WILL WE EVER TRUST THE POLICE AGAIN?

Police: “The civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order.”

Wayne Couzens. David Carrick. Countless others who have failed to preserve the security a person in power should provide to the general public. A dark shadow has been cast over what it means to be a member of the Police in the UK over the past few years, and public trust is at its breaking point.

As someone who has read with disgust about atrocities against women, I, and many others who hold the same stance, consider it imperative that there is a change to the way the police force operates. The tragic murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 has gripped the nation, revealing the brutality underneath the custodian helmets and police vests. We are told that ‘immediate steps” have been taken to protect women at night, including a £25 million scheme to improve lighting and CCTV in central London. However, one fact I found particularly striking was the rise in safety apps for women, including “Life360” and “Walksafe” to monitor crime levels in your local area. Yet the question I ask you is why this is needed in the first place. Why can’t a woman feel safe walking at night, or going for a run, or waiting to catch the bus? I find it depressing that we as a society are taking proactive steps to make people feel safer, instead of uprooting the main problem in the first place – the failure of police to protect the public.

In order to understand why such horrors against women have happened in the first place, we need to look back at how police officers are accepted into the forces. While it is important to be “confident” and have a “good level of fitness”, (Ministry of Defence Police), many perpetrators have seemingly slipped under the radar of the Home Office - many perpetrators who could have been stopped a long time ago. David Carrick committed 48 rapes in the past two decades, waging a campaign of terror and humiliation against innocent women. After pleading guilty to 43 charges on 13th December 2022, he now faces jail for life. Lives of countless women, however, could have been saved since 2002, when Carrick is accused of assaulting and harassing a former partner. The Met overlooks this; he is not arrested. Subsequently, this pattern repeats itself in 2004, when Carrick is involved in a domestic incident, but no criminal allegations are made to the Met; he is not arrested. 17 years later… It has taken the Met, those into whose hands we put our lives, 17 years to hunt him down.

Has brutality become the norm for our police?

This is not just about those whose crimes have hit the headlines. At the start of this year, Commissioner of the Met Sir Mark Rowley admitted that 161 of his 35,000 officers had r criminal records, arguably due to the sustained lack of enthusiasm there is in joining the Police since the most recent reported incidents. Is the Met having to recruit former officers to maintain its numbers?

It is evident that certain hate-fuelled members of the Met have targeted their wrath upon minorities in society - particularly women, people of colour, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. These criminal offences can rightly be defined as “hate crimes”: they purposefully attack someone’s protected characteristics, which include race, religion, gender and sexuality. In a country so proud to call itself as “promoting equality”, the UK has failed when striving towards a fairer and more equal society. There have been numerous instances of black people being stopped by police simply because of their skin colour, the most notorious in recent years being the murder of George Floyd in the US in May 2020. It seems that children and young adults in schools have a much better understanding of respect and prejudice than those who we look up to as role models, those whose role we used to want to play when we were in nursery.

If we are to bring these injustices to a standstill, I believe it essential that there is a change to the way in which recruits are accepted into the Police. Stopping crime instigated by the members of the police force can be achieved by monitoring who can and cannot enter the forces more carefully. Too many times that a policeman has committed a crime that has gone beneath the radar. Although it is easier said than done, I believe that the Met and the Government can take proactive steps to further the security of society, even if it means investing more in the forces in order to regain public trust.

I would like to think that when I finish Repton, I will be leaving the safety haven of the School and entering a world where I can walk peacefully on my way back home, without having to turn my back at the sound of footsteps or a police siren. I would like to think that one day, we can regain trust in the police…. But that day is far from today.

Elektra S (11A)