My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and she’s suffered at the hands of predatory men all her life. Perhaps the occasional shouting irritates the neighbours, but it’s only the same monologue most of them paid through the nose to hear Mark Rylance deliver on stage in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem: ‘I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse/ Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,/ May they wander the land for ever…’
During those few deceitful warm days in early March, Rose had one of her doorstep rants. She took a swipe at a security camera, too, then retreated back inside. A neighbour, new to the street, called the police, whereupon three police cars arrived in short order, eight officers leaped out and banged on Rose’s front door. My other friend, peering beadily through the gap in her curtains, said it was like an alien landing out there: strobing blue lights, officers bulked up in bullet-proof vests.
Rose opened her door, saw the scene, and became hysterical with fear. Oddly, the officers of the Met seemed terrified too, said my friend at the window, as if they were facing a bunch of Albanian gangsters, not a tiny middle–aged tippler. No one explained to poor Rose what was going on or made an effort to calm her down. The officer in charge, officer X, I’ll call him, turned away from her to knock on a neighbour’s door, so Rose tapped him on the back, on the bullet-proof vest, she says, to get his attention. At the touch of her hand, officer X, already unaccountably hyped up, lost it. He whipped around and grabbed terrified Rose, wrestled her into handcuffs and dragged her off into one of the police cars. She was screaming for help, said my watcher friend. Rose was kept overnight in the cells and when I saw her a few days later she had raw marks around her wrists where each cuff had removed a circlet of skin. She’d been charged with an offence against officer X, she said, which could mean two years in prison.
Rose pleaded not guilty and received a court date. And in the days leading up to her court appearance, I became very angry about the whole affair, on Rose’s behalf and selfishly, for all of us depend on the police. We hear so much about the recruitment crisis in the force, and about under-funding. So why send eight officers to respond to a minor public disturbance? Burglaries don’t get a look-in here in London. I know a man who called 999 to report armed robbers downstairs in his house with a young child asleep upstairs. Not a whisper of a cop. It makes you wonder whether the reason they arrived with such admirable speed to Rose’s doorstep was precisely because there was no threat.
The Met officers seemed terrified, as if facing a bunch of Albanian gangsters, not a tiny tippler
I’ve taken to having imaginary conversations with officer X, in which I grill him on his motivation. Did you really think that pressing charges was a good use of public money, I ask him, sometimes out loud: £65 an hour for each of the eight officers; £800-odd for a night in the cells; £1,000 just to get a court date, plus £800 for the solicitors. A two-day trial for assault in the crown court costs around £1,400, then there’s paperwork and the pointless contribution to the insane backlog of cases. Rose’s appearance in court was simply to get a date for a trial, she was told, which would be some time in 2028.
So to add to the cash, there’s the psychological cost to Rose of living for four anxious years with the possibility of a two-year sentence hanging over her. Officer X must have weighed all that up against the tap on his armour-plated shoulder. Then he thought, yep, definitely worth it, and his colleagues didn’t disagree.
What’s wrong with them? Is it the politics? We’ve heard a lot, these past few weeks, about the ideological capture of the police. Trans policewomen (that’s men) to be allowed to strip-search real women; young officers actually hissing, like medieval exorcists, at the mention of ‘gender critical’ women’s names. Worst of all, crimes committed by violent men who identify as women have been recorded by the police as women’s crimes. The number of ‘women’ convicted of sexual assault must have sky-rocketed.
Is it nuts to think that this ideology – and the misogyny that it embraces – might be behind the casual disregard for women like Rose and the lack of sympathy for her situation? She is plainly, obviously, vulnerable; just the sort of woman whom officer X should be programmed to protect, not to destroy. Perhaps real women are no longer the police’s victims of choice.
I went with Rose to the crown court last week so that she could register her ‘not guilty’ plea and receive the date for her distant trial. It was an enormous court, and it was fascinating. Barristers appeared and disappeared, pacing down corridors checking the time like Alice in Wonderland’s white rabbit. Above the front door the carved words: ‘A structure of hope built on the foundations of faith by the hand of charity.’
Rose was lucky with her judge. She was a woman who seemed to understand the whole picture at a glance. She noted that Rose had no prior convictions, then looked at the photograph the police had presented as evidence of assault, and described it slowly and with weary disgust: ‘A light cat scratch, barely visible, on the officer’s arm.’ Then she turned to the police solicitor and suggested that the Met consider the terrible waste of everyone’s time in proceeding.
A few hours later Rose and I got word that the police were in fact prepared to drop the case, though when she broke the news, the solicitor seemed to imply that they did that only reluctantly.
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