The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 2GN 15
NEWS
going to see it. It was Mother’s Day and I
hadn’t even got her a present.” Steven-
son was put in a police van and ques-
tioned before being released on Clapham
Common later that night, alone and in
pitch darkness.
“All the time I was being handcuffed
and taken away I was thinking, this is how
Couzens got Sarah into his car. I knew
they were going to put me in their van but
I didn’t know what they were going to do
to me or what they could get away with. I
could feel adrenaline pumping through
me, hairs were sticking up all over my
body. I’ve never experienced fear like it.”
After the picture, taken by the Sunday
Times photographer Jack Hill, went viral,
she received hundreds of messages on
her Twitter account.
“Which turned out to be really, really
in-depth death threats and extremely
twisted misogyny from men who said
they knew where I lived and they were
coming to kidnap me. I don’t think I slept
for more than an hour all that week.” She
was accused of being a member of Antifa,
the American left-wing anti-fascist and
anti-racist political movement.
“One guy told me he was going to kerb-
stomp me and rape me beforehand.”
This, she says, was not the most graphic
threat she had. She reported the most
severe one, which had been sent by a
man who accused her of hijacking the
vigil and then listed the things he was
going to do to her before he killed her.
“The female police officer who took
my statement asked, ‘Well, did you hijack
the vigil?’ And I was like, ‘What? No! I
didn’t.’ But if I had, does that mean I
deserve to die?”
At one point, in her naivety, and never
having experienced trolling before, sheagreed to talk to someone on a “live”, a
broadcast streamed over Instagram. “He
was convinced I was a crisis actress,”
Stevenson says — someone hired to play a
role at the vigil. “I’d never even heard of
that. I thought I’d be able to prove I wasn’t
an actress. But I just sat there and sobbed
in front of 2,000 people while he called
me a c*** and a whore.”
Afterwards she lay on her sofa and
cried herself to sleep. “I couldn’t even get
myself up to bed.”
Stevenson also said that her Tinder
profile was liked by 50 serving Met offi-
cers. How did you know they were policeing her statement following a mugging in- Mason, who as a detective chief
inspector later became an aide to Dick,
was found guilty of gross misconduct that
was sexually motivated but kept his job.
As well as taking the Met to court, Stev-
enson is contesting a £200 fine for break-
ing Covid laws. She is incandescent about
the hypocrisy involved in Boris Johnson’s
cabinet partying a month after she was
arrested. “There’s no way he’s getting
arrested and fined for having a party, and
even if he did get a fine, it wouldn’t affect
him,” she says. “For some people, a £
fine means they won’t eat for a week.”
Stevenson was born and raised in
Southend. Her mother is a teacher in a
school for children with special needs,
her father a quality assurance engineer.
After a series of jobs that did not interest
her, she began studying physics at Queen
Mary University of London, dropping out
when her mother was diagnosed with
cancer. “For a while, I didn’t really have a
path, but every time I heard about a dis-
covery in physics on the news I thought,
that’s so cool, so interesting. I’ve got a bil-
lion physics books at home and I studied
in my spare time.”
At the time of the vigil, she was halfway
through a physics foundation year at
Royal Holloway, University of London. As
soon as she arrived she became an aca-
demic rep and ran an Instagram page,
Women in Physics. She also works for
SEPnet, the South East Physics Network,
which helps schoolchildren learn more
about becoming physicists. “I like being
busy,” she says. “I like helping people.”
So when opportunities arrived to cam-
paign for women’s rights, she grabbed
them — and rage propelled her forward.
“At first I felt bad about finding a platform
off the back of Sarah’s death. But I didn’t
ask for this. It just happened.” She met a
black woman at the vigil who had written
her solicitor’s number on her arm, plan-
ning for the likelihood of being arrested.
“As a white woman, I didn’t have to
think about these things. I believed that
the police, with a few exceptions, did a
good job. I was wrong.”
Of the 14 officers investigated at Char-
ing Cross, only one was sacked. Two were
promoted. In the other cases, the Inde-
pendent Office for Police Conduct found
that no further action should be taken.
Stevenson believes there are more —
and worse — revelations to come. She is
continually worried about her own secu-
rity, has been followed home by random
strangers and had to move house.
“After the vigil, a very nice, very
decent police officer came round and
gave me a barricade for my door and win-
dow locks, and I carry a vibrating alarm
wherever I go.” She acknowledges that
not all police officers are violent rapists
or misogynists but says that neither she,
nor any of her friends, would feel safe
asking a police officer for help.
