As Nottinghamshire’s top officer, she saw the best of the police – and the very worst, experiencing two indecent assaults. Now she is working to make misogyny a hate crime
On the day Sarah Everard’s killer admitted to her kidnap, rape and murder, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, was speaking about violence against women and girls. “On occasion,” she admitted of her force, “I have a bad ’un.” This was, perhaps, an attempt to reassure the public that Wayne Couzens, who killed Everard while serving as a Met police officer, was an anomaly.
Sue Fish is not reassured. Fish spent her entire career in the police, working her way up to become Nottinghamshire chief constable, before retiring in 2017. “The vast majority of police officers are fantastic,” she says. “[But] there are a significant minority who are attracted to it because of the power, and the potential that you’ve got to abuse that power. I’ve seen it time and time again, through my service.”
