THE SENIOR officer responsible for Thames Valley Police’s new strategy tackling violence against women and girls said she was ‘saddened to the core’ by sick Met PC Wayne Couzens' kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Launching the force’s new Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, Ch Supt Katy Barrow-Grint recognised that there would be ‘concerns’ around people’s trust and confidence in policing in the wake of the high-profile case last year.
She told the Oxford Mail: “We absolutely understand there may be concerns about trust and confidence in policing in our communities.
“But I will do my very best to ensure that women and girls who live in the Thames Valley and particularly in Oxfordshire, where I am the local policing chief superintendent, are safe.”
Ms Barrow-Grint said: “We have reviewed our vetting standards, we have reviewed all of our investigations where there may have been a police officer involved, we have robust processes to investigate where standards have fallen.
“You will have seen recently cases where we have taken our officers to court where they have abused their position of trust for sexual purposes and we will root out those who are misogynistic and sexist.”
Last September, Wayne Couzens was jailed for life after he admitted kidnapping Sarah Everard in south London in March, raping then murdering her. Then a serving Met Police officer, he claimed to be arresting her for breaching Covid rules before bundling Ms Everard into his hire car.
In the wake of her murder, scores of vigils took place around the country – including an online event in Oxford.
In November last year, a YouGov poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition found that 47 per cent of women interviewed said their trust in the police had fallen following Ms Everard’s death.
“As a woman and as a police officer I thought it was disgusting and disgraceful and it saddens me to the core that a member of the police community would do such a thing,” Ms Barrow-Grint said.
She added that the public ‘rightly’ expected high standards of police officers and staff.
Published on Wednesday, the new Thames Valley Police strategy aimed at reducing violence against women and girls includes ambitions to ‘improve offender management’ and increase the number of ‘absent victim’ prosecutions where a victim of, for example, domestic abuse does not support a prosecution.
The new strategy, which follows moves by the government and the National Police Chiefs' Council to make it a priority for police forces nationwide, was said to be top of the chief constable’s priority list.
Asked whether the force had enough officers and staff to ensure that it could make good on its ambitions, Ms Barrow-Grint acknowledged the difficulty where investigations increasingly relied on trawling through data from phones or computers.
But the force was getting 600 new officers, including detectives, she said. “I am satisfied we have got the resourcing priorities right to deal with violence against women and girls.”
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