Ultimately, she quit. She had lasted five years. McDonald has now written a book about her experiences, No Comment: What I Wish I’d Known About Becoming a Detective, in which she lays bare the realities of life in the police force, and which the police force is unlikely to use as an advertising manual for potential new recruits. She was thrown in at the deep end after just five months’ classroom training, plus a probationary stint at Bethnal Green police station. In the book, she writes that, by the end of the job, she felt like one of the abuse victims she interviewed: one whose partner “beats me up but needs me, and I stay for the tiny glimmers of hope that I will make a difference”. All but four of her class of 15 direct entrants have left the force, she writes. (The Met says it has since made changes to the programme.)

The woman reported him, and the husband was arrested. “We charged him, had him remanded, but he kept appealing, and kept winning. He’d go to court and say things like, ‘Oh, but I’m going to miss my sister’s wedding,’ and the judge would let him go.” These findings shook a nation whose trust in policing was already plummeting. The latest poll shows just 40 per cent of Britons have confidence in the police – down from 67 per cent last year, and 87 per cent in 1981. All the while, across the country antisocial behaviour is rising even as officer recruitment does, and more than nine in ten crimes in England and Wales now go unsolved. You could be the first person they’d spoken to about it and they’d honestly believe you were going to help them – and you’d really want to help,” she says. “So you’d put everything together and work really hard and take it to the CPS – and it was so hard to get anything prosecuted. After all that, you’d often have to say to someone who’d told you what was happening to them that you couldn’t do anything.” Finding the suspect was easy – if not the partner, it was generally someone the victim knew, with “stranger rapes” in dark alleyways so rare that they were dealt with by a separate unit. The hard part was charging them.

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The job there, she says, felt like fighting a raging fire with a water pistol. “What I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis, what I was personally involved with and the people around me were involved with, is more trauma than the average person would see in maybe two years,” she says. “It’s very, very high volume and very, very high risk.” She would juggle 20 cases at a time, overseeing each from arrest to court. A short secondment, to a murder investigation team, left her wondering why they seemingly enjoyed unlimited resources once it was too late to save the victim, while her domestic violence team – capable of preventing murders – was run ragged. Everyone knows who the dodgy characters are, but no one can take it anywhere, because that’s committing career suicide In the summer of 2017, McDonald was between jobs, having cycled through careers in management consultancy, advertising and tech sales. She was shadowing a barrister and considering going into law when she saw a female detective testify at a child abuse trial and realised that hers was a job capable of changing lives. The Met Police's Direct Entry Detective scheme was aimed at turning people with no experience of the police into detectives.

I wrote what I saw,” McDonald says, “and, yes, it reveals an uncomfortable truth, but then the police are our public servants at the end of the day, and so we should know what goes on, shouldn’t we?” Jess McDonald was a true crime junkie and Line of Duty sofa sleuth with a strong sense of justice. Under a year later, thanks to a controversial new initiative, she was a detective in the London Metropolitan Police Service. After a while, it just became intolerable. The job is already traumatic enough as it is, you know?” People complain to the police all the time that they’re not doing enough [to secure a conviction], but what they have to understand is that our work was often frustrated by the next step in the criminal justice system. The Crown Prosecution Service isn’t really fit for purpose; they’re failing to keep people safe time and again. If the CPS doesn’t deal with it properly, then there’s only so much the police can do.”Unlike the women she worked with, McDonald said she would still report a sexual offence to the police (“I’d write my statement myself”). But with two-year waits for rape trial dates, she conceded that “you don’t have meaningful access to justice”. She has learned from her time in the police to protect herself.

In a statement, the Met said that after McDonald raised bullying concerns, she had been offered “substantial management guidance, advice and welfare support” and encouraged to come forward with more information; it insisted that it takes allegations of officer criminality, as in Mel’s case, “incredibly seriously”.Borrow Foreign Bodies → How Not to Be an Antique Dealer: Everything I've Learnt That Nobody Told Me, by Drew Pritchard Elizabeth I was less than three years old when her mother was executed. Given that she could have held precious few memories of Anne Boleyn, it is often assumed that her mother exerted little influence over her. But this is both inaccurate and misleading. Elizabeth knew that she had to be discreet about Anne, but there is compelling evidence that her mother exerted a profound influence on her character, beliefs and reign. Even during Henry's lifetime, Elizabeth dared to express her sympathy for her late mother by secretly wearing Anne's famous 'A' pendant when she sat for a painting with her father and siblings. Borrow How Not to Be an Antique Dealer → No Comment: What I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Detective, by Jess McDonald Borrow I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was → The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Secret, by Victoria Belim At one point in the book, she recounts living in shared police accommodation, and how one male officer filmed a female counterpart in the shower. He was reported, but not fired. The officer’s next job was to protect victims of sexual offences.