The secret life of a Met detective: why Jess McDonald quit her job

She joined the police to make a difference. But McDonald's work on rape and domestic violence cases left her with PTSD and the determination to speak out

Jess McDonald was still on probation as a trainee police detective when she encountered her first alleged rapist. Like much else she describes in her memoir, No Comment, the interview didn't go at all as expected.

Like the vast majority of the rape cases she would work on later, it boiled down to a woman's word against a man's. Their stories broadly matched, except that he said the sex was consensual and she that it wasn't. "I’ve read all the statements and I’m thinking: ‘OK, first of all, this is not clearcut.’ It kind of messes with your head a bit, because you just don't know for certain," says McDonald, a 36-year-old former tech salesperson who joined the Metropolitan police via an experimental direct-entry scheme that fast-tracked graduates into the criminal investigation department, allowing them to eschew years spent pounding the beat in uniform.

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".

So far, so depressingly predictable, given recent policing scandals. McDonald's book describes some deeply troubling incidents, including what she concludes was the racist arrest of a young black man for banging on his own front door; recruits being told to practise stop-and-search skills on homeless people who had seemingly done nothing wrong; and two shocking stories of predatory male police officers committing sexual offences on colleagues. One young woman was assaulted by a senior officer at a borough party, but didn't tell for fear it would "only cause trouble"; another was spied on in the shower by a male officer who had recently been appointed to lead a sexual offences team. McDonald resigned after allegedly being bullied by two male officers.

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.’"

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."

It is a more nuanced story than the one usually told about the Met, but one partly echoed by Louise Casey's recent report on the force, which declared it institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic, but also warned of frontline officers experiencing higher burnout rates than frontline doctors during Covid. McDonald was briefly signed off with depression before joining the CSU and diagnosed with PTSD on her way out a year and a half later.

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.)

What surprises me most, when we meet on a video call, is that part of her would love to go back. "It's a regret that it played out the way it did," she says. "It's just an incredible job. You are doing meaningful work – albeit very frustrated by the system, but it feels like this really matters."

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.

Despite the Met's chequered reputation, she had no qualms about applying, she says: "I went in very unknowing and quite open, thinking a lot more about what I could bring to it versus: ‘How is this going to impact on me?’ If I look back now, I think: oh bless," she says, rolling her eyes at her naivety.

Her first uncomfortable moment came in Bethnal Green, when she was asked to stop and search "what looked like two emaciated crack addicts", who didn't look to McDonald as if they had done anything to justify it. But none of the trainees felt confident challenging the instruction.

How easy is it for officers to speak out against things that feel wrong? "Hopefully, easier post-Casey, but it's not easy at all," she says. ‘There were things that I was affronted by – I was just like: ‘What the hell?’ But everyone there is quite institutionalised." Detectives who come up via the traditional route are "almost broken down" like army recruits, she says: "You obey orders, you don't overthink it … it's very much: ‘This is how it's done here.’" But at least in Bethnal Green she was mentored by a kindly, experienced sergeant, in contrast to her posting at CSU.

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.

Most officers, she says, coped with the pressure in one of two ways. "You either burn out and break from it, or you become quite hardened. And if you become too hardened, you almost become detached; you maybe don't care so much. I’ve heard colleagues referring to an investigation, interviewing or whatever, as shelf-stacking." But McDonald couldn't switch off emotionally from the gruesome cases she was handling and increasingly felt powerless to help.

"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.

While poor policing is often blamed for low conviction rates, McDonald insists this is not the full story with rape or domestic violence. "There are obvious cultural issues, which the Casey review flagged up. However, I do think sometimes they’re being scapegoated a little and we’re not looking at the broader picture. For women having access to justice, it's CPS charging standards." That said, in the book, she quotes a male colleague who had worked on domestic violence for years announcing: "I don't get it, why don't they just leave?"

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.

While she was shocked by Mel's experience, it didn't prompt her to consider quitting. Instead, she left after what she describes as workplace bullying by two sergeants, one of whom began disciplinary proceedings against her (struck out, she writes, after she complained of bullying).

She doesn't know why she was targeted. "It could be because I’m female; it could be because I’d had an issue with my mental health; it could be because I was coming in from this scheme, so I was like an outsider." As with racism and sexism, she says, bullying is hard to prove, because it is cumulative: "It's like a thousand tiny things. You can almost explain away every single incident [in isolation]." But bullying is an abuse of power that should be a red flag in policing, she says. She wants an anonymous reporting system to be introduced to allow Met officers to raise concerns about colleagues.

"The vast majority of people join the police to make a difference and to help, and they’re awarded these powers to help with that. However, some people join the police for the powers. And people who seek power to abuse power are at the heart of a lot of really serious crimes," she says. "In my experience, within the police, everyone knows who the dodgy characters are. Everyone's talking about it, but no one can take it anywhere, because that's committing career suicide, and nothing's going to be done."

McDonald never worked with Sarah Everard's murderer, Wayne Couzens, but she learned afterwards that his colleagues nicknamed him "the rapist". "So they obviously found him creepy," she says. "There needs to be a really proactive approach to dodgy behaviour, uncomfortable things – not necessarily crimes. If 40 women that someone's working with are saying: ‘This guy makes me feel really uncomfortable,’ that warrants an investigation."

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.

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".

As for the book's other allegations about behaviour and culture in the force, it added that the commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, "has been unequivocal in his determination to raise standards and improve culture across the Met as outlined in our recent update on standards and in the turnaround plan".

McDonald says she is optimistic that Rowley – who echoed her concerns in May by accusing the CPS of "cherrypicking" easy cases to prosecute – can make improvements. Unlike some of her colleagues, she says she would now report it if she were raped. But she is less confident that if she reported a minor crime, such as theft, it would be solved, given how overwhelmed the Met is by more violent crime. "Theft of a phone? Forget it, they don't have time," she says. "I’ve had friends texting me like: ‘Someone's stolen my bike!’ Yes, it's bad, but it's like: ‘Guys, you have no idea."

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."

Some names have been changed

No Comment: What I Wish I’d Known About Becoming a Detective by Jess McDonald (Raven Books, £16.99) is out now. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply