Rotten apples or rotten barrel?

Why are police forces a magnet for men who want to rape women? And what should we do about it?

We might be shocked and disgusted but should we be surprised that PC David Carrick, an armed police officer in the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, admitted to 41 offences including 24 acts of rape and three counts of false imprisonment against twelve women over a 17- year period?  After all, it’s not that long since the nation was outraged at the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving police officer, Wayne Couzens.

How bad a problem is it?

Sadly, misogynistic sex crimes by members of the police are not a rarity.  At the end of 2021, it was reported by the BBC that at least 750 allegations of sexual misconduct had been made against serving police officers in England and Wales during the previous five-year period.  The largest police force, the Metropolitan police force, recorded 530 allegations of sexual offences by serving officers between 2016-2020 and between 2019 and 2022 there were 104 Met employees convicted of offences. This week, the head of the Met said the Met were reviewing 1633 cases of alleged sexual offences or domestic violence involving over 1000 staff over the last decade. 

These are just the ones we know about.  If you were raped by a police officer, wouldn’t you think twice about reporting it to the police?

Should we be surprised?

Well no.  Any organisation that operates with power is open to abuse of power.  It’s inevitable that some people join the police because being in the police offers opportunities for power over others that they find exhilarating. 

People who want to abuse others gravitate towards organisations that can facilitate this.  They seek out positions of trust where they will be in contact with vulnerable people.  This doesn’t just happen in the police; we’ve repeatedly seen these kinds of crime in children’s homes, religious bodies, the education system and in charities. 

Whilst men who sexually offend as police officers may be in a minority, the constant stream of stories suggests it’s a sizeable minority rather than a “few bad apples” as previously described by Cressida Dick.

In the last twelve months alone, media coverage has made it clear there’s a problem with institutional misogyny in the police.  Aside from allegations of sexual offences, we’ve seen the treatment of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, Wayne Couzens being nicknamed “the rapist” by his colleagues and former Detective Superintendent Paige Kimberley having a job offer withdrawn when she exposed sexist Whatsapp messages. 

In October 2022, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley referred to hundreds of “rogue officers” who were getting away with criminal behaviour including eleven who had convictions for sexual offences.

Is a position in the police the perfect cover for abuse?

Positions of trust make it easier to offend.  Sadly, with a position in the police, perhaps it’s even easier? Positions of trust give potential abusers a mask to hide behind and the would-be rapist in the police perhaps benefits from confidence in knowing a victim is unlikely to report the crime to the very organisation that’s harmed her.  

Being in the police also reduces the potential victim’s ability to spot the danger.  Police work often encounters people at their most vulnerable.  In the aftermath of a crime, victims might find it hard to think straight or identify cues to danger. 

Can we guarantee any would-be rapist won’t be employed by the police?

People who commit sexual offences are rarely caught out first time.  So we’re not likely to screen out un-convicted rapists from those who apply to join the police. 

Some might argue that a constant diet of serious violent and sexually violent crime might desensitise some predisposed individuals to abhorrent acts and corrupt them to the degree that these offences start to seem titillating even if they weren’t previously committing sexual offences.  It’s unlikely we will ever get so good at pre-employment screening that we can eliminate this risk either.

But we could see an impact if we reduce the tendency of the organisational culture to make others blind to these acts.  Help others spot an emerging problem and speak up before it’s too late.

How police culture reduces the safety of women and other minority groups

Police culture is very similar to that seen in other sectors where people doing difficult jobs are not allowed to talk about how they feel.  I’ve seen this in prisons, the military and in secure hospitals too.  Police work makes huge emotional demands of staff; police are exposed to fear, disgust and sadness, emotions that make all of us feel vulnerable.   Officers are not “allowed” to discuss this.  The culture dictates this.  If police culture vetoes emotion, what happens to these powerful, overwhelming emotions at an individual level?  It’s inevitable that members of the police end up disconnected from themselves.  And if they’re disconnected from their own emotions, is it any surprise if they become emotionally disconnected from the people they serve and start to see women, racialised minorities and homosexuals as “other”?  Are they really going to stick their heads above the parapet?

