Cressida Dick and the Metropolitan Police lost the communications war after Sarah Everard disappearance
The disappearance and alleged murder of Sarah Everard touched already frayed nerves.
Many have spoken or written of their powerful feeling of “It could have been me”, because Ms Everard was doing what thousands of women do all the time, walking back to her house through streets she knew with, presumably, every expectation of reaching home unharmed.
Ms Everard disappeared on Wednesday 3 March.
The Metropolitan Police was sufficiently concerned by Friday to issue an appeal on Twitter for sightings of her, and the following day, they began to drag the ponds on Clapham Common. After that, the police moved with commendable speed: by Tuesday 9 March, they had arrested a serving police officer in Kent.
The following day the sad tale reached its grisly denouement. “Human remains”—what a grotesque and chilling phrase that is—were found in woodland on Wednesday, and two days later they were identified as Ms Everard’s last earthly footprint.
The Metropolitan Police might be expected to be given some quiet, solemn credit, then. From disappearance of victim to arrest of suspect in six days is swift enough, and the trail was clearly not allowed to go cold. Their acts have spoken well of them. The problem started when they started issuing statements.
Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was right to comment publicly, though in general terms, on such a high-profile case. She expressed her understanding of widespread alarm among women—and men—but sought to lower the temperature by adding that “it is thankfully incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets”. This platitude seemed to rankle.
Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, who has a long and distinguished record in campaigning on violence against women, summed up the unease.
“Since last week, since Sarah first went missing, six women and a little girl have been reported as having been killed at the hands of men. So it’s not particularly rare and the fear that women live with is an everyday thing.”
The statistics are alarming reading.
As Ms Phillips highlighted later in the House of Commons, a woman or girl is killed by male violence every three days. That doesn’t feel “incredibly rare”, either to women or to men watching the debate and wondering how best to contribute.
In addition, there is a huge problem with the criminal justice system in this regard. Last year, rape convictions fell by 23 per cent, prosecutions for domestic abuse fell by 24 per cent and a tiny fraction, only one in 20, allegations of child sex offences end in conviction. Only the most blinkered Polyanna would believe the rates of the crimes themselves have fallen.
So we have two competing, indeed opposite, narratives.
On the one hand, the police propagating the message that violence against women, while horrifying, is very rare.
On the other, women pointing first to low rates of prosecution and second to a pervasive climate of fear. This is a serious problem for the Met: we are proud of saying in the UK that we carry out policing by consent, but that consent depends on a sense of unity between law enforcement and the public, a sense that everyone is at least on the same page. Women might reasonably doubt that this is so at the moment.
There was another factor which has poisoned the well. Campaigning group Reclaim These Streets announced that a vigil would be held on Clapham Common on Saturday 13 March to honour Ms Everard’s memory and highlight the dangers facing women. It was stressed that the demonstration would be socially distanced.
With an almost incredible tin ear, the Met reacted by saying that such a vigil would be illegal and that the organisers could be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit a crime, and referred to the relevant provisions of the Serious Crime Act 2007. This could hardly have been a more crass misstep.
The past year has hardly been free of mass public demonstrations, so to veto a peaceful event organised by a law-abiding group is utter folly. The police tried to salvage something from their idiocy by saying that they understood the strength of feeling and were “in discussion with the organisers about this event in light of the current Covid regulations”. It should never have come to that.
On Friday, the High Court ruled that the police were entitled to take action against the vigil organised in memory of Ms Everard on Clapham Common. Mr Justice Holgate added that he hoped the case had provided clarity on the law concerning protests. This put the ball back in the Met’s court.
Surely judgement and empathy would be applied somewhere along the line, some effort to acknowledge and accommodate the extraordinary strength of feeling which Ms Everard’s murder had brought to the surface. After all, a right to take action does not in itself confer a responsibility, and policing is always a matter of judgement, of balancing resources, legislation and realpolitik.
It was not unreasonable to hope that an accommodation might be released. After all, it is not that we have seen no mass protests in London since the pandemic began. There was a mass demonstration against lockdown regulations in Trafalgar Square last August: led and provoked by crackpots and sinister conspiracists, to be sure; but the Metropolitan Police handed a letter to representatives of the thousands gathered, and advised them to disperse. Advised them, rather than firm and decisive action to disperse those who had arrived.
Saturday night in Clapham was rather different. Despite a visit by the Duchess of Cambridge earlier in the day, police officers moved in at 6.30 pm to disperse the wholly peaceful gathering.
Yes, the mourners – we should call them that, for that is what they were – had been warned not to gather, and were defying the letter of the law. But scuffles soon broke out. From there, it was inevitable.
Some women refused to disperse. The police seized and handcuffed them. There were shouts, screams. What was beamed to the world’s media? Police officers, mainly men, dragging women away from a vigil for a murder victim, and doing so with robust force.
The Metropolitan Police could hardly have concocted a worse public relations scenario; but it was hardly their first misstep in a litany of cack-handedness and insensitivity. The question of who made the decision has been posed. It must be answered, and there will be consequences
The Metropolitan Police has a director of communications. His name is James Helm, for students of the curious, and he was a journalist before moving into public relations. It would be invidious to hold him personally responsible for a bad week at the office. But London taxpayers are entitled to ask what the Met’s strategy is. If they have a plan to reduce violence against women, they must capture hearts and minds. This is not how you do that.