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More women police officers won’t reduce police violence [1]

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Date: 2023-04

As reports of hideous violence by serving Metropolitan Police officers such as David Carrick unravel the legitimacy of British policing as a whole, policymakers and the public are grasping for solutions. The most misguided among them is the suggestion that the presence of more women officers could reduce violence in the police.

This idea is underpinned by two assumptions. First, that violence within policing is the fault of individual male officers, as opposed to the very design of policing itself. Second, that women, who in the general population are statistically less violent, will not use violence when working as police. Both assumptions are incorrect.

Women officers perpetrate grim violence. Two women police officers cut the clothes from, strip-searched and humiliated Koshka Duff, leaving her with physical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Four women police officers strip-searched the 15-year-old Black schoolgirl known as Child Q, knowing she was on her period. Strip-searches, a form of state-sanctioned sexual assault, are no less traumatising when conducted by women.

The curious logic of ‘add women and stir’ as a violence reduction strategy is barely credible. West Mercia PC Mary Ellen Bettley-Smith repeatedly brutalised Black ex-footballer Dalian Atkinson as he lay dying. Laura Curran, a detective constable in the Met, was involved in the death of Olaseni Lewis, a 23-year-old who died of a brain injury and cardio-respiratory arrest after officers used excessive force to restrain him.

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This routine violence is justified both to the public and the police themselves as part of the job. Acknowledging that women in the police perpetrate violence, including against women and girls, is not to suggest that they cannot experience abuse from their male counterparts. They regularly do, as documented in the Baroness Casey Review, released last week. It is simply a recognition that feminist solidarity across lines of state power does not exist. To expect it would be a naive underestimation of how state power operates.

The very function of policing is social control. This control is enforced through violence, intimidation and coercion. Arrests, restraints, strip-searches, stop-and-searches and the power to break into and raid homes are everyday practices. As the above examples show, police who are equipped with handcuffs, batons, tasers and firearms will make use of them, regardless of their gender.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/police-metropolitan-violence-woman-sarah-everard-casey-review/

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