Whoever Priti Patel appoints as Met police chief must be committed to reforming a broken system rife with institutional misogyny
And so there were two. Cressida Dick’s replacement as the Met police commissioner has been whittled down to two men: the former counter-terroism chief Sir Mark Rowley and one of Dick’s lieutenants, Nick Ephgrave. It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that almost every candidate touted was a white man. The new commissioner has a gargantuan task ahead: tackling the deep-rooted, institutional misogyny and inequality in British policing.
Rowley, the man many consider the frontrunner, has already acknowledged that cultural reform is needed. But his assertion that policing has been largely “transformed” since the 1980s and that it is only “some corners” that still need attention may provide little comfort to the 49% of police staff members across England, Scotland and Wales who, when surveyed as recently as 2018, said they’d heard sexualised jokes told repeatedly at work. Or, indeed, the one in five who had received sexually explicit emails or texts from a colleague, or the almost one in 10 who had been told that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment.
Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates is published by Simon & Schuster and available to buy now
