One evening last March,
Sarah Everard was walking home from her friend’s in South London,
when she was approached by an off-duty police officer.
Wearing civilian clothing,
Wayne Couzens showed her his warrant card.
He falsely arrested her,
using the pretense of Covid regulations,
and drove her to a secluded area, where he raped and killed her
using his police belt.
The way Couzens used his position as a police officer to coerce Sarah
shook the nation.
As did the news that the police had overlooked
worrying reports about Couzens indecently exposing himself to women.
Days later, that same police force
aggressively broke up crowds at her vigil.
Oh my God! What on Earth are you doing?!
Sarah’s murder and the events that followed
have shone a light on the police’s treatment of women.
Policing, which should be such a force for good,
is failing half the population.
And it’s not only a problem in the UK.
Get your f*****g hands off her!
She’s getting manhandled!
Cops are engaging in sexual violence
rather than being the protectors from sexual violence.
It’s way beyond bad apples. We’re way beyond that.
It's really a rotten orchard.
This hypocrisy is hurting women in the military, too,
who are being failed by their colleagues...
He violently raped me.
Once he finished, he made sure to let me know that he was an officer.
and let down by the institution set up to protect citizens.
This is exactly why f*****g females in the military
f*****g kill themselves.
Nobody f*****g takes us seriously.
But why are men from these institutions
preying on their colleagues and those they are sworn to protect?
Who do you protect?
This is how the police and the military
are failing to stop men in their forces
from abusing women.
[SYSTEM ERROR]
Who killed Sarah Everard?
The police killed Sarah Everard!
Who killed Breonna Taylor?
The police killed Breonna Taylor!
From violence to domestic abuse and rape,
attention has been paid to the catalog of abuse
women face at the hands of the police.
I joined the police in 1986.
I saw really bad behavior.
Sue says she was indecently assaulted by colleagues twice.
And I was mortified and didn’t report it.
I was really ashamed.
Today, police officers abusing their position for sexual purposes
represents the largest form of police corruption in the UK.
It’s well documented
that policing disproportionately attracts those who like power,
like authority, like a uniform.
In the US, the treatment of women by officers
has also raised questions about the types of individuals
often attracted to police work.
That’s when the officer started searching her.
Look at what he did.
No one’s groping you. There’s a little camera right there.
Pay attention to it.
There’s this sexualized nature of policing where some police officers,
not all, not all,
but there are some police officers who are constantly looking for
their next sexual conquest on the job.
Minors are often targeted in the US.
The most common age we see
of someone victimized by a police officer
for a sex-related police crime
is 14 years old,
followed by 15 years old.
Thirty-one-year-old Robert Cain
is accused of having sex with a 15-year-old girl.
Instead of protecting the most vulnerable,
some officers abuse them.
Women of color, disabled women,
unhoused women, migrant women,
trans and gender nonconforming women, queer women
are primary targets of police sexual violence
because they're vulnerable to criminalization.
In 2015, Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of multiple counts of rape
and other sexual charges.
Do you recall putting your penis in her mouth?
I don’t know.
Holtzclaw specifically targeted women of color.
He assumed that he could do this
because there’s no way she’s going to report him.
There's no way nobody's going to believe her.
Cops deliberately target people
who they don’t think will be believed when they come forward.
There was an officer that made a traffic stop
and only sexually assaulted the woman driver
when he realized that she was an undocumented immigrant.
According to the woman,
Macklin then ordered her to drive behind a nearby store,
forcing her to perform oral sex.
He thought, “She simply isn’t going to risk everything
and come forward to complain about me
because she might get deported.”
Some police officers exert their power at home, too.
These perpetrators don’t tend to change their spots.
In the UK, one woman every week
comes forward to report domestic abuse
at the hands of their police officer partner.
The domestic abuse in the police!
-Is epidemic! -Is epidemic!
The police have tried to reassure women
that men like Wayne Couzens
are not representative of police forces as a whole.
His actions were a gross betrayal of everything policing stands for.
But in fact, the same police force that let Sarah Everard down
has been systematically undermining women’s rights.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that the police
were guilty of sexist discrimination.
In 2003, Kate, an activist,
was deceived into a sexual relationship
by an undercover officer sent to spy on protest groups.
I have no doubt that the police officers
used relationships with women
to further their operational ends.
This practice had been going on for decades.
Until they recognize the systemic issues at play,
they’re never going to deal with the problem.
In the UK,
the government is desperate to recruit more police officers.
As a police officer,
it’s a privilege to serve our communities,
to protect vulnerable people,
and to see them through
some of the best and worst moments of their lives.
This government is on track and on course
to deliver 20,000 more police officers.
But some worry that this rush to recruit
may lead to the wrong people being taken on.
Even officers who do have criminal records are not dismissed.
