Fellow Met police officers shoved porn in my face – BBC Panorama isn’t surprising

Panorama’s latest programme, Undercover in the Police, is a shocking indictment of the state of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Having spent over 10 years between 2004 and 2015 working as a police constable in the Met myself, I watched it on Wednesday night because I was interested to see if anything had changed since I forced myself to fit into the ‘boys club’ that I found makes up the force.

Sexist jokes, porn at work, bullying and sexual harassment were part of life in the force for women like me back then.

And last night’s expose showed me nothing has changed. 

I watched in disgust as several male police officers displayed behaviour that horribly demonstrated – in the words of former Chief Constable Sue Fish – a ‘highly toxic culture’ of ‘hypersexualised male behaviour, misogyny, racism and gratuitous unlawful violence’.

For those who haven’t seen it, the programme followed Rory Bibb – an undercover reporter posing as a DDO (a designated detention officer) – as he worked in the custody suite at Charing Cross Police Station. He recorded the behaviour of the officers around him, and the footage is shocking.

First, the misogyny. Two sergeants are filmed laughing about a rape allegation, and one – PS Joe McIlvenny – is later recorded describing a female detainee by saying, ‘I’ve paid money to go to clubs and see women dressed like this’.

This is a man who was described by Rory as ‘relentless’ talking about sex at work and later appears to doubt a woman’s allegations of domestic abuse, saying ‘that’s what she says’. 

That this man has any kind of power over women is terrifying.

Second, there’s racism. Islam was described by one officer as a ‘serious problem’, and Muslims were declared by another to be the people who caused the ‘most crime’ across London.

At the pub with the undercover journalist, an officer called PC Neilson stated that ‘any foreign person is the worst to deal with’ and went on to describe Algerian immigrants as ‘scum’. As the night went on, PC Neilson admitted that he’d like to shoot immigrants in the head, and wished he had a revolver to do so.

I expected racism and I certainly expected misogyny, but what truly shocked me was the unjustifiable violence.

I thought police brutality was mostly a thing of the past, that we’d learnt from avoidable deaths in custody, but it seems to me that police officers seem comfortable increasingly resorting to unnecessary force.

At one point in the programme, PC Neilson described using excessive force on a 17-year-old boy in the back of a police van. 

He bragged about knowing what pressure points to use to elicit the most pain and described repeatedly moving them so that the boy didn’t become ‘immune’ to the agony he was inflicting.

Another officer described, laughing the entire time, how easy it is to snap the tendons of fingers if a detainee is not cooperating with having their fingerprints taken, and we see an officer nicknamed ‘Stampy’ stamping on a detainee’s head.

Instead of being ashamed of their behaviour, these officers brag about it. But bragging only occurs when the right people are around, and the programme also exposes the culture of secrecy that has pushed the racists, sexists, and bullies underground.

Sadly, the programme brought me right back to the mid 2000s, when I was a new recruit.

At one point in the show, a clearly uncomfortable female officer leaves a group of male colleagues as they begin to discuss a woman wearing no underwear. It reminded me of the multiple times I was made to feel uncomfortable by the male officers around me, how they constantly talked about sex at work, how pornography was shoved in my face, and how I was quizzed on my sex life. 

At the time, I’m ashamed to say I went along with it. There was, and still is, a culture of silence within policing, and anyone who goes against the grain is ostracised and cast out. You had to be ‘one of the lads.’ 

On the occasion where I did speak to a sergeant about it, I was encouraged not to make it official.  

It’s now been 10 years since I left the Met, predominantly so that I could spend more time with my young children,  but I regularly speak to current officers who tell me nothing has changed. Female officers in particular reach out to tell me that they still feel like they can’t speak out about the sexism they face at work. 

Recently an officer told me that she was being harassed by a sergeant, and when she told him she didn’t fancy him, he stopped giving her overtime.

I do try and encourage these women to speak up, but it’s hard to convince them when doing so risks losing not only friends, but their whole careers. 

Unfortunately, nothing will change in policing until whistle-blowers are celebrated and encouraged. 

Sergeants should take every complaint brought to them by their PCs seriously, and be enthusiastic about ‘going on the record,’ instead of discouraging it. But this would involve a culture shift so enormous that I’m not even sure it is possible.

Thankfully, after the release of the Panorama exposé, the Met has reacted quickly – eight officers and one staff member have been suspended, with two further officers taken off front line duties.

Commissioner Rowley said the behaviour was ‘disgraceful’ and ‘totally unacceptable’, but his words mean nothing. 

Yes, they are acting against officers who are caught out, but what are they doing to stop this type of man – because it is generally male officers – joining in the first place?

Dangerous men are attracted to policing because of the power it gives them. A man with a warrant card can walk up to any woman he likes and take her off the street. 

We need to change our image of the ideal police officer from an uncompromising brute to one of unshakeable integrity. 

While it is excellent that the Met have been coming down harder on discrimination – the Met says that more than 1,400 officers and staff have left or been dismissed since 2022 for failing to meet standards – the programme shows like-minded cops clearly sticking together.

I believe everything that happens at Charing Cross is also happening at every police station across the UK. This is not a Charing Cross problem and it’s not even a Met problem – it’s a UK policing problem.

And until the image of policing is completely turned upside down and compassion, virtue, and honesty are valued over brute force, strength and ‘banter’, nothing will change.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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