“They give me the fear — I cross the
road to avoid them.” She still has night-
mares about being forced to the ground,
unable to breathe. “The feeling of being
physically overwhelmed as they sur-
rounded me will stay with me for ever.”
One of the messages she received on
the night Dick resigned was from an agent
interested in representing her. “I feel like
an impostor sometimes,” she says. “This
isn’t really my story. As a white woman, I
feel embarrassed and ashamed that it’s
taken me so long to wake up to something
that black and brown, gay and trans
women have been experiencing for dec-
ades. I’d hear about police brutality and
I’d think, really? That’s pretty rare isn’t it?
I feel like punching myself in the face. I
mean come on, snap out of it Patsy. You
could have been helping these people.”
She is acutely conscious that other
women have worked for years to expose
police failings and names Chantelle Lunt,
a former serving police officer and
founder of Merseyside BLM Alliance.
“Then I come along and suddenly
everyone wants to know what I think. I
just want to use my platform to pass the
mic and amplify the voices of those who
have not been heard.”
The failure to reform the police is truly
criminal, Stephen Bush, page 24Police
officers
give me
the fear.
I cross
the road
to avoid
them
Patsy Stevenson,
a physics
student, was
photographed
being arrested at
a vigil for Sarah
Everard, who was
killed by a
serving
Metropolitan
Police officerofficers? “Because they were in uniform!
And their bio says, ‘I’ve got handcuffs and
a baton and they’re not the fluffy kind.
Wink.’ I mean, what are they doing?”
An official watchdog report this month
revealed horrific WhatsApp messages
exchanged by officers at Charing Cross
police station in central London. Kristina
O’Connor, daughter of the entertainer
Des O’Connor, announced last week that
she was taking legal action against the
Met for “enabling and normalising”
misogyny after a detective sergeant,
James Mason, told her she “was amaz-
ingly hot” and asked for a date after tak-The
police
freed
her
alone,
in the
pitch
black
Met trainees painted my face white, says black ex-cop, and the force hasn’t changed
joining the force in 1992. He
recalled how on one occasion
at the Met’s training college in
Hendon, north London, a
group of recruits burst into
his room to smother his face
in shoe whitener, then told
him: “Now you fit in.”
At the time, Turawa went
along with the joke and failed
to report the incident to
superiors “because I wanted
to belong”. He even allowed
colleagues to take a
photograph of the prank.
“I was complicit in it,” he
said this weekend. “Looking
back at the photo now, I think
‘Oh my God, look at what you
put up with to fit in.’”
Turawa, who went on tomoment is not going to
change it.”
Turawa, who retired in
2018 after more than 25 years
at the Met, said that abusive
language and behaviour once
seen in police canteens had
transferred to social media
and WhatsApp groups.
Turawa, who runs a
diversity and inclusion
consultancy, believes that a
national agency needs to be
set up by the government “to
overhaul the culture of
policing” across UK forces.
He said he was recently
invited to join a Facebook
group launched by other
members of his intake at
Hendon from 1992. However,when he wrote of his ordeal
at the college, his post was
taken down by a former
colleague. He was told: “We
don’t want this kind of thing
in this group. There’s no
racism in this job and I think
you are just making this up.”
In a statement, Scotland
Yard told The Black Cop
documentary: “This is not the
same Met as it was 20-
years ago. We now provide
mandatory diversity training
for all officers and staff.
“We have done more than
almost any other organisation
to ensure that racism isn’t
tolerated and we champion
equality and inclusion.”
@DipeshGadherScotland Yard’s first openly
gay black officer has revealed
that fellow recruits painted
his face white to make him
“fit in”.
Gamal Turawa said a
discriminatory “canteen
culture” in the Metropolitan
Police had “destroyed” Dame
Cressida Dick and would
finish off future
commissioners unless there
was a radical shake-up at
rank- and-file level.
Turawa, 58, claimed that
cultural change has been
“minimal” since he first
encountered racism whenDipesh Gadher
Home Affairs Correspondentpainted his face
and thinks: “Oh
my God, look at
what you put up
with to fit in”Caroline ScottWhen news broke on Thursday night that
Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan
Police commissioner, had resigned, I was
grabbing my car keys and running out the
door to interview Patsy Stevenson.
By the time I met Stevenson in her
local pub half an hour later, her phone
was buzzing with messages from news
outlets wanting comments from this
28-year-old physics student who, 12
months ago, was not interested in politics
and knew nothing about misogyny in the
police force.
