A force to be reckoned with

originally published:
22nd August 2009

The last team Inspector Liz Owsley of the Metropolitan police worked on, not so long ago, happened to have just one woman. All the rest were young male PCs.

There was a moment, she relates, when a bit of a situation was starting to kick off with a bunch of yobs in a courtyard. A constable was getting overly verbal with one of the lads, trading insults: a real slanging match.

“So the woman officer just turned to him and said, quite gently, ‘You’re not helping,’” Owsley recalls. “It was only a small thing, tiny really, but it was classic. Women police will always want to resolve a situation with the least possible upset.

Their question is always, can we do this without confrontation? Is it possible without conflict? There just isn’t that same kind of macho aggressiveness you can get from the men. We’re better communicators.

“After the public outrage and official brickbats heaped on the Met’s handling of G20 protests in London in April, during which a newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, died after being hit by a police officer, news this week that both senior officers controlling tactics at next week’s Climate Camp will be women has been broadly welcomed as evidence that the force may be trying to adopt a less confrontational approach to policing demonstrations.

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Posted by Zinzi Eka-Naphtali on 27/08/2009. Filed under Breaking News & Digests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry