![]() “I’m not saying there aren’t issues with the culture and standards in terms of how it’s reported, in terms of turning a blind eye, in terms of not rooting out ‘bad apples’,” she says. Yet she says that most officers she worked alongside were good people, keen to help, but often burnt out or desensitised by an impossible workload aggravated by budget cuts. McDonald in 2018 outside New Scotland Yard, shortly after joining the Met. McDonald resigned after allegedly being bullied by two male officers. One young woman was assaulted by a senior officer at a borough party, but didn’t tell for fear it would “only cause trouble” another was spied on in the shower by a male officer who had recently been appointed to lead a sexual offences team. McDonald’s book describes some deeply troubling incidents, including what she concludes was the racist arrest of a young black man for banging on his own front door recruits being told to practise stop-and-search skills on homeless people who had seemingly done nothing wrong and two shocking stories of predatory male police officers committing sexual offences on colleagues. So far, so depressingly predictable, given recent policing scandals. “And the detective, who was relatively senior, said: ‘Oh no, crap rape, it’s not going anywhere – don’t worry about it.’ And I was like: but how is it not going anywhere? It’s got to go somewhere.” How could conflicting accounts simply be deemed to cancel each other out, she wondered, without trying to establish the truth? With only 1.3% of police-recorded rapes in England and Wales leading to prosecution in 2020-21, many women’s worst nightmares must have been written off as “crap rapes”. ![]() She asked the officer conducting the interview how a jury would decide who to believe.
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