No Comment: What I Wish I'd Known About Becoming A Detective

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Unlike the women she worked with, McDonald said she would still report a sexual offence to the police (“I’d write my statement myself”). But with two-year waits for rape trial dates, she conceded that “you don’t have meaningful access to justice”. She has learned from her time in the police to protect herself. The Met Police's Direct Entry Detective scheme was aimed at turning people with no experience of the police into detectives.

Jess McDonald was a true crime junkie and Line of Duty sofa sleuth with a strong sense of justice. Under a year later, thanks to a controversial new initiative, she was a detective in the London Metropolitan Police Service. 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”. The more he got away with it, the bolder he became. The harassment continued. His wife feared for her life. “She lived in terror. It was awful. And you just feel incredibly helpless.”Borrow Foreign Bodies → How Not to Be an Antique Dealer: Everything I've Learnt That Nobody Told Me, by Drew Pritchard 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. 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. Everyone knows who the dodgy characters are, but no one can take it anywhere, because that’s committing career suicide Drew Pritchard set himself up as a dealer when he was a teenager, rooting around in scrapyards, working out of a shed and getting about in a ropy old Transit. Now he's a leading figure in the antiques trade with an international online business, and he's hugely popular presenter of hit TV show Salvage Hunters. But he's still as driven by the thrill of the find as he was forty years ago. In this engaging and informative narrative, clearly structured into practical themes, Drew reveals what it takes to start with nothing but an obsession and a dream. He shows you how to create the opportunities, establish a network, get the best out of auctions and fairs, spot the fakes, develop your eye, build a reputation, buy and sell and yes, make a profit.

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!”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.”

Just as McDonald’s new book about her experience, No Comment: What I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Detective, was due out, the Casey Review landed. The report was a historic excoriation of the UK’s biggest police force. Baroness Louise Casey, a former government crime adviser, found the Met to be “institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic”. Like McDonald, a quarter of women working in the Met told the review they’d been bullied. Piecing together evidence from original documents and artefacts, this book tells the story of Anne Boleyn's relationship with, and influence over her daughter Elizabeth. In so doing, it sheds light on two of the most famous and influential women in history.

People complain to the police all the time that they’re not doing enough [to secure a conviction], but what they have to understand is that our work was often frustrated by the next step in the criminal justice system. The Crown Prosecution Service isn’t really fit for purpose; they’re failing to keep people safe time and again. If the CPS doesn’t deal with it properly, then there’s only so much the police can do.” 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.

I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was is an insight into the depths of her psyche, and a stark exploration of what trauma can do to someone. Reflecting on years of personal and professional experience, she opens up to readers about her struggles with mental health and different treatments over the years, hoping to provide reassurance and guidance to anyone confronting their own anticipated, or unanticipated, struggles with mental health. 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.”

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. Elizabeth I was less than three years old when her mother was executed. Given that she could have held precious few memories of Anne Boleyn, it is often assumed that her mother exerted little influence over her. But this is both inaccurate and misleading. Elizabeth knew that she had to be discreet about Anne, but there is compelling evidence that her mother exerted a profound influence on her character, beliefs and reign. Even during Henry's lifetime, Elizabeth dared to express her sympathy for her late mother by secretly wearing Anne's famous 'A' pendant when she sat for a painting with her father and siblings. 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.