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Any woman who has been sitting in a cab and reached for the handle to find the door locked and felt their muscles instinctively tense for a split second until they hear the familiar clink of the car unlocking, even though they have been safely delivered to their requested destination, will have had an opinion on Sam Kerr’s court case.
Drunk or sober, when a woman gets in a taxi at night, they are keeping a close eye on the route being taken, sharing their live location, messaging friends and/or partners and sharing trip details, watching the driver. In an Uber watching the driver go off the recommended route on your phone? Watching out the window as a driver turns off the route you know makes the most sense? Logical answers flash through your mind – there must be traffic, perhaps there’s road closures, maybe there’s been an accident – but they do not quell a rising fear that puts you on high alert.
It’s not just in cabs either. Every woman who has walked down a street after dark has at some stage taken a longer route to stay on more populated roads, has taken a different route to stay under streetlights, has either removed their earphones or turned them off so that they can be alert to everything and everyone around them, has clasped their keys in their hand in case they need some kind of weapon.
Every woman will have mentally listed the items in their bag according to how useful they could be in an emergency, will have thought about the clothes they’re wearing and what they look like that day to determine whether they might be at a higher risk, will have crossed the street when they need to check whether someone they suspect of following them does the same, will have watched their shadow to make sure no other shadows creep silently closer.
These are just some of the many examples of the unspoken things women instinctively do to stay safe. There are also many examples of unspoken things people of colour and members of the LGBTQI+ community do to protect themselves at night too.
A friend and I were followed home from school by three men when we were 11. We were acutely aware of it, managed to stay calm and waited until there was enough distance between us, and we had turned around a corner and were out of sight before running. Each morning as a teenager, my friends and I used to choose which of the two routes to school we wanted to take, one which took us down the nicknamed “Paedophile Lane” and the other down the nicknamed “Rapist Road” . I won’t go into the many examples that have followed.
How often does a straight, white man consider these things? This is the question an intoxicated Kerr was attempting to ask of PC Stephen Lovell when she was sat in a police station telling him to “put your shoes in a female’s shoes. We were trapped for 20 minutes in this guy’s car”.
The Chelsea player added: “You have to understand the emergency that both of us felt. Look at what happened last time when a woman accepted a police officer’s help in Clapham and got raped and killed.”
Kerr and her fiancé Kristie Mewis said in court that they felt like they were being kidnapped by the taxi driver when he rerouted from driving them home to a police station after Kerr had “spit-vomited” out the window. He did so without telling them, they alleged.
They also said that it was in fear for their lives that Mewis kicked a window out with the doors locked and the driver refusing their requests to stop. They claimed the taxi driver’s allegations of fare dodging were fabricated and that he was driving erratically. They said they had called the police themselves and had been hung up on. They questioned why, despite Mewis admitting it was her who kicked out the window, they were both charged with criminal damage.
This is what preceded Kerr’s inappropriate and poorly articulated rant, which she conceded was embarrassing. “You guys are stupid and white, you guys are fucking stupid and white,” she said. “I’m looking you in the eyes, I’m looking you in the eyes, you guys are fucking stupid.”
The prosecution argued that all that preceded those words was irrelevant because what she has said was there for everyone to see on video.
Except the context is everything. Start with the Met police, which was found to be be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic in a report less than two years ago and has a history (including a very recent history through the murder of Sarah Everard) of failing women, seemingly ignoring two women in significant distress. They were intoxicated but that does not mean they should not have their concerns taken seriously.
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As Kerr and Mewis were sitting in the police station their claims were dismissed without investigation. The police did not subsequently request copies of emergency service calls, speed cameras and ANPR records were not checked, the taxi driver was taken at his word that he did not have a recording device in the vehicle and this was not checked.
The taxi driver was not arrested or interviewed despite detaining the women in the taxi to drive them to the station, an action explicitly advised against in the Taxi Drivers’ Handbook which states: “Detaining passengers against their will in the back of a taxi over an unpaid fare, including locking the passenger in and driving to a police station, is not condoned by police and could get you in trouble”.
In addition, when the police saw a woman climbing out of a broken taxi window, they did not see the need to switch on body cams.
Meanwhile, PC Lovell failed to mention any upset caused by Kerr’s “stupid and white” comments in his first statement. The Crown Prosecution Service initially decided that the evidence against Kerr did not meet the required threshold. Then, 11 months later he submitted a second statement saying he had been left “shocked, upset and humiliated”.
In his closing statement, the prosecutor, Bill Emlyn Jones KC, asked the jury: “The fact you will be able to think of much worse examples of racial aggravation is irrelevant. Would we consider this a racially aggravated insult if she had said stupid and black? Of course you would, it wouldn’t even be contestable.”
Except, that feels like a straw man argument. The likelihood of Kerr calling a black police officer “stupid and black” was and is close to zero. Had she been talking to a black male officer, who does not benefit from the same privilege as a white man, race would likely have not been brought into the equation even in a drunken rant. It’s reasonable to speculate that had a black man been in that room interviewing Kerr her concerns as a woman of colour might have been taken more seriously. And had a woman, of any race, been in the room interviewing Kerr, the likelihood is her concerns as a woman would have been taken more seriously too.
What will the impact of this case be on Kerr and her very valuable image? Hopefully, not significant. People make mistakes that they may not be proud of, and Kerr certainly won’t be proud of the widely watched footage of events in the police station, but being dragged through a jury trial charged with racially aggravated harassment was an unnecessary trauma to inflict and a waste of time and money.
