‘Belief’ not a starting point for police

It seems fair to acknowledge, 10 years after the Bazley report into police handling of the Louise Nicholas case, that there’s evidence of significant improvement in police culture when it comes to sex crime investigations.

But there’s a cautionary note that doesn’t go without saying. We should also be wary against the possibility of over-correction and replacing one bias with another.

The bottom line, right now, is pleasing. Anyone nowadays taking a sexual assault complaint to the police can reasonably expect not to be confronted by a cop of stern, dubious countenance, hairy forearms folded across a blue shirt, displeased at the very prospect of an investigation, let alone the merits of one.

That hasn’t always been a given. Nicholas herself came up against a truly hideous example of this, both explained and worsened by the fact she was pointing the finger at three senior police officers as her packrapists in the 1980s.

Her complaints led to an appalling coverup spanning 25 years, some aspects of which were found in court to have been criminally obstructive. Her own strength of character, helped by a pleasing example of the news media doing its job, eventually led to a commission of inquiry headed by Dame Margaret Bazley that identified a problem of police culture that went beyond the individuals in the case.

Police reaction was too often so doubtful that it repelled people from coming forward and deadened prospects of an honest, incisive inquiry resulting.

So discomforting were the klaxons of alarm raised by the Bazley report that every few years since then the Office of the Auditor-general has reported on progress addressing her recommendations.

The last of these has now surfaced. It’s reassuring. The assessment is backed up by Rape Prevention Education and by Nicholas herself, who now works with the police. She says they have taken major steps forward, not only in handling complaints against their own, but their approach to all those who come to them.

Here is where we need to be careful. Nicholas goes too far when she says people who go to the police need not only to be treated sensitively, but ‘‘to be believed’’.

That sends a wrong signal; that the initial police reaction should be belief, any more than it should be disbelief. However rare they may be, false complaints do arise. A recent example: Christopher John Ferguson spent 10 months in jail before his 13-year-old accuser admitted she had lied about the rape.

The only belief required or acceptable from the police at the outset of an inquiry is that complaints must be handled with sensitivity, honesty and diligence.