The Met have released the most incredible statement, titled
Our response to issues raised by the crimes of Wayne Couzens. It includes some of the measures they have introduced,
• We will soon publish a new strategy for tackling violence against women and girls. This will outline how we will prioritise action against sexual and violent predatory offenders.
• We have established specialist Predatory Offender Units and since last November they have arrested more than 2,000 suspects for domestic abuse, sex offences and for child abuse.
• The Met is growing and we are deploying 650 new officers into busy public places, including those where women and girls often lack confidence that they are safe.
• We are also stepping up reassurance patrols and providing an increased police presence where it is most needed by identifying key “hotspot” locations for offences of violence and harassment. We are allocating officers solely for patrol in those areas.
• Understanding the concerns of women in London is really important to us and we are undertaking a range of activity so we can better listen and respond.
New officers and increased police presence really misses the point. When you've made people fearful of the police, putting more of them on the street doesn't help.
We only want the best of the best in the Met and we will always act when our employees fall below the standards we and the public expect and erode the trust we depend upon. [my emphasis]
I cannot believe they actually wrote that and made it public. I actually laughed out loud when I read it and am still in awe at the audacity to make a statement like that. It's blatant bollocks.
We are reviewing our crime screening process in respect of indecent exposure. We want to better understand the information we have as part of our approach to the identification and policing of crime hotspots.
We believe this is an under-reported crime.
No sh.t.
No admission that the reason it's so under-reported is that the police rarely do anything so why waste our time.
[If] you do find yourself in an interaction with a sole [plain clothes] police officer and you are on your own, it is entirely reasonable for you to seek further reassurance of that officer’s identity and intentions. Our advice is to ask some very searching questions of that officer:
- Where are your colleagues?
- Where have you come from?
- Why are you here?
- Exactly why are you stopping or talking to me?
If this is what they consider "very searching questions" then I'm honestly impressed they manage to successfully get information out of anyone.
Try to seek some independent verification of what they say, if they have a radio ask to hear the voice of the operator, even ask to speak through the radio to the operator to say who you are and for them to verify you are with a genuine officer, acting legitimately.
And, as many people on twitter are pointing out, it's unlikely these measures would have saved Sarah. The problem isn't with rapists pretending to be police officers, it's that rapists
are police officers. Couzens was a genuine officer, "arresting" Sarah for breaking a genuine (if badly written) law. Maybe an operator would ask why he was arresting someone for breaching covid regulations when he wasn't on his shift but maybe they'd just think he was being a diligent officer, who knows.
They end with the advice that
Bagpuss has already flagged. Anyone who has ever caught a bus knows the great glee with which bus drivers will ignore anyone running for them, even if they're almost at the stop. The idea that bus drivers will stop for someone waving at them nowhere near a stop is absolutely laughable.
I completely agree with Bagpuss that they are flailing. They are not looking at Couzens as emblematic of a culture that degrades and disregards women but as a "bad apple" who gives the rest of them a bad name. They don't want to admit their culpability, either in having a vetting and hiring process that allowed a man like him to be allowed to become a police officer or in the way they dismiss "low level" sexual crimes as not worth investigating. If the indecent exposure cases had been investigated properly then chances are he'd have not been allowed to become a Met officer. And even if he was (and I'm cynical enough to believe that they wouldn't have been deemed 'serious' enough to stop him being hired) the judge wouldn't have been able to use "his hitherto good character" as a mitigating factor in his sentencing or say that he "has no prior previous convictions".
The fact that "some of his colleagues have spoken supportively of him" despite him pleading guilty to a heinous crime really appals me. I can see people being shocked or in disbelief but to actually speak supportively of him for the judge to make note of it is a step too far. How on earth is any woman supposed to trust an organisation who has members who will do that? He had a private WhatsApp group with other officers that involved "
homophobic, sexist and racist messages". This speaks to a culture that sees this as acceptable. I don't blame his bosses for not knowing about this group but I do blame them for hiring people who think such groups are acceptable. I blame them for allowing a culture where sexism, homophobia and racism are unchallenged and allowed to flourish. And I don't see any indication that the Met, or any police force, is going to do anything about that.
