Criminal justice ‘failing’ women who are abused
BORIS JOHNSON has urged women to trust police while acknowledging problems in the criminal justice system in relation to female complaints, rape and sexual violence.
The Prime Minister said “too many women are spending too long” waiting for their cases to be heard, adding that the Government will “stop at nothing” to make sure more rapists are jailed.
His comments come after Metropolitan Police firearms officer Wayne Couzens 48, was handed a whole life sentence at the Old Bailey last Thursday for murdering Sarah Everard by Lord Justice Fulford, who said his “warped, selfish and brutal” offences had eroded confidence in the police.
Ms Everard, 33, was walking home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on the evening of March 3 when she was kidnapped, raped and murdered by Couzens.
Mr Johnson told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show yesterday: “My view is that the police do – overwhelmingly – a wonderful job and what I want is the public, and women in particular, girls and young women, women of all ages, to trust the police. They are overwhelmingly trustworthy.”
Later, Mr Johnson said the criminal justice system has not been quick enough to act on reports of sexual violence against women and girls.
Speaking to reporters at a youth centre in Manchester, he said: “The problem is that there is an endemic difficulty in getting the criminal justice system to deal with these complaints fast enough and sometimes to see them, take them, seriously enough.
“There are delays taking place at every stage in the process. You know the reasons – it’s all the complexities to do with people’s mobile phones, the evidence that’s produced by the defence, and all that kind of stuff. But, in the end, that is no excuse.
“We have to have these complaints properly dealt with. We have to have a situation in which women know that their reporting of rape, sexual, domestic violence is going to be properly taken care of.
“So, we’re investing massively in all that stuff to make the streets safer, and some of these most terrible, biggest, dangerous crime types are actually coming down. So, we’re focusing on both ends of the process, but it’s in the middle, it’s the bit with the criminal justice system, between the reporting and the conviction.
“We need to contract it, we need to give women the confidence that their complaints are being taken seriously. We are putting £25 million more today into CCTV, into street lighting, 10,000 more police already recruited as part of our 20,000, and we’re toughening the sentences for serious sexual offences.
Asked whether the public could expect conviction rates to go up, the Prime Minister replied: “We’re going to work as hard as we can to achieve that. We have to work with the prosecutors, with the police, with the criminal justice system, and that’s what we are going to do.”
Meanwhile, Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has asked the Metropolitan Police for an urgent meeting after it emerged that Couzens worked on the Parliamentary Estate in 2020. The Parliamentary Estate includes the Palace of Westminster – the location of both the House of Commons and House of Lords.