Child Q: Officer who strip searched girl thought she was ‘doing the right thing'
This involved the removal of the 15-year-old's clothing including underwear, her bending over and having to expose intimate parts of her body while she was menstruating, the panel heard.
Trainee detective constable (TDC) Kristina Linge, Pc Victoria Wray and Pc Rafal Szmydynski, who were all Pcs at the time, all deny gross misconduct over their treatment of the girl.
Giving evidence to a misconduct panel on Monday, Pc Wray, who undertook the search alongside TDC Linge, admitted a series of failings in her handling of the incident.
Three Met officers deny gross misconduct (Jordan Pettitt/PA)
Robert Morris, representing her, asked: 'Do you think you were performing an overly intrusive search?'
'I thought the skipper had authorised it, I thought the officers at the scene had covered all bases,' she replied.
'I thought I was doing the right thing,' she added.
Asked whether she was 'aware' of certain stereotypes relating to black people, Pc Wray replied: 'If I am aware of the stereotypes, I don't use them stereotypes to make any decisions.
'Those decisions are purely based on facts, on my surroundings, on the intel, I prefer to make very objective decisions.'
The panel heard records showed the majority of the individuals stopped and searched by Pc Wray were black or Asian.
Mr Morris continued: 'Do you think your actions have been unconsciously biased by race?'
'No, not at all,' she replied.
Asked if she thought the search should have taken place at all, Pc Wray responded 'No.
'There was so many things that should've been done, we should've spoken to the teachers more, we should've phoned mum, we should've spoken to the sergeant more.'
Mr Morris went on to ask why she did not stop to do those things and reassess the situation, to which Pc Wray replied: 'I was just following the lead of other officers.'
'It was just such a quick interaction, I am sorry and I should've stopped and I should've thought and I should've checked, I am really sorry,' she added.
The officer, who was 25 at the time of the incident, said of the search: 'I never intended it to be humiliating and degrading.
'It happened in the way we were trained, we tried to make it age-appropriate.'
Speaking through tears, whilst dabbing her eyes with tissues, Pc Wray added: 'I am really sorry to Child Q and her family.
'I should've checked so many things but I didn't and I'm sorry.
'I'm sorry for any distress, it was never my intention, I was just trying to help out.'
Pc Wray said prior to the incident she had never strip searched anyone who was not in custody and had never attended a school for policing purposes.
The panel previously heard the child informed the officers who searched her that she was menstruating but the search continued during which her sanitary pad was exposed.
When no drugs were found, Child Q's hair was also scoured.
According to the allegations, Pcs Linge and Szmydynski performed a search that exposed the girl's intimate parts when this was 'disproportionate in all the circumstances'.
Pcs Linge and Wray are also accused of performing or allowing the search in a manner which was 'unjustified, inappropriate, disproportionate, humiliating and degrading'.
It is alleged that all of this happened without authorisation, in the absence of an appropriate adult, and with no adequate concern being given to Child Q's age, sex, or the need to treat her as a child, and that the child's race was an effective cause of this.
Pcs Szmydynski and Linge are further accused of giving a 'misleading record' of the search afterwards.
The girl will not be giving evidence at the tribunal 'because of the psychological effects' the search has had on her, the panel has heard.
Outrage over Child Q's treatment led to protests outside Stoke Newington Police Station.
Scotland Yard has previously apologised over the incident.
The hearing continues.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
6 hours ago
- ITV News
Police pledge to tackle shoplifters and phone thieves despite huge cuts
London police chiefs are promising to target shoplifters and phone thieves in a huge cost-cutting reorganisation aimed at saving £260m. Scotland Yard plans to transfer 170 officers to neighbourhood teams in seven of London's worst crime hotspots. The Met was forced to shrink its headcount by 1,700 before March 2026 after failing to secure enough additional funding from the government and the mayor. The fresh focus on crime hotspots will see officers move to the West End, Brixton, Kingston, Ealing, Finsbury Park, Southwark and Spitalfields. But the change in emphasis will see the abolition of the Royal Parks Police, the removal of police officers from schools and cuts to the mounted section, dog units, traffic officers and the flying squad. The force is also drawing up plans to close front counters at some police stations and cut opening hours at others. Senior officers have called the reorganisation "Tough Choices". The Met insisted it was "ruthlessly prioritising" its resources on core policing and putting more officers on the beat. The changes will see up to 80 officers moved to the West End to tackle antisocial behaviour, violence against women and girls, shoplifting and phone theft. The move comes 24 hours after the Policy Exchange think tank reported a 60% jump in muggings involving knives in central London. Another 90 police will be deployed in the six other "town centres" identified as having the most thefts and robberies. Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: "The Met is getting smaller but more capable." He added: " We have a laser-like focus on ensuring our officers and staff are in roles where they can drive down crime on issues that matter the most to Londoners." London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan said the new initiative was bolstered by an additional £32m from the Home Office and City Hall. He said: "Despite years of austerity by the previous government, this is the latest example of the Met Police and I prioritising what Londoners want and delivering on our pledge to put high visibility policing at the heart of fighting crime and rebuilding community confidence and trust."
Spectator
13 hours ago
- Spectator
Britain's new role as a bastion of black culture
One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who was born in Jamaica in 1934 and worked in London as a bus conductor, was disappointed to find that the British were not only unmindful of the Commonwealth, but disinclined to help African-Caribbean immigrants. (Gallingly for him, Italians in the Soho confectionary business were extended a warmer welcome, even though they had fought on Hitler's side.) Inevitably as a 'clippie' on double-deckers, Hinds was exposed to racism. African-Caribbean folk were not that numerous in 1950s London and an entire week could go by without Hinds seeing another black face. Yet London Transport played its role, he believed, in breaking down race prejudice as buses allowed the public to encounter people from the Caribbean for the first time and even (heavens!) talk to them. But the sense of camaraderie did not last. The UK was convulsed by race 'disturbances' in 1958, when tensions erupted first in Nottingham, then, more grievously, in London. White youths ('Teddy Boys' to the press) set out to assault the black and Asian colonial inhabitants of Shepherd's Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale, between the factories of Wood Lane and the now middle-class streets of Notting Hill. Oswald Mosley's neo-fascist Union Movement rallied Britons to go out 'nigger-hunting'. So began four days of some of the worst civil unrest the UK was to see until the Brixton riots three decades later. In her exhaustive history of the Anglophone Caribbean, Imaobong Umoren relates that any slender confidence British Caribbean migrants might have felt as citizens of the country of 'Missus Queen' was undermined by the riots. Overnight they found themselves denigrated as unwanted 'coloured' room-seekers. (Back in the Caribbean, the term 'coloured' applied to people of mixed race, but in the UK it was one of the basic words of ghastly genteel boarding-house culture.) Mosleyite calls for racial purity puzzled Hinds and other newcomers from the West Indies, as racial mixing was not new to them: Chinese and Indian indentured labourers had long married into the local African slave-descended populations. Hinds (who died in Brixton in 2023 at the age of 89) was one of the first to champion the English-speaking Caribbean as a multi-shaded community of nations, at once parochial and international in its collision of African and European cultures. Jamaica's own intermingling