Edge's News: Police handling of women after Sarah Everard case is appalling......PM Boris Johnson

The police’s failure to take violence against women and girls seriously enough is “infuriating”, Boris Johnson has said in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

In an interview with The Times, Johnson said that the public are right to feel the police are failing women and girls who are subjected to violence and sexual abuse.

Everard, 33, was kidnapped, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer who was this week given a whole life tariff at the Old Bailey.

The prime minister held talks on Thursday with Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, about how to boost the prosecutions for rape and secure more convictions.

Johnson said: “But there’s another problem, which is partly caused by the failure of the criminal justice system to dispose of these [cases]. Are the police taking this issue seriously enough? It’s infuriating. I think the public feel that they aren’t and they’re not wrong.”

“Do I fundamentally believe the police are on our side? Yes, absolutely they are. Can you trust the police? Yes you can. But there is an issue about how we handle sexual violence, domestic violence, the sensitivity, the diligence, the time, the delay, the confusion about your mobile phone. That’s the thing we need to fix.”

He said that while there are hundreds of thousands of “wonderful police officers in this country”, there is an issue with the way police treat women.

“What is unquestionably going up is the number of complaints by women that are not being taken seriously.

“What has been unquestionably going down has been the number of successful prosecutions for rape. The public know that. They can feel it. They know there’s something going wrong in the system.”

He said that many women give up attempts to find justice because of “victim attrition”.

“Far, far too many women are basically finding their lives lost to this system, waiting for their complaint to be taken seriously, waiting for their case to be heard, and nothing is happening,” he said.

“You’re seeing victim attrition, you’re seeing people giving up, it’s utterly miserable for them. It’s infuriating.

“The police are realising when they arrest someone they’re not getting through the system fast enough. Very sadly that may well be one of the reasons why they’re not doing enough to help the victims that report and we need to fix that.”

He stood by Dick amid calls for her to resign. “I’ve known her for a long time and worked with her in a number of positions,” he said. “I think that she understands what a huge task we all face in making sure women feel more confident about the way their complaints are going to be taken by the police.”

The number of rape cases reported to police that resulted in a suspect being charged fell to a record low of 1,490 last year — a rate of just 3 per cent. This year the government promised to reverse the alarming fall and set a new target of 13 per cent.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, described Everard’s murder as an “absolute scandal” for the Met and demanded the force makes immediate changes to the way it handles violence against women.

She led calls for a wider societal change to end violence against women, declaring “enough is enough”, but faced fresh criticism over the government’s lack of action on the issue.

In an interview with London’s Evening Standard, Patel refused to name Couzens, instead describing him as “a monster that absolutely abused power and authority”.

Issuing a stark warning to the Met, the home secretary added: “That’s an absolute scandal and that’s where the police will have to make some changes through the reforms, through being held to account and through difficult conversations.”

She insisted she will “not shy away from difficult conversations with all levels of policing, believe you me”.

One chief constable told The Times that the Couzens case was the “Dr Shipman for policing” and needed to result in meaningful change. The comment was a reference to Harold Shipman, a GP who murdered 250 people.

However there was an immediate public backlash after one of the main messages from senior Met officers was to tell women to hail a bus or call 999 if they were concerned about a lone officer. The chief said it would have been helpful to have a “coherent public message that puts the emphasis on the police service, not on women, to sort this out”.

Five serving police officers, including three from the Met, are under investigation by the watchdog for allegedly exchanging misogynistic and racist material with Couzens in 2019. TheMet officers, two of whom are under criminal investigation, have been placed on restricted duties but not suspended.