Everything about working in the Metropolitan Police shocked Jess McDonald when she joined, as a true crime and Line of Duty fan, in spring 2018. Officers dismissing complex sex crimes as just another “classic crap rape”. A black man arrested, charged and held simply for banging on his own front door when locked out. Instructions to practise stop-and-search on the homeless. The detective sergeant, poised to lead a rape unit, caught photographing his female colleague in the shower in shared police digs.
But etched in her memory were her fellow women on the rape team all telling her the same thing: that they “wouldn’t report it” if they themselves were raped. “The first few times I heard it, I was absolutely shocked,” the former detective constable told me, her eyes still widening at the memory five years after she joined the force – and two years since she left, burnt out. “But increasingly you realise women don’t have access to justice, essentially.”
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