Stevenson had been on her way to
meet me when she heard Dick had gone.
“I stopped in the street and almost cried,”
she says. “I thought, thank God. Not only
has she presided over a force where sys-
temic misogyny and racism has been
allowed to thrive, she’s failed to ensure
the perpetrators are prosecuted. But the
fact that she’s out doesn’t fix what’s going
on. This can’t be a token gesture. There
has to be top-down, radical change.”
Stevenson describes her life this past
year as “surreal”. Thrust into a role she
did not ask for but felt she could not turn
her back on, her world changed com-
pletely when a picture of her arrest at a
vigil for Sarah Everard went viral.
Before the event on Clapham Com-
mon, south London, on March 13 last
year, she had only been to one protest — a
Black Lives Matter meeting in her home-
town of Southend. “We listened, took a
knee and went home. That’s how I
thought these things went.”
Lockdown guidance banning mass
gatherings was in place at the time of the
Everard vigil and the Met urged the pub-
lic to “stay at home or find a lawful and
safer way to express your views”.
Why did she go? “After Sarah’s death,
women didn’t feel they could trust the
police,” she says. “The vigil took place
outside, we were socially distanced and
wearing masks. It felt as though Covid
laws were being used to silence us.”
Stevenson cannot tell me everything
that happened that evening because she
is taking legal action against the police.
“All I can tell you is you’ll be shocked
when you hear it.”
What she will say is: “If you’d been
there, you’d have felt the misery in the
air. People were crying and trying to sup-
port each other, there were speeches on
the bandstand. Then, suddenly, it was
chaos — and the only thing that had
changed was that the police had arrived.”
Stevenson was forced to the ground,
handcuffed and arrested under Covid-
laws, the same laws that serving Met offi-
cer Wayne Couzens had falsely invoked
ten days earlier to arrest and handcuff
Everard as she walked home through Cla-
pham. Couzens drove Everard to Dover,
then raped her and strangled her with his
police belt. The kidnapping took less
than five minutes and was seen by two
people who believed they were witness-
ing a “legitimate arrest”.
We sit for a moment contemplating the
horror of that evening and the insensitiv-
ity of police at the vigil. Stevenson, who is
only 5ft 1in, is hugging her knees to her
chest. She wears tiny Vans skater shoes
that cannot be more than a size three,
harem trousers and a furry zip-up jacket
with a hoody that she pulls up to show me
how little there is of her underneath her
clothes. She is so incredibly slight, she
seems no bigger than a child. The officers
who forced her to the ground were
“huge, really big”. Brute force was unnec-
essary. Why does she think it was used?
“Intimidation,” Stevenson says. “It felt
like they were telling us not to mess with
them. I’d always trusted the police, so it
was unexpected and shocking. I’m such a
goody two-shoes. I have my head in my
books, I’ve never even tried drugs. I
could never have imagined something
like that could happen to me. I felt like a
child who’d never been scolded before. I
was confused and terrified. I hadn’t a clue
how to deal with it. I thought I’d be kicked
out of uni and never get a job.”
When she realised that the picture of
her being held down was on the front
page of every newspaper the next morn-
ing, her first thought was: “My mum’swork as a diversity and
inclusion trainer at the force,
said he was also subjected to
other “microaggressions”
under the guise of “banter”.
“People would say things
like ‘You don’t really have to
study because they want
you lot here. You can’t fail,’”
he said.
Turawa’s comments follow
a police watchdog’s report
into a culture of racism,
misogyny, homophobia and
bullying at a station in
London’s West End, which
precipitated Dick’s departure
last week.
Sadiq Khan, the capital’s
mayor, said he had lost
confidence in theGamal Turawa
says he looks
back at a photo
of the time fellow
police recruitscommissioner after claiming
she had failed to come up
with serious proposals to deal
with the problem.
Turawa, whose life story is
told in a Bafta-nominated
documentary, The Black Cop,
said Dick was in “denial”
about “institutional
discrimination”. He said: “It’s
easy to say ‘It’s just a few bad
apples,’ but the wider
question is ‘Why have you got
this culture where this can
take place? Where people feel
comfortable enough to
behave like this?’
“That culture has
destroyed another
commissioner and I think the
system that we have at the‘When I was cuffed, I thought:
This is how Couzens got Sarah’
BEN STEVENS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES; SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILLPatsy Stevenson, who is just 5ft 1in and a self-confessed goody two-shoes, had never been in trouble
with the police until the Everard vigil. Despite Cressida Dick’s resignation, she still wants answers