Wayne Couzens: inquiry calls for sexual offences review of all UK police

A chilling government report on the murder of Sarah Everard has given Britain’s police forces seven months to review every recorded allegation of sexual offences by serving officers.  

So what? Everard was abducted, raped and strangled with a police belt by Wayne Couzens, an off-duty officer. Three years after her death at 33, the inquiry has found police are still failing to

• weed out potentially dangerous officers;
• properly investigate sexual offences; or
• recognise trends in sexual offence escalation.

One of those trends is a potential escalation from indecent exposure (flashing) to rape.

The September review deadline in the inquiry’s report, published yesterday, heads a list of 16 urgent recommendations to stop more police sexual predators operating “in plain sight”. 

Big red flag. Eight times before Everard’s murder, between 2004 and February 2021, Couzens was reported to police for indecent exposure. Only after he was convicted for the murder was he prosecuted on three counts for the offence.

Before becoming an officer, he also allegedly committed a “serious” sexual assault against a child “barely in her teens”. 

Gateway crime. Research is limited, in part because victims often don’t come forward, but studies suggest that between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of men who indecently expose themselves go on to commit sexual offences involving physical contact.

Deadly indifference. The inquiry found there was “no doubt” a failure to properly investigate a report of indecent exposure linked to Couzens in June 2015 was a missed opportunity to disrupt or even prevent further offending. And yet…

• The failure to take the offence seriously continued to the weeks before the murder. Couzens was reported five times for exposing himself in February 2021 alone.
• After his arrest, the Met Police told the inquiry it would still have recruited him in 2018, even if provided with information about the 2015 incident. 
• When Couzens was finally sentenced in March 2023, the trial judge said the lack of investigation into his record of indecent exposure could only have served to strengthen a belief that he could “dominate and abuse women without being stopped”.

The 327-page report by Elish Angiolini makes for grim reading. It documents Couzens’s taste for violent pornography and a record of sexual offending stretching back more than 20 years before he murdered Everard. It also records how he

• left six photographs of his penis on a young woman’s phone while working for Kent Special Constabulary (such behaviour was confirmed by the inquiry as “common” among police colleagues); and 
• responded in 2019 to messages about a vulnerable, drunk woman in a WhatsApp group chat with other Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) officers with: “Did you finger her to see if she was okay?”.

Bad orchard. One senior officer suggested to the inquiry that Couzens was a “complete outlier”. But Angiolini told the BBC yesterday she couldn’t give assurances that there weren’t “other Wayne Couzens in the police force” – and the signs are there are plenty.

An analysis by Tortoise and End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) of court reporting and College of Policing data found that 46 serving and former Metropolitan Police officers have been charged with or convicted of rape, sexual assault or related offences against women and girls since March 2021. Eight more officers are currently being prosecuted for rape or sexual assault.

Andrea Simon, Director of EVAW, said government and police leaders should urgently heed the inquiry’s recommendations to avoid “more failings, excuses, and missed opportunities to prevent police perpetrating violence against women and children”.

Splendid ignorance. More than 70 recommendations relating to police misconduct have been made in previous reports on policing over the past 20 years. Yet a senior police leader told Angiolini police were still “splendidly ignorant of evidence of what it should be doing”.

As if to prove the point, the National Police Chiefs’ Council chair, Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, said yesterday he was “aghast” at the red flags missed before Everard’s murder. 

Stephens has said the NPCC must do “everything humanly possible” to enact Angiolini’s recommendations. James Cleverly, the home secretary, said police officers charged with certain criminal offences would be automatically suspended. 

In the meantime, Sarah Everard’s mother said her daughter would never have got into a stranger’s car. “She died because he was a police officer.”

Further reading: A year ago Baroness Louise Casey’s inquiry reported similarly damning findings on the Metropolitan Police’s failure to protect women and children.

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