This article mentions sexual assault.
In June 2020, Danyal Hussein stabbed to death two sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, in London’s Fryent Park as part of a sadistic attempt to win the lottery by murdering random women. When the victims’ bodies were found, two officers from the Metropolitan Police were assigned to guard the crime scene. Those officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, left their posts on the cordon to take photos of the dead women, superimpose their own faces on them, and share them to a WhatsApp group named “Covid Cunts”. They referred to the sisters as “dead birds”. Days earlier, Jaffer had bragged on WhatsApp about covering up an assault on a group of Asian men.
In March 2021, Sarah Everard was walking home through south London when she was approached by Met officer Wayne Couzens, who went by the nickname “The Rapist”. Couzens handcuffed her, shoved her into his police car and drove her to Kent, where he raped and murdered her. When a group of women tried to hold a vigil for Everard on Clapham Common, the gathering was violently broken up by Met officers under COVID-19 lockdown regulations. The police threw the women to the ground and handcuffed them, just as Everard had been, before arresting them. Officers trampled the floral tributes that had been left for a woman who did not make it home because one of their colleagues had killed her.
Which brings us to the events of January 30, 2023, when Sam Kerr, one of the greatest footballers in the world, and certainly Australia’s greatest, had a run-in with the members of the Metropolitan Police and a taxi driver. Kerr and her fiancée Kristie Mewis were returning home from a night out, and after Kerr had vomited out of the window, the driver locked the doors, veered off the route home and took the women directly to a police station. Fearing for their safety, the women called the police themselves from the back of the locked cab. Mewis, also an elite footballer, kicked out a window with her feet in a bid to escape.
On reaching what the women hoped would be the safety of a police station, Kerr was charged with “racially aggravated harassment” after she called a police officer “fucking stupid and white” because he did not believe the danger the women were in. Of course, the police officers’ refusal to take Kerr and Mewis seriously should come as no surprise given the force’s recent track record. Kerr referenced the Everard case in her arguments at the police station that night, to no avail.
The Crown Prosecution Service initially and rightly declined to take up the case against Kerr because it did not meet the required threshold for the crime of racially aggravated harassment. It was only after the officer made an additional statement that he had felt “shocked, upset and humiliated” by Kerr’s behaviour that the matter went to trial.
A review commissioned after Everard’s murder found that the Met Police was institutionally racist, misogynistic, homophobic, corrupt and yes, disproportionately white, which many Londoners could have attested to directly without the need for an inquiry. It certainly sheds some light on the decision to charge a gay woman of colour with racially aggravated harassment for the crime of trying to explain the concept of white privilege while drunk.
The spurious charges brought against Kerr can most properly be seen as part of a pattern of harassment of women and ethnic minorities by the Metropolitan Police. Following the crackdown on the Sarah Everard vigil, one of the arrested women, Patsy Stevenson, was bombarded on Tinder by at least 50 serving police officers, a tactic she said amounted to intimidation.
The hypocrisy of a representative of an institution that stopped and searched the same Black boy 60 times in two years and strip-searched a 15-year-old Black girl at school while she was on her period claiming to be shocked and humiliated by Kerr’s words is breathtaking. Not to mention the fact that more than a thousand serving officers were under investigation for sexual and domestic violence at the time of Kerr’s dispute with police. “Fucking stupid and white” would appear to be the least of it.
A vast amount of time, money and whatever constitutes the digital version of newsprint has now been wasted on a night out in which the only people who had any reasonable fears were the women who were locked in a taxi and disbelieved by the police. Yet despite the entirely appropriate not guilty verdict, the focus remains on the perceived sins of Kerr rather than those of the police officer. Questions raised in the Australian media about Kerr’s fitness for sporting hero status and her suitability for the Matildas’ captaincy are disingenuous at best, especially those that hinge on her gender.
But then again, perhaps this is to be expected from a sports media culture that not too long ago witnessed a “sportswoman of the year” award being given to a horse.
What will happen to Kerr’s reputation? The Australian press corps has been picking over the remains of this nothingburger of a case like a pack of underfed seagulls. If there is any sense of proportion left, the answer should be nothing at all. This is after all a country that apparently lauds the sporting larrikin — the drinking of 52 beers on a flight to the UK, say — but only, it seems, if that larrikin is male. We’re seemingly happy to forgive the domestic abusers and homophobes who have managed to have celebrated sporting careers in this country.
Kerr’s not guilty verdict is a vindication for the player and an indictment of a deeply flawed police force on the brink of collapse because it repeatedly fails the communities it purports to protect. It is a victory for women who are targeted and dismissed by officers and a stark reminder of racial double standards in policing. What it is not is a verdict on Kerr’s rightful place in the sporting firmament.
If an institutionally bigoted police force and a pearl-clutching media don’t like it, well, to cite a certain great Australian, they can suck on that one.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
For counselling, advice and support for men in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania who have anger, relationship or parenting issues, call the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491. Men in WA can contact the Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline on 1800 000 599.
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