Why does the police force attract so many sex abusers?

Growing up, I didn’t really think about the police until I got caught shoplifting at the age of 14. Separated from my comrades in the five-finger-discount crusade, I was stuck in a cell for half an hour but the earache only started when my furious parents came to collect me. I almost asked the kind policeman if I might stay overnight until they’d calmed down. I wouldn’t do that now. Though I know that the vast majority of police are decent people, they also seem to harbour an unusually high number of woman-haters. Why do so many perverts join the police? 

This week a serving Metropolitan Police officer appeared in court accused of raping a woman in the sea off Brighton beach, while on a stag do – he’s just the latest in a long line of brutes in blue. Last month a Hampshire policeman was accused of raping a mother of three he met on a dating app while her children slept; he had messaged her about having sex in his uniform, adding ‘I’m a bit of a rebel off-duty.’ ‘Because of the fact they had been messaging, and in part because he was a police officer, she felt a degree of trust,’ her counsel said. In March, a Bradford policeman was jailed for ten years for raping and impregnating a ‘paralytically drunk’ 20-year-old. A Metropolitan policeman is currently facing trial for 44 sex attacks – and for false imprisonment. My best friend was one of the victims of the Brighton policeman Tony Lumb, who in 2020 was sacked for having sex with vulnerable women he met in the course of his work – including a victim of stalking and a victim of a disability hate crime – over the space of four years. And who can forget Wayne Couzens, killer of Sarah Everard – the 15th woman killed by a policeman in 12 years – affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ by his police workmates? 

The British police are – putting it politely – a shambles. Last year was the worst yet for the number of charges brought against them; millions of pounds of public money is paid to victims of police ‘misconduct’. Last month it was announced that a record six constabularies – including those scamps at the Met – are now under ‘special measures’; this week it was reported that the Met has been substantially under-recording crimes compared with other police forces of a similar size, raising concerns about the potential manipulation of statistics. And of course, the crimes which these have-a-go heroes are most seriously under-recording are crimes against women; not even half as many rapes, and one third the number of stalking offences than West Midlands police. (They’re probably just not recording the sex crimes against women by serving policemen.) 

In the face of this, it seems incredible that the newly elected president of the police Superintendents’ Association, Paul Fotheringham, this year put the case for more police ‘working from home’ in future in order to ‘improve diversity’. In the light of the number of policemen (it’s always men) who have been exposed for making comments about the sexual uses for female victims of crimes – even of murdered women – I’m afraid my initial reaction is not that this will give the police a chance to work more ‘diversely’ but simply that they can now curate their pornography more conveniently. 

With depressing predictability, during lockdown, domestic violence perpetrated by police officers increased by almost 50 per cent, with 308 reports of abuse against serving policemen – almost six incidents a week. While between 2015-20 only 6.3 per cent of domestic abuse reports leads to a conviction, when a police officer is accused it drops even further to 3.4 per cent, with 80 per cent of the accused keeping their jobs. Bros before hoes – or ‘unreliable witnesses’ as some policeman dismissed the terrified children who summed up the courage to report their torture and trafficking at the hands of the grooming gangs, sometimes arresting the girls themselves for ‘disorderly behaviour’ when they reported rape and torture. It’s telling that it was a woman, former detective Maggie Oliver, who became a whistleblower after resigning in disgust at the handling of the cases by the police force during the years when the grooming gangs operated. 

So does the police force attract nasty men in greater numbers than other professions? The paraphernalia which might attract sadists is there; uniforms, handcuffs, truncheons and tasers. One of the reasons why otherwise broad-minded people like me feel uneasy when we see photos of policeman happily posing with men in extreme fetish-wear at Pride marches is that we are instinctively aware that if people find it OK to parade their sexual kinks in broad daylight, it tends to make civil society far less civil for women and children. 

In my book Welcome To The Woke Trials, I put forward the theory that wokeism is a reactionary – not a revolutionary – creed. The fact that the police seem to prefer taking the side of the males who score high in the Victimhood Olympics – be they mostly Muslim men torturing mostly white female children or men pretending to be women and boasting that they KILL TERFS – shows how misogyny has shape-shifted, happily assisted by the ‘justice’ system. When Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, told a police association conference that ‘sexist’ police were putting ‘male brotherhood’ above the protection of women and girls from sexual violence, she highlighted a frightening fact.  

One of the slyest inventions of the Woke Bros is the nasty-sounding ‘Carceral Feminism’ – the very reasonable idea that women might want their rapists to be punished with imprisonment. By effectively ‘decriminalising’ (Dame Vera’s word) rape – 63,136 allegations recorded in the year to September 2021, the highest recorded annual figure to date, leading to just 1,557 prosecutions, while over the past four years rape prosecutions have fallen by 70 per cent – it’s as though the police are waging their own undeclared war against Carceral Feminism simply by not pursuing rape convictions. I’ve never been one of those idiots who believes in defunding the police but – unlike that 14-year-old girl who thought she might be happier in a police cell than at home getting scolded – I wouldn’t defend them now, either. Sadly, the philosophy of too many of those whose job it is the protect the public and punish the criminal appears to be the modish mantra ‘Forgive and forget’. Forgive the criminal and forget the victim, that is – especially if the victim is female.