male police officer partners, it is they who are sometimes victimised and punished by others in the force.

There is no question that women are still being failed by the police, and that is partly underpinned by a failure of the police to identify risky behaviour - and ultimately, criminal activity that involves violence against women and children - by its own male officers. It is very difficult, then, to set this against the way Northumbria police have in my view ruthlessly pursued an experienced female detective constable, who has just been summarily dismissed by gross misconduct panel for allegedly offensive comments aimed at men.

Rachel Fletcher’s misconduct hearing was covered by the excellent Tribunal Tweets. Her barrister was Naomi Cunningham.

Fletcher was a detective who specialises in safeguarding who has helped to put a prolific child sex abuser behind bars. She knows better than most police officers about the nature of male violence against women and children. She was accused of a number of inappropriate comments at work, including:

• Joking at work about imposing a curfew on men to prevent rapes from happening, which she admits. Many a feminist might think - so what? Are male colleagues really so thin-skinned they cannot tolerate a satirical joke about the fact that almost all criminal violence in society - in particular, sexual violence - is perpetrated by men? Why is Fletcher being punished for this kind of comment, when it took an undercover Panorama investigation last year to lead to the police taking any action at all against grossly misogynist comments at Charing Cross police station?

• Commenting at work that ‘all men are rapists’. Fletcher denies this, saying she said ‘all rapists are men’. On that point, she is absolutely correct. All rapists are men. If any of her male colleagues have a problem with that fact, what on earth are they doing in the police force?

• Referring to men who identify as female as ‘cocks in frocks’. Fletcher denies she said this too, though she did robustly challenge unlawful national police guidance that was developed by none other than the chief constable of Northumbria police - and since revised in the wake of the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment - that implied female officers must strip search male suspects who identify as female. This is a recipe for unlawful sexual assault of female officers at work, it was a horrific piece of guidance from a misogynist institution that does not value the rights and dignity of its female officers, and Fletcher was absolutely correct to challenge it. Fletcher does acknowledge she has however used arguably crass language of the sort that is commonly used by colleagues working in her area.

Fletcher very plausibly believes that she has been scapegoated because she refused to go along with the guidance written by the chief constable of her force on strip searching. Read case studies from the Centre for Women’s Justice on female officers who report male officers for abuse, and you can how in some parts of the police, women are victimised for raising concerns relating to safeguarding. She is right to be concerned that this could be what happened here.

This will now be tested through the courts: Fletcher is suing the police for discrimination and victimisation in the employment tribunal. She has a fundraiser page and you can watch her recent interview with Josh Howie on Free Speech Nation here.

For me it says it all that police management brutally ejected a gender-critical female officer committed to putting male sex offenders, including those who target children, behind bars. Yet Centre for Women’s Justice research shows there still appear to be male officers who get away with actually abusing women and whose police careers suffer little, if any, consequence. Are the police still institutionally misogynist? You bet they are.