They’re even taken on.
And despite the danger some police officers present to women,
the vetting process is not prioritizing women’s safety.
The focus of vetting is about organized crime.
It’s not about sexual misconduct.
It’s not about women’s safety.
Once inside, due to the nature of their jobs,
officers are given access to resources and potential victims.
We actually see cases that are horrific,
where an officer will actually use law enforcement databases
to obtain information,
and then they actually stalk their targeted victim
and violently rape them as a sexual predator.
The police have a lot of power.
The decision whether to arrest somebody
is an incredible amount of discretion
that we give law enforcement officers.
Anna Chambers showed us how she was put in handcuffs
after being detained by two undercover detectives
at this park in Brooklyn.
Chambers says one of the detectives climbed into the backseat
and forced her to perform a sex act.
I was screaming, like, “No, please, like, stop.”
The police work a tough job,
and fellow officers often provide much-needed support.
The bond that you create with your team
is a hugely strong one.
This bond, however, has a darker side.
There are so many good officers,
but they’re just turning a blind eye, that willful blindness,
and indeed, [in] some cases, absolute explicit support.
Should these matters by some miracle go to court,
police officers line up in their droves
to say what a wonderful chap he is.
That happened with Couzens.
Police officers were there giving good character evidence
of a man who took prostitutes to works dos
and showed extreme pornography round the nick.
The police are the ones that are supposed to protect us.
So when the offender’s a police officer,
victims can often feel stuck.
Survivors are made to report their assault
to the agency that employs the person who assaulted them.
There’s really nowhere to go.
If someone reports a police officer.
People working on the case often know the suspect.
They may even be friends with them.
So then all of the kind of problems
around integrity of investigations comes up.
So who polices the police?
We don’t have some kind of magical external police service
that polices the police.
We only have a civilian body,
and that is limited in what it can do.
Law enforcement is exempt from law enforcement.
The cases that we’ve identified are really the tip of the iceberg.
The police aren’t the only institution designed to protect
that is being condemned for hypocrisy.
At odds with what is expected,
for women in the military,
danger often comes from within their own forces.
Last year, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old soldier,
went missing from the military post at Fort Hood in Texas.
How could she go missing on a military base?
That’s ridiculous! Go find her!
Her family said that she had been sexually harassed
before her disappearance.
Ten weeks later, Vanessa’s body was found.
She had been murdered, dismembered, and burnt by another service member.
Overnight, hundreds marching to Houston City Hall,
demanding justice for army soldier Vanessa Guillén.
Many in the military came forward with their own stories.
He’s able to admit what he did,
and they say, “We’re going to make sure that you get out honorably.
And you’ll be able to re-enlist
and do this s**t to somebody else in another branch,
just not this one.”
And that s**t breaks my f*****g heart.
Today, female service members in the US
are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier
than shot by an enemy at war.
It is hypermasculine institution.
The military’s very young.
We know that youth increases the risk of sexual assault.
It’s resulted in a substantially higher likelihood
of sexual assault in the military than we’d see in the civilian world.
Despite this, the systems in place
are failing to protect women service members,
as an archaic set of rules gives commanders control over
whether suspects are prosecuted.
The commander knows the offender, often likes him.
Yeah, it really disincentivizes people to come forward.
The chain of command and the lack of an independent investigator
makes it easy for sexual assaults to be swept under the rug.
Investigators say she was sexually harassed
by a supervisor at Fort Hood,
and military leaders ignored her allegations.
Convicting rape is hard.
Sex assault and rape cases
are probably the most difficult to prosecute successfully.
There’s a lot of stereotypes and bias in the makeup of jurors’ minds.
The trauma impacts people so many different ways,
and so a lot of times a survivor will freeze during the process.
But in the military, the odds are really stacked against survivors.
In the military, I think it’s even heightened,
we view military members as able to defend themselves.
So it’s like, “Why didn’t this woman fight back?”
Instead of getting justice, women often face retaliation.
The survivors of military sexual assault
are much more likely to be retaliated against after reporting
than they were to see their offender be held accountable.
The deaths of Sarah Everard and Vanessa Guillén
have raised the need for drastic change
within the military and the police.
We will not live in fear!
Women united
will never be defeated!
Attempts to reform these age-old institutions have been slow.
Congress has to act,
and they are moving towards that.
The military has been opposing this with as much vigor as possible.
And unfortunately, that has slowed down reform.
When it comes to policing, promises to enact change are aplenty.
But many remain worried.
Policing is so resistant to change.
It’s so insular. It’s so defensive.
How do we take people out of positions of power
where they can engage in sexual violence
or extortion or rape
because of the power they have?
There are certainly best practices that can be implemented.
But the problem is we’re dealing with a very sexualized police subculture.
I don’t know how to change that.