As for the pitiful rape prosecution rate, her time working on sexual and domestic violence cases inside the Met’s community safety unit (CSU) convinced McDonald that the real culprit wasn’t police misogyny but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) criteria that set a high bar for prosecuting. “They want a realistic chance of conviction. But with these crimes against women – and they are predominantly crimes against women – you can’t have that,” she says, pointing out that intimate crimes rarely have witnesses. “I’m not saying they’re easy crimes to prosecute and then to convict. However, it’s not good enough to just be like: ‘Oh, it’s a grey area’ – a lot of these crimes are grey. It’s so very, very demoralising when you work in a unit where other women you work with say they wouldn’t report it if they were raped themselves.” What would she say to a friend who was considering going into policing? She doesn’t hesitate: “I’d say go for it. But don’t suffer in silence.” The Met Police's Direct Entry Detective scheme was aimed at turning people with no experience of the police into detectives. I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was is an insight into the depths of her psyche, and a stark exploration of what trauma can do to someone. Reflecting on years of personal and professional experience, she opens up to readers about her struggles with mental health and different treatments over the years, hoping to provide reassurance and guidance to anyone confronting their own anticipated, or unanticipated, struggles with mental health. Instead, she blamed a “misogynistic criminal justice system” – specifically, the Crown Prosecution Service’s charging standards. Time and again, she would complete an investigation only to be told by a CPS lawyer on the other end of the phone that there was “no realistic prospect of conviction”.

Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues, lovers and neighbours. McDonald says she didn’t experience sexual harassment in the Met, but she knows women who did. Her friend Mel was living in police accommodation when she caught a senior officer using his mobile phone to spy on her in the shower of their shared bathroom. Fortunately, another officer intervened and the culprit was arrested, but by the time his case came to court, Mel had quit the force. “She’s said to me since, would she have reported it if it was just her and him? Probably not, because he’s more senior,” says McDonald. After a while, it just became intolerable. The job is already traumatic enough as it is, you know?”

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Yet she says that most officers she worked alongside were good people, keen to help, but often burnt out or desensitised by an impossible workload aggravated by budget cuts. “I’m not saying there aren’t issues with the culture and standards in terms of how it’s reported, in terms of turning a blind eye, in terms of not rooting out ‘bad apples’,” she says. “But it’s so demoralising to think that all these people who are almost martyring themselves with how intense the work is, like any public service, are now almost tarred with this brush of ‘the police are just bullies, racist, sexist.’” I do want to point out that there are some really good people in the force doing an incredible job in very tough circumstances,” she says, “but, yes, there are some really bad apples, too.” She asked the officer conducting the interview how a jury would decide who to believe. “And the detective, who was relatively senior, said: ‘Oh no, crap rape, it’s not going anywhere – don’t worry about it.’ And I was like: but how is it not going anywhere? It’s got to go somewhere.” How could conflicting accounts simply be deemed to cancel each other out, she wondered, without trying to establish the truth? With only 1.3% of police-recorded rapes in England and Wales leading to prosecution in 2020-21, many women’s worst nightmares must have been written off as “crap rapes”. 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. 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.

Borrow I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was → The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Secret, by Victoria Belim Borrow Foreign Bodies → How Not to Be an Antique Dealer: Everything I've Learnt That Nobody Told Me, by Drew Pritchard The moment she qualified, the regularity of her previous working life evaporated. “It’s all shiftwork, so you no longer have a Monday to Friday, and you don’t have weekends off. Instead, you have rest days. But if you’re working a particular case, you just see it through to completion. The work-life balance,” she notes, “wasn’t great.” 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.With the devastating effects of COVID-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilisation, we live in unprecedented times - or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease live side by side. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines. The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science - it is political, cultural and deeply personal.

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.” Her original plan was to publish her book anonymously while continuing in the job, she says. Now that it is out under her real name, is she worried about her former colleagues’ response? “Not really. I’m sure some people who have not behaved the best would rather it hadn’t seen the light of day, but it’s honest – at the end of the day, it’s what happened,” she says. She sees the publication of the book as part of changing policing culture. A relationship ended, and now the bulk of her social circle was made up of fellow trainees. After graduating, she was posted to east London, and worked largely with domestic abuse cases. Almost 11 per cent of all crimes reported to the police concern domestic abuse but, McDonald says, these are often the hardest to get a conviction for. 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.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.

Borrow How Not to Be an Antique Dealer → No Comment: What I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Detective, by Jess McDonaldProbably the most important book on the state of British policing you'll ever read' Graham Bartlett