Should women be in the police?

All American beard, Matt Walsh, this week coughed up a steaming take so obnoxious and ignorant it made headlines in the mainstream press.

“If we’re being honest” the conservative pundit told his 3.1m YouTube subscribers, “female cops are absurd.” Citing the case of a copper in the US who accidentally shot a driver she pulled over in the leg, he claimed that women are simply too “jumpy” to be in front line policing roles, that they are “cartoonish”. He added that the only reason women are employed as officers at all is thanks to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies which “lowered the standards”. Walsh continued to justify his stance by explaining women officers made him nervous.

Walsh has a carefully curated image as “Mr Common Sense”; a down-to-earth man who is prepared to roll-up his plaid shirt sleeves and sock it to the DEI industry. To these ends he has made films ridiculing the ridiculous, taking on transgenderism in What is a Woman? and critical race theory in Am I a Racist? Yet his criticism of women officers is every bit as nutty as the swivel eyed zealots who argue Jesus was a black transwoman. With his rage baiting Conservatism, it’s tempting to wonder if Walsh means what he says, or whether it’s a spasm of bravado to please his fans.

Cathy Larkman, the Women’s Rights Network lead for policing, served for 31 years in the police force, including as a firearms commander, before retiring as a superintendent in 2021. When she heard Walsh’s comments she laughed, and suggested he’d been watching too many police dramas.

“To be frank, I am astonished that anyone seems to think that brute strength is the only asset to being a police officer. He clearly has no real clue what day to day policing entails… Full on conflict situations are a small part of the role of a police officer.”

Reflecting on her time at the sharp end of operational policing she says that her sex was often an advantage, as men are usually reluctant to hit women in public.

“I’ve been in situations where I have been dealing with a very aggressive male, who doesn’t want to be arrested and will resist, physically if necessary. Nine times out of ten, that same male will calm down when facing a female officer and behave himself, but is happy to fight a male officer taking the very same action. This isn’t theory by the way, this is reality based on hard experience.”

What woman or child who has been raped would want to disclose that to a man?

Conversely, she says, male officers are sometimes coy about restraining or arresting violent women.

Of course, policing is not only a matter of chasing down and facing off against criminals. Listening to victims of crime is also central. And what woman or child who has been raped would want to disclose that to a man? 

This is a particular concern given the apparent stream of criminally abusive male officers who have been exposed as working within the Metropolitan Police. Indeed, from The Angiolini Inquiry to the Baroness Casey Review, there have now been multiple investigations into the culture that allows officers like the murderous misogynist Wayne Couzens to go undetected. None seems to have made much of a difference and sadly, women who come into contact with male officers have every reason to be wary. The same undoubtedly holds true for the US, where there will be many more predatory boys in blue than female officers who accidentally pull the trigger while disarming male suspects. 

Given the apparent inability of so many men charged with upholding the law to act within in, perhaps the logical solution is to bar men from frontline roles. Emotional, hormonal and vain, many men just don’t have what it takes to be police officers. You never know when a surge of testosterone might make them do something unpredictable, or when a display of bravado could cause them to forget their orders. Banning men would undoubtedly give victims of crime, in particular women, confidence and potentially deescalate confrontations.

Of course, the humane and sensible approach is to accept that to police by consent officers ought to reflect the communities they serve. Thankfully this is not Afghanistan, nor is it Iran. In a civilised society, even when dealing with the incivility of criminals, there is a role for both women and men to uphold the law. Were Walsh not quite so testerical, were he a little calmer, less cartoonish and more logical, he might remember that. But perhaps these failings aren’t his fault, as he will no doubt agree, we can’t all be women.