Maggie Blyth: ‘The Met’s failings made me ashamed to be a police officer’

Of all the damning evidence to come out of Baroness Louise Casey’s report into the Met last week, there was one graphic description that shocked even chief constable Maggie Blyth – that of freezers, overstuffed with evidence from rape victims, being left to frost over and break down, destroying any chance of justice for hundreds of women.

“What really hit me was the image of the broken fridges,” says the 58-year-old. “When I read that, I felt ashamed to be a police officer.”

Blyth is the first national police coordinator for violence against women and girls – a role created in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder. She is charged with putting in place a new model for every force in England and Wales to make women and girls safer.

She has only been in the role a year – a year which has seen David Carrick, an officer from the same elite diplomatic police unit as Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens, exposed as one of Britain’s worst serial rapists and many other stories of officers accused of serious crimes.

This month’s damning report by Baroness Casey called the Metropolitan Police Service “institutionally” misogynistic, racist and homophobic – a word that prompted Met Commissioner Mark Rowley to respond that he didn’t see “the level of toxicity that Louise calls out”. What does Blyth think?

“Policing has not been professionally curious enough,” she says. “And that will be a combination of senior leaders not asking the right questions and a workforce not feeling listened to if they want to raise complaints.

”We have to accept that our criminal justice system is teetering on an edge. It’s really broken for women.”

One of the most disturbing parts of the report was the verdict of a male officer that “the detection rate [for rape] is so low, you might as well say it’s legal in London”.

Fewer than 1.5 per cent of reported rapes in England and Wales leads to a charge and the court backlog is growing, with some victims waiting two years and 42 per cent dropping out before their case is heard. How have things got to this point?

“It’s abhorrent,” says Blyth. “There are some genuine resource issues that need to be put right – the volume of cases coming through to a relatively small and inexperienced group of investigators. There are [also] deep rooted cultural issues about how individuals view these crimes and that they’re not necessarily as worthy of investigating as others.”

Blyth calls violence against women and girls “an epidemic”. Yet it remains woefully under-funded. “Let’s put it like this, counterterrorism has a billion,” she says, her blue eyes flashing. “The funding I have as a team is a million. That probably gives you some sense of the difference. It’s disgraceful.”

There are increasing calls for police officers to have better training in solving crimes such as rape and domestic violence. One of Blyth’s solutions is a form of “accreditation” for officers in public protection, the umbrella under which violence against women and girls falls.

“We put our best commanders through public order training and firearms training. If you want to go through any promotion process in policing, you have to get that sort of accreditation. But we don’t have the same route for public protection. We are putting people in charge without the right support and training. They don’t understand it,” she says.

Her other big idea is to bring in outside experts, from specialist women’s services, to work alongside the police – whether in stations or virtually – supporting victims and freeing officers up to focus on perpetrators.

“I want specialist victims’ organisations to be part of the criminal justice solution to women reporting this type of crime, because they’ve got the expertise. It is a very new and different way of working. But we will need additional resourcing for it that won’t come out of policing.”

Violence against women and girls was recently included in the Strategic Policing Requirement for 2023, elevating it to the same level of national threat at terrorism. Blyth has sought the counsel of Neil Basu, the UK’s former counterterror chief, and plans to follow the same step-by-step process he used to make funding it a political priority.

Another area of huge concern is the misogyny and predatory behaviour among police officers.

In a report this month, Blyth showed that of around 1,500 officers in England and Wales accused of violence against women and girls in a six-month period, only 13 were sacked. To that end, the anonymous hotline set up last year for women – whether outside or inside policing – to report rogue Met officers, will soon be expanded nationally.

Are there still killers and rapists, like Couzens and Carrick, in policing?

“I think that there will be, because we know that those men are among us, so there will be some in policing as they will be in every profession,” she says. “We need to be alert to that in all that we do.

“I think the Met isn’t alone in having systemic issues with misogyny, sexism. There are certainly large areas of policing where we would see similar attitudes and behaviour.”

Blyth, who lives in the rural West Midlands with her husband and has three daughters, joined the police in 2016, following a 30-year career in probation and child protection. She worked for Hampshire constabulary, before putting herself forward for this position. Today, we meet in her office at the National Police Chiefs’ Council in central London, which contains a grey seating area, a bare wooden table and a hat stand. It gives the impression of a woman who doesn’t spend much time here, instead travelling the country to visit stations, speak to women’s organisations and lobby government departments.

I wonder whether she feels that enough has been achieved since she took over.

“I had absolutely no idea [this role] would be as challenging and difficult as it has been. That we would have a David Carrick exposed on top of a Wayne Couzens, that never ever occurred to me,” she says. “It made me realise that I can’t let this go. I’ve got to make sure that there is a solution.”

She appears frustrated, even quietly angry, as we speak. Is she?

“I don’t want to be in a situation where women and girls can’t and don’t report this type of crime, and where the men that I’ve spent my whole career trying to put behind bars get away with it. If we cannot prove that we’re capable of policing this type of crime, then it’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever get their trust and confidence again.

“It doesn’t feel easy... but it’s sort of non-negotiable. I owe it to my daughters and I owe it to victims and survivors.”