The Killing of Sarah Everard

Why we need to look beyond the Police

Like many people I have been haunted by the disgusting murder of Sarah Everard ever since the news of her kidnapping was announced in March.  At times during the day and even in the middle of night, I have found myself thinking about the sweet, kind, intelligent face that appears in her photographs and I mourn the life that was extinguished so savagely.

I have thought about her because it is so deeply sad and horrific to think that anyone should have had to endure what she went through at her murderer’s hands, and because I know that she could have been my daughter or one of her friends, or any one of so many young women who walked through the streets of London that night, who the cop-creature might have selected for his ‘hunt.’

Now the creature has been sentenced to life, and even though justice has been served it still feels like an inadequate response to such a cruel atrocity.  Not surprisingly there has been a search for explanations that go beyond the perpetrator himself.  Some have blamed the Met and called for resignations.

Predictably, in these utterly depressing and amoral times, there have been those who have used the murder to pursue their own repellent agendas. The loathsome charlatan Piers Corbyn and the equally contemptible celebrity ‘freedom fighter’ Kirstie Allsopp have both claimed that Covid restrictions enabled the creature to arrest his victim.  On Twitter the usual ‘not all men’ arguments pour forth with dismal predictability.

Both the Home Secretary and Police Commisioner Cressida Dick have promised a response, without any indication of what form it should take.  Given the general unwillingness of British institutions to hold themselves to account these days, it would be optimistic to hope for much from either of these two. Former or serving police officers have variously called on women to become more ‘streetwise’ about arrests, challenge the police who arrest them, flag down a bus or even run away.

The victim-blaming in these narratives is only matched by their idiocy.  What would happen to a black woman or a woman wearing a hijab who resisted arrest or tried to run away? Why should women be called upon to find solutions to male violence, whether the perpetrators present a badge or not?  Other police officers and politicians have defended the Police and echoed Cressida Dick’s depiction of the creature as a ‘wrong un.’ 

This is obviously true, but what little we know about the creature suggests institutional failings and institutional culpability that go beyond the sleazy motivations of a depraved psychopath.

On three occasions, the creature was alleged to have committed indecent exposure, yet still kept his job. He was known to have a taste for violent pornography that reportedly earned him the nickname ‘the rapist’ amongst his colleagues. He belonged to a Whatsapp group that shared what the Police discreetly refer to as ‘discriminatory’ messages with a sexist, racist, and homophobic content. 

How could a man like this have remained in uniform?   What went wrong with police vetting procedures?   Did these procedures even ‘go wrong’ at all, or is there a culture in the Met in which vicious sexual banter, violent pornography, and even the occasional bit of indecent exposure are not considered serious enough issues to warrant removing a police officer from duty? 

According to the judge, some of the creature’s colleagues had ‘spoken supportively’ about him even after he pleaded guilty.  On what grounds could these colleagues have possibly supported someone who had already confessed to such a sickenng crime?

These are questions that need to be asked, and the Met cannot be trusted to answer them by itself.  An external independent inquiry is required. Many people have called for the resignation of Cressida Dick and even Priti Patel. Personally I have no problem with this.  A police officer who presided over the extra-judicial execution of an innocent Brazilian electrician and then lied about it should never have been promoted in the first place.  In March, the Met responded with astounding brutality to a peaceful vigil by mostly young women, ignoring requests to negotiate with the organisers.

The Police argued that the demonstrators were in breach of Covid restrictions, but it is difficult not to conclude that they used such unneccessary force precisely because the vigil was an implicit criticism of the police.  A police commissioner and home secretary who seriously wanted to restore trust in the police should have resigned then, but in a country where very few people resign for anything unless they offend Boris Johnson, they didn’t, and I don’t expect it will happen now.

Beyond the ‘locker room’

Nevertheless the focus on resignations can miss a wider point.   In her heartbreakingly eloquent victim impact statement, Sarah Everard’s mother wondered how her daughter’s killer ‘could value a human life so cheaply…He treated my daughter as if she was nothing and disposed of her as if she was rubbish.’

This murder reminds us that there are men who will always hold women’s lives cheaply and consider them rubbish.  Since Sarah Everard’s death 81 women have been murdered by men in the UK. Last year, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, an estimated 151,000 women were raped or assaulted in the UK. Of these only 59,000 were reported to the police, and 1,439 people were actually convicted.

It is true that more men than women are killed each year in the UK, but women are nearly always killed by men and killed because they are women. Women, not men, must accept every day and especially at night, that they might be stalked, harrassed or attacked. They are the ones who must find someone to go home with them, to make sure that they are with a squad, to stick to the bright lights and crowded spaces, to call home, to wonder if the man coming towards them or walking close behind might be a threat. 

They are the ones who might be killed with their children in their own homes, beaten to death by their cagefighter boyfriend, or killed by a stranger on their way to the pub. All this is so routine, so normalised, that it is only when a particularly atrocious murder takes place that we even pay any attention to it. 

We need to recognise how widespread this is. We need to explore the wider cultural attitudes embedded in society that dehumanise women and make it possible for some men to terrorise women and take their lives ‘as if they were rubbish.’

We need to know why so many men listened to the violent sexist banter of Levi Bellfield, the murderer of Milly Dowler, and did nothing about it. And why the necrophiliac sicko Jimmy Savile was viewed as a bit of a lad for so many years, even though so many people knew or suspected what he was doing.

Why did it not occur to the cop-creature’s colleagues that a taste for ‘violent pornography’ might not be compatible with serving the community?  Why do ‘incels’ think that women who don’t want to have sex with them can be shot?  Why was the Plymouth shooter hailed as a ‘saint’ in Internet chat rooms?  Why do men so often play the victims whenever women try to hold them responsible?

These are questions we need to ask.  Because it’s no good saying that ‘not all men’ are like this.  We already know this. But enough of us are, and too many of us take it for granted. 

Too many of us don’t wish to acknowledge the lethal power of misogyny and the fear that it engenders, so that decades after the ‘reclaim the night’ marches of the 1970s, cities remain danger zones for women.

So let’s call the failings of the Police in this terrible murder to account, but let’s also take a good look at ourselves and remember that the problem here isn’t just the Met, and it definitely isn’t women. It’s us.