The Times- Sue Fish: ‘It’s not just the odd deviant. There is a toxic culture of sexism in policing’
Sue Fish: ‘It’s not just the odd deviant. There is a toxic culture of sexism in policing’
Forces need to recruit officers with empathy and compassion, a former chief constable tells Fiona Hamilton
Sue Fish vividly remembers the “bad old days” when she joined the police in the mid-1980s. She recalls the initiation ceremony in which young female constables had their skirts torn down so their buttocks could be imprinted with the date stamp used for reports.
The desk sergeant rushing out females for foot patrol when it rained so that male officers could look at their breasts through their soaked white shirts. The officers known for beating their wives who got away with it because “as long as it didn’t affect you at work and you were seen as a good bloke, you were all right”.
For Fish, 59, who rose through the ranks to become Nottinghamshire chief constable, the memories came back this week when Charing Cross police station was exposed as a hotbed of sexism, racism and homophobia.
She fears that nowadays the “normalisation” of domestic violence, the hatred of ethnic minorities and the expressions of violent misogyny are even worse.
Fish, who retired from Nottinghamshire constabulary in 2017, shook her head and a look of revulsion appeared on her face as she described reading WhatsApp messages between officers that joked about rape, domestic violence and killing black children.
“I felt physically sick,” she said. “The bit about ‘slapping his missus’ and how apparently it ‘makes them love you more’ . . . just horrific. The stuff about the fanatics at the mosque and the awful jokes about black kids being made into dog food, it was just vile.”
Messages from a male officer wanting to “hate f***” and rape a female colleague and jokes about using a knife to get women into bed were particularly chilling in light of the crimes of Wayne Couzens, the former Met constable who abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard last year in a case that sent shockwaves across the country.
“I’ve been trying to make this clear for some time,” Fish said. “That’s it’s not just the odd deviant, the occasional bad’un, the rotten apple.
“That monster that took Sarah Everard’s life, he acted out the sorts of things that are being talked about on these WhatsApp groups.
“Not everyone acts out what they talk about, thankfully. But that normalisation of hatred, domestic violence, rape of women and violation of children and ethnic minorities is just despicable.”
Compared to her youth in the police, there is now a “different dynamic in terms of the level of violence that is both expressed and then carried out”.
She said that she blamed it on poor whistleblowing culture and the easy accessibility of violent pornography, which normalises demeaning women and hurting them during sex.
Fish said she feared that the men access it as boys and continue to do so as warranted officers.
A string of senior police officers who spoke out after the Couzens case promised to oust rogue officers but denied there was institutional misogyny, racism and other misconduct.
Fish was one of the few to acknowledge the extent of the problem, warning that significant parts of policing involved a “very toxic culture of sexism and misogyny that objectifies women”. She revealed that she was indecently assaulted twice by two colleagues, who were both senior.
She has come to the sad conclusion that the abhorrent views expressed at Charing Cross, which was the subject of an extensive inquiry by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), are widespread. The report comes after two Metropolitan police officers shared photographs with colleagues of two murdered sisters in Wembley, who were described in messages as “two dead birds”. The IOPC has warned of an increasing number of cases in which police are sharing grossly offensive images and messages that the public would be “appalled by”.
Fish said: “What’s really sad for me is what was expressed in those messages in Charing Cross could be in any police station. The fact that it’s a police officer expressing it to another police officer is unconscionable.
“Finding words that are in any way adequately awful enough to describe almost the never-ending catalogue of appalling views and behaviours of police officers — it fails me in terms of the horror.”
She said that she was disgusted but not shocked. As a senior leader in policing, Fish tried to fight back against misogynistic culture but said that she found an unease among many of her senior colleagues.
In 2016 she categorised misogyny as a hate crime, a measure that aimed to encourage women to come forward and sent a message that sexism in her region would not be tolerated.
It has since been adopted by about half the forces in England and Wales. Fish said that at first she was “belittled” by colleagues who criticised and tried to undermine the initiative.
Fish also declared war on officers who abused their positions of power to use for sex vulnerable women such as victims of domestic violence.
She said: “I was really challenged by colleagues across the country who said: ‘Why are you doing that? Why are you lifting this stone?’
“But it was fundamentally about the trust and confidence of the most vulnerable in society. If they can’t trust us, what does that say about us?”
Fish insisted that she was still proud of the British police service and pointed to “many, many brilliant officers” done a huge disservice by others who behaved badly.
She called for reform to rid police forces of significant numbers of rogue officers. Since speaking out she has been approached by female police officers who claim that their reports of sexism and domestic violence have been ignored. In some cases perpetrators have been promoted, Fish claimed.
She said that professional standards units should be disbanded and such complaints assessed by a separate body with non-police investigators.
Police forces must be “radical” in their pursuit of predators by building criminal profiles of rogue officers to investigate with greater scrutiny of their behaviour off duty, she said. There needed to be a culture where whistleblowing and calling out poor behaviour was supported rather than punished and marginalised. The disciplinary system needed more punitive penalties.
called for a different approach to recruitment to attract the right kind of officer. “If there’s another advertisement with drones, guns and handcuffs, I’ll scream,” she said. “We need people with compassion, empathy and diligence. That’s the profile to deliver policing in the 21st century, not ‘rough-ty tough-ty we take no shit types’.
She called on police, particularly the Met, to stop “defending the indefensible”. “They are never going to fix it until they start recognising the depth, scale and impact of what is going on.”
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