Notts Police hail misogyny crackdown a “success”

Notts police encourage women to report non-crimes for investigation

You may recall that a couple of months ago the new Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police announced that she would be encouragingwomen to report acts of misogyny to the police for investigation, regardless of whether the actions being reported were actual crimes or not.

The force, which is dealing with a £54M budget cut, has axed its city division and is expected to cut 400 police officers from its ranks over the next three-years, has trained some police officers to deal with investigations into allegations of misogyny. I’m not a detective but I’m unclear exactly how you investigate a misogynistic assault differently from a regular assault – maybe you can enlighten me on the differences in evidence likely to be found in the two situations?

This successful policy has seen twenty investigations launched, which resulted in two arrests – both for offences that would have been investigated (or should have been investigated) regardless of the new misogyny classification. I make that a strike rate of 10% albeit from a very small sample. It seems neither man has been charged with anything and there have been no convictions, which in my book is a 0% clear up rate. Though, I admit it is still early days.

These remarkable detection rates have so impressed other forces that they are sending police officers to Nottingham to see how they too can implement this exciting policy, which I’m sure has everything to do with the awe-inspiring performance and nothing to do with looking, good, modern or PC.

I have a mother, two sisters, an assortment of female aunts and cousins as well as a girlfriend and a daughter; I want to see criminals arrested, charged, convicted and punished. What I’m not interested in seeing is an obvious publicity stunt aimed at grabbing some headlines, a few column inches and making a new chief constable look good in the few months before she retires from the force.

So far, all this initiative seems to have done is lead to the arrest of two men who should have been arrested anyway. The overwhelming majority of allegations, 90%, have not resulted in even an arrest. If that’s your idea of doing something useful to combat crime against women, then I dread to think what a bad idea looks like.

Police complain a lot about direct entry superintendents but when chief constables who have worked their way through the ranks seem more intent on building a public image than doing something actually useful I have to wonder whether DE is such a bad thing.