Is the Met ROTTEN TO THE CORE?

A killer in the ranks. A Peeping Tom in charge of a rape unit. Box-ticking bosses. So, asks a detective who was driven out...

What is going on with the Metropolitan Police? The largest force in the country has been rocked by a series of shocking scandals, most notoriously the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens and the 17-year campaign of rape and sexual abuse carried out by David Carrick.

Red flags had been raised about the behaviour of both men but were ignored. Meanwhile, it’s becoming hard to keep track of the number of serving officers under investigation for posting vile misogynistic, racist or homophobic abuse on social media. Are there just a lot of bad apples, or is the whole system rotten to the core?

One person well qualified to comment is Jess McDonald. She had always been fascinated by stories of true crime, and in 2018 she became part of the first intake of 100 recruits to the Direct Entry Scheme, a recruitment experiment designed to attract graduates into the Met with the promise that they would begin their careers as detectives without having to spend time in uniform first.

After only five months of intensive training, McDonald was thrown into the deep end as a member of a Community Safeguarding Unit (CSU) in East London. What community safeguarding boils down to is domestic abuse, and McDonald’s description of the people she encounters is vivid and harrowing.

Early in her career she is asked to keep an eye on two little girls who she finds sitting on the floor of the police station giggling and gorging themselves on snacks.

What the girls don’t know is that their father has been arrested for murdering their mother and that their childhoods are effectively over.

McDonald was determined to make a difference but the odds were stacked against her. The workload was overwhelming, and she likens her job to ‘fighting a raging fire with a small hand-held water pistol’.

One of the problems she identifies is that the very nature of her work meant it fell into a kind of no-man’s-land between police and social work – and, as she pointedly observes, there isn’t enough money for either.

She also felt constricted by the box-ticking mentality of her superiors. ‘You’ve done your bit,’ she was told when she asked to be allowed to continue working on a particularly worrying case that wasn’t being followed up.

When she protested about having to make what she considered to be pointless arrests, she was told: ‘It’s not so much what we’re doing, it’s what we’re seen to be doing.’

But it’s not just a question of individual attitudes. She thinks there is a deeper, structural problem with the criminal justice system. The police, she says, are ‘victim-focused’, whereas the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is only interested in pursuing cases that have a probability of conviction. McDonald claims that the CPS’s charging standards are ‘inherently misogynistic’. It’s a serious allegation, but the bare statistics strongly suggest that the system is dysfunctional: in 2021 only 1.3 per cent of the 67,125 rapes reported to the Met resulted in prosecution.

One prosecution that was pursued involved a friend of hers who caught a superior officer taking photos of her in the shower on his phone.

Two things are especially shocking about the case.

One is that the officer was suspended on full pay for the two years it took to come to court, costing the taxpayer a six-figure sum. The other is that the man in question had just been appointed to head a unit investigating rape allegations. It takes guts for victims of sexual abuse to come forward, and many women decide that it isn’t worth the bother. Another of McDonald’s friends, who was groped by her sergeant, admitted frankly that she didn’t want to ‘cause trouble’.

It’s perhaps surprising that although McDonald decries what she calls a ‘culture of silence’, she concludes that the Met is moving in the right direction.

In the end it wasn’t sexual harassment but bullying that forced McDonald to quit. She was warned by a sympathetic colleague that her boss was out to get her but she wasn’t prepared for the vindictiveness that followed. The man spiked her chances of moving on to a better job by writing a damning appraisal and openly boasting that he’d ‘just destroyed a direct entrant’. The senior officer who reviewed her record found that it was exemplary and that the criticisms were unjust, but by then McDonald had had enough.

So, too, had most of the other eager recruits who’d signed up with her in 2018. At the time of writing her book, McDonald states that only four of her original class were still working as police officers.

It’s a depressing story because McDonald is exactly the kind of committed, intelligent officer the police force needs.

It also hammers home how urgently the whole criminal justice system is in need of reform.

‘A colleague caught a superior officer taking photos of her in the shower’