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.”

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.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. Probably the most important book on the state of British policing you'll ever read' Graham Bartlett 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.” 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.)

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.Borrow The Rooster House → Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama 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.” 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”. The first time Detective Constable Jess McDonald interviewed a suspect who declined to answer questions, she was a little thrown. “I’d seen Line of Duty, of course,” she says, “and so I knew that ‘no comment’ could happen, but when it happened to me… oof!” She laughs, sighs, and blows out her cheeks. “It was awful!”