Janet Hills, a senior black female police officer said that London’s Metropolitan police should not be treating sexism as banter. This comes after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer. A senior police officer had abducted marketing executive Sarah Everard on a London street, raped and then murdered her. 

“There needs to be a zero tolerance [for sexism] and there isn’t. There is this sort of leeway of ‘oh well it was just a joke or bants or whatever’. It’s then not recorded, and therefore the behaviours increase and get worse,” she told Guardian. 

Janet Hills joined the force in 1991, becoming the first female chair of the Black Police Association in 2015.  “Ultimately what needs to happen is for the police to take on board the fact that the problem is within,” she said. 

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She claimed that her seniors did not take her first complaint of sexism seriously and instead focused on faults in her work. 

“I’ve got to be honest with you, it did knock my confidence by quite a lot. But, again, it’s almost accepted. You accept that this is the way it is,” she said. “In terms of my own experience, it didn’t quiet me but I can see how it has quietened others, in terms of not saying anything and just ducking their heads and getting on with the job in hand.”

The ex-Scotland Yard chief superintendent Parm Sandhu, earlier this week, said that “some female police officers didn’t raise concerns about male colleagues’ behaviour because they feared they would not get support when asking for help, and that they would get kicked in in the street”. 

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Janet Hills continued, “I don’t think a colleague would stand by and let anyone who is a colleague get assaulted in that way,” she said. “If they want to get to you, it will be around your performance and that’s where we see a massive disparity.”

She added, “The fear that if you call for help no one would [help], that is a big fear, but I can’t ever see that happening. It’s definitely a perception.”

Met, on Friday, released the advice that people stopped by a lone plainclothes officer should challenge their legitimacy and could try “waving a bus down”.

Janet criticised it and said, “It’s not sensible. What they need to do is speak to women, find out a consensus and idea of what it feels like to be a female who potentially hasn’t got the lighting on their street or has to go to a park, and what that feels like and what they can then do.”

“You need to understand the problem before you can then put out a solution and that solution says to me that they still cannot understand the problem.”