Popping out to buy milk the other night, I saw how women die. My nearest local shop in south-west London, the place I go for last-minute and forgotten groceries, is an M&S at a petrol station. It sells fuel, overpriced food and coffee. It’s open late.
As I queued to pay for my semi-skimmed just before 7 p.m., I noticed a couple of police constables – one male, one female – waiting for coffee. Their marked car was parked outside, though not at a pump; they’d evidently stopped just for the coffee.
Did the time it takes to get a coffee, pick a snack, and pay for it cost a woman a beating?
As we waited, there was an electrical squawk from one of the officers’ radios. A dispatcher read over details of an emergency call with an address in London SW11. One of the words she used stood out: ‘domestic’.
As the message played out, the two PCs tensed, then, on hearing that word, relaxed. They exchanged a look. The woman raised her eyebrows to the man and looked to the coffee counter, the implied question clear: shall we go then? His reply was also non-vocal: a shrug and a half-smile: why rush?
So the two officers, having received an urgent call to respond to a reported crime, waited until someone made them each a cup of coffee, selected snacks, paid and then walked to their car. There, they sat stationary for another minute or more as one of them, in the passenger seat, opened and ate a yoghurt. Then they drove slowly off the forecourt.
After they pulled out onto the main road, the car’s siren sounded and its blue lights flashed. The car accelerated rapidly through the evening traffic, looking to all the world like a police unit straining every sinew to reach people in need as soon as humanly possible.
As a very big city, London naturally generates crime statistics of significant size. According to the Home Office, a total of 95,113 domestic abuse related crimes were recorded by the Metropolitan Police in the year to March 2023.
That’s about 260 a day, or more than ten an hour. No doubt calls to domestic incidents are a routine part of any Met patrol officer’s shift.
Another statistic is worth noting though. Of those 95,000 recorded crimes, less than 7,000 led to someone being charged or summonsed. The people who committed almost 90,000 crimes of domestic violence and abuse faced no action from police or prosecutors.
Most domestic violence is committed against women, by men. Sometimes women die. It’s hard to find official data on domestic murders, but the feminist campaigner Karen Ingala Smith counts women killed by men every year. She says at least 100 women were killed by men in the U.K. last year. Most of those murders were at home: domestics. At least seven were in the Met’s area of responsibility.
The primary reason that women die is that men kill them. The same is true of women who are beaten and abused: the men responsible are to blame. Crime happens. Criminals are responsible for it.
But we have a police force because crime happens, and part of its role is the prevention of crime where possible. When the police fail, sometimes people – women – suffer and sometimes die. The words ‘just a domestic’ capture an age-old culture of police indifference that costs women blood, teeth, bruises and sometimes their lives.
My main thought about those PCs shrugging and waiting for their coffees before responding to an emergency call was how utterly normal it seemed. There was nothing furtive or tense about their exchange or demeanour – delaying their response to that call was routine, mundane.
This is consistent with countless stories of women who couldn’t get the police to take them seriously when they reported domestic abuse. According to a Victim Support report in 2023, over half of all respondents (53 per cent) reported an instance of domestic abuse at least twice before they felt appropriate action was taken by the police. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) reported an instance of domestic abuse to the police three times or more before appropriate action was taken.
Those officers in my local garage evidently felt that their actions were nothing unusual or remarkable. Just a domestic. Just another day at work.
What difference did those few minutes make? Did the time it takes to get a coffee, pick a snack, and pay for it cost a woman a beating? Did that yoghurt put a woman’s life at risk, leave her bleeding, or in fear?
I don’t know the answer to those questions. But neither did the police officers who waited for their coffee.
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