Emotional detachment in the police might be compounded by the high potential of officers to become traumatised by their work.  Research from the University of Cambridge supported by Police Care UK found that 20 % police officers are likely to be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder with many of them unaware that they have symptoms of this condition.  They are five times more likely to experience PTSD than the general public and score significantly lower on WHO wellbeing indices than other employment sectors in the UK.  Impaired empathy can be a consequence of emotional avoidance in PTSD.  Is this impaired empathy for victims enabling police misogyny to pass unchallenged? Creating officers that simply don’t care about the communities they serve?

You can hear more about how police culture causes “robocop” in this conversation with former Detective Inspector, SJ Lennie that me and David Jones had for the Locked Up Living Podcast. 

When we avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, we can easily end up feeling angry.  Anger is an emotion that’s protects us; it makes us powerful and gives us the strength to defend ourselves from things that make us feel weak. And it’s contagious.  In blue-light services, anger with service users is often the one emotion the culture permits us to feel.   It might not be desirable but its accepted, considered “acceptable”.  If anger is the only permissible emotion, should we be surprised if it leads to bouts of brutality in some officers? 

How to weed out corrupt cops?

It was helpful to see a shift from Dick’s perspective of a few rotten apples to an acknowledgement by Sir Rowley that there is a huge problem in the Met.   But so long as these crimes are seen only as a reflection of individuals employed by the police, is anything likely to change? The police won’t develop foolproof tools to screen out someone who’s never been convicted.  So, if police forces are to change, the organisation first needs to change its mindset; rape by serving officers isn’t just an individual problem, its one the police culture facilitates.  Police Chiefs need to acknowledge this.

So, what should the police do to create meaningful change?

Firstly, leaders of healthy blue light organisations accept that they will attract people motivated to sexually offend.  They know it’s a real risk.  They keep this in their minds and encourage others to do so too.  They discuss the risk openly rather than in hushed voices behind closed doors.  They make it possible to “entertain the worst”: that one of their colleagues has joined up in order to enact his deviant sexual fantasies.  I’ve seen this make it possible for staff to speak about feeling uncomfortable with behaviour of colleagues and keeps people mindful that there could be a threat within their midst.  But it’s a conversation that’s not had often enough.

Secondly, the organisation needs to work harder to create a culture of emotional literacy and authenticity.  This means leaders have to start acknowledging their own feelings of fear, sadness and disgust instead of channelling everything through anger.  They need to lead by example and make it clear that talking about the emotional impact of the work is not just acceptable, it is required for a healthy organisation.  Far from communicating weakness as is often feared, my own experience in a high secure prison is that discussing these sorts of feelings normalises them and allows people to seek help when they need it.  Staff often told me they were worried that if they spoke of their fear, they would look like cowards.  But you can’t demonstrate courage if you’re not feeling frightened.  By acting bravely despite your fear, you demonstrate how strong you truly are.

In some organisations where employees are routinely exposed to fear and other emotional pain (like secure hospitals and specialist units in prisons), staff have reflective practice sessions to identify and make sense of their feelings about their work.  Right now, this is only available to those police working in child protection.  The third step police chiefs need to take towards making their organisation healthier is to make this mandatory for all employees.  Of course, there would be those who initially resent and avoid it, but in the prison unit I worked in, mandating reflective practice meant staff were not singled out as weak if they accepted it and it became a very valued part of the work.

If Sir Mark Rowley wants to ensure the Met emerges from 2023 better than it looks going into it, it’s time for him to take a different tack to his predecessors and start looking at the wider organisation and not just for the bad pennies.  We all deserve police forces we don’t have to fear.

Do you have experience of working in an organisation where vulnerable emotions are denied? Know what it’s like to have to put on a “brave” face as you go into work each day? Are you familiar with the stress of coping with difficult situations and having to “brush them off” as that’s “just the way it is?”  Have you ever raised concerns about colleagues that fell on deaf ears? Do you want to share other ideas about how these kinds of toxic cultures can be challenged? I’d love to hear – feel free to comment below.

If you’re interested in understanding toxic organisational culture and how it can be changed or prevented, listen in to the Locked Up Living podcast I co-host with David Jones or sign up to further posts.