of Asian, white and African bloods in some ways made it a more 'modern' society than postwar Britain. Hinds, ahead of his time, could see that the UK, too, was going to be racially mixed one day. Umoren, a professor at the LSE, argues that the problem of the colour-line continues to haunt British-Caribbean relations. An insidious 'shadism' has ensured that a minority of white or near white (what Jamaicans call 'local white') inhabitants still control the plantations and other industries. Planter snobberies were shaped and defined by colour (or, more properly, ethnicity). In order to bolster their social status, slave-owners evolved an elaborate ranking of skin, beginning with their eminences at the top and descending to the 'salt-water Negro' at the bottom. Between black and white were mustees, mustaphinos, quarteroons, octoroons and Sambos –a derogatory term for the children of 'mulatto' and African mix. Aspects of this racialised system have survived, says Umoren. She deploys an armoury of off-putting campus-brand jargon ('hereditary racial slavery', 'male heteropatriarchy', 'racial-caste hierarchy') to make her point. The so-called 'white élites' of Georgian England could do no good at all. Even the abolitionists under William Wilberforce were 'middle class religious zealots' who culpably derided African culture. The only hope of salvation for the formerly enslaved lay in their move white-ward into Christianity. Yet, as Umoren acknowledges, many African Caribbeans today hold romantic opinions of the British Empire, or at least display a pious Anglo-patriotism (call them 'Afro-Saxons'). For them, Britannia was not all 'white supremacist ideology' and 'racial capitalism'. An example? Though the death penalty still exists in Jamaica, most capital punishments are overturned in London by the Privy Council, Jamaica's court of Final Appeal. Thus an ancient British institution comprised of mostly 'élite' white Law Lords becomes an unlikely defender of human rights in Jamaica. Such paradoxes are part of the Caribbean confusion: Victorian moralities that have long disappeared in the UK linger on in its former dependencies. Lanre Bakare's We Were There, a bracingly readable social history, celebrates the UK as a bastion of black culture, black music and food. Most white-owned grocery stores in the UK now stock tins of Caribbean ackee, bottles of pepper sauce and carrot juice. The 'Jamaicanisation' of London's old Caribbean quarter – its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove – quickened apace after Jamaica's independence in 1962, when more of its inhabitants left for the UK. Britain's indigenous culture is now so deeply influenced by the island that a Jamaican inflection is hip among white British teenagers. (Dizzee Rascal, whose scratchy beats appeal to both white and black audiences, has 'Londonised' a Caribbean tradition of storytelling that was previously found in reggae, calypso and ska's shuffle beat.) For good or ill, Jamaican culture is youth culture in British cities. Bakare, who was born in West Yorkshire to a Nigerian father and a mother from Leeds, is well placed to write about Lagosian high-life guitar, ragga, reggae, jazz funk and hip-hop. He conjures the black music and racism that was occasionally rife in the Liverpool and Cardiff docks, as well as in Manchester and Edinburgh during the 11-year Thatcher premiership. While punk took hold in London in the late 1970s, a black American dance music craze exploded in Wigan and other inner city areas in the north where African Caribbean migration was at its most dense. Tony Palmer's astonishing Wigan Casino documentary, shot in the Greater Manchester dancehall during the winter of 1977, inspired Bakare, he says, to write this book. It shows a Northern Soul all-nighter in full, amphetamine-amped swing. The dancers are manifestly almost all white, but, as Bakare points out, Northern Soul song lyrics often communicated aspects of the black consciousness movement espoused by Stokely Carmichael and other African-American civil rights activists. (The video for Pulp's current Motown-like single 'Got to Have Love', appropriately, uses footage from the documentary.) In vivid, well-written pages, Bakare considers the British countryside as a last enclave of whiteness, though things are changing. Black nature lovers are now represented by such groups as the London Caribbean Trekkers, Bristol Steppin Sistas and Peaks of Colour. In 1989, the Daily Telegraph's former editor Bill Deedes (who championed the use of the countryside by all) suggested that the rural Black Environmentalist Network come out in favour of field sports: 'Blacks for Foxhunting' was the slogan he suggested, not entirely in jest. Bakare's excellent book captures the life and glory of a culture that changed the face of Britain for good.
Spectator
a day ago
- Spectator
The Met must fix London's street crime crisis
It's a statement of the bleeding obvious: London is in the grip of a street crime epidemic. Between 2021 and 2024, knife crime in London increased by 58.5 per cent to 16,789 offences – the highest number ever recorded. Most, about 60 per cent, are robberies, and in a significant proportion of them the item stolen was a mobile phone. Over 81,000 mobile phones were reported stolen in London last year. What has gone wrong, who is responsible and what can be done about it? One of the key insights Policy Exchange reveal in its report today is that knife crime is highly geographically concentrated. Only 4 per cent of neighbourhoods account for over a quarter of all knife crime offences and just 15 per cent of neighbourhoods account for over half of all knife crime offences in the capital. About 20 streets in London's West End near Oxford Circus and Regent Street had more knife crime than nearly 15 per cent of the rest of the capital combined. By taking a 'zero-tolerance' approach to the criminals who stalk these neighbourhoods the police could make a huge dent into the city's overall rates of knife crime, robbery and theft. So why haven't they? Sir Mark Rowley is nearly three years into his five-year term as commissioner of the Met. No one doubts that he inherited a force that was on its knees, with his predecessor having been very publicly pushed out of office. Taking over an organisation at what many believed was its nadir presented Rowley with one key opportunity: the press, politicians and, most importantly, the public would have backed him to take almost any steps necessary if it meant reshaping the Met as the crime fighting force London needs. Yet when the force finally released their new strategic plan almost a year into the Commissioner's term – called 'A New Met' – it was a damp squib. Triangulated, I imagine, with so-called 'stakeholders' – and designed to offend no one – it failed to set a clear crime fighting direction for the country's biggest and arguably most important police force. This pandering to stakeholders is one of the force's biggest strategic mistakes of recent years. (And by 'stakeholders', of course, I'm referring to lobbyists campaign groups whose stated aim is often to advance the cause of people of one identity over another.) At the root of the error is a belief that these organisations have an aim in common with the Met: to improve policing. So often, however, lobbyists limit the police's ability to operate effectively by growing the internal bureaucracy and making crime fighting harder. Until senior officers recognise this, they will continue to be taken for a ride, and the Met will be moved ever further from their core purpose: 'Crime Fighting First'. That the force found time to log nearly 15,000 Non-Crime Hate Incidents over the past five years, while showing such glaring ineffectiveness in tackling actual crime, is emblematic of the Met's deep dysfunction. Policy Exchange was one of the first to call for the abolition of NCHIs in a report published last year and supported by former Met Commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe. The Met's second strategic blunder is their inability to deploy the right resources to the tip of the spear. The Met's senior management have repeatedly said they are making 'tough choices' because of constrained finances – but the force's own numbers show this to be nonsense. There are currently 140 police officers working in the Met's 'Transformation Department', 23 in Human Resources, 21 in the 'Culture, Diversity and Inclusion' Department – the examples of police officers doing these non-jobs goes on. As many as 850 police officers could immediately be redeployed to the frontline away from their comfortable desk sinecures. The Met obsessively panders to 'stakeholders' The Met has admitted that three years ago the force had no effective performance management system, didn't know where all their officers were deployed, had a non-existent workforce planning system and weak financial plans. Were those responsible for overseeing this failing system shown the door? Has any of that sufficiently changed? The reality is that the Commissioner continues to be ill-served by several of his senior team. That he hasn't given some of these people their marching orders is a mystery. The third major problem is to be found just down the river from New Scotland Yard – at City Hall. Sir Sadiq Khan has been Mayor of London for nine years – he is the effective Police and Crime Commissioner for London but the steps he has taken have hamstrung the police in their fight against crime. Prior to his election, Sir Sadiq reportedly said: 'If I'm mayor I'll do all in my power to further cut [stop and search's] use.' The Mayor got his way. Between March 2021 and March 2024, the number of searches fell by 56.4 per cent – that's 175,613 fewer searches. Yet knife crime has increased dramatically and when the effectiveness of stop and search is raised, the response of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime is dismissive: 'That's contested,' they say. The Mayor's deputy is Kaya Comer-Schwartz, the former leader of Islington Council. In July 2024, according to minutes of a council meeting, she 'expressed pride in pushing back against the disproportionate use of live facial recognition by the Metropolitan Police'. This is a system which has so far led to the arrest of 1,045 wanted suspects – including sex offenders. In March 2023, over a year before the Deputy Mayor's boastful comments, the Met's Live Facial Recognition system was subject to an independent evaluation by the National Physical Laboratory. They found no false positive disparities for black individuals or other ethnic minorities when configured as the force does on operational deployments. With friends like the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, who needs enemies? Sir Mark has two years left of his term as Commissioner. With an explicit and unequivocal 'Crime Fighting First' agenda, where the 'stakeholder' blancmange and the 'partnership' bromides are cut adrift, the Met could still become what the public needs. In future years Rowley might be spoken of as the hero who saved the Met, and perhaps even London itself. The alternative isn't worth contemplating.
