Born in Lancashire, she says her connection to the north-east of England, where she was also a police and crime commissioner (PCC) for Northumbria, was because she “fell in love with a guy who lived in the north-east” – her first husband David Taylor-Gooby. They divorced and she remarried, although her second husband, Robert Baird, died a year later from complications following open-heart surgery. As a young lawyer in the 1970s, she gained a reputation as an activist, even donating her fees to support the fight by locals in the Northumberland country park of Druridge Bay against nuclear waste disposal, as well as representing political protesters on Greenham Common. other peace camps and anti-apartheid marches. One of her personal passions throughout her life was running. Even now, every other morning she heads for the parks, woods and open ground around her home in north London, tracking her distances and times, about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) each run, on her Fitbit . “I run in the morning, it really sets you up for the day. It’s just that kind of whole fresh air challenge. You get a buzz.” Her favorite movie is Chariots of Fire, the Oscar-winning story of the rivalry between two Olympic athletes. After Labour’s defeat in 2010, Dame Vera spent seven years as PCC for Northumbria where she persuaded burly North East lasses to become guardians of vulnerable women in the night economy. They were so excited about their mission that they wore little badges with pictures of open arms. It was in 2019 that he decided to apply to be victims’ commissioner, one of six candidates, including Conservative candidates. He was appointed by David Gauke, then Justice Secretary, and Theresa May, then Prime Minister. Dame Vera replaced Baroness Newlove, a Conservative peer who served as England and Wales’ first victims’ commissioner for seven years after being reappointed. “I was extremely impressed with Theresa May and her stance on domestic abuse – there would be no domestic abuse legislation if it wasn’t for Theresa May,” says Dame Vera. “I interviewed David Gauke and we discussed whether the policy was relevant and we both decided he was not in that role.” Indeed, she maintains that she has been “meticulous in ensuring that politics does not come into play in anything I do as a victims’ commissioner. I have criticized the government as I would any other government if they have done something wrong and I praised them when they took up Article 28,” a reference to the release of pre-recorded video cross-examinations to spare rape victims the trauma of court appearances. Her four-year tenure, however, has seen unprecedented political and social upheaval, ushering in three prime ministers and four justice ministers, not to mention the Covid pandemic shutting down the criminal justice and court system, and now an economic and cost-of-living crisis. At the very least, it means none of the current ministers have invested political capital in it, while new governments have turned their backs on the more “liberal” approach championed by Gauke, her first foreign minister. This has not stopped her from being a staunch defender of victims’ rights, not least because of the crisis of confidence in policing in London. As a victims’ commissioner, she says her lowest point came when she was at a neighbour’s house for dinner and word got around that it was a police officer who had murdered Sarah Everard. “I can remember when we heard that he had been killed by a policeman,” he says. “It was very clear that the authorities should really understand this issue – that the protection of young girls on the street is really not being considered. Young women would tell me they were harassed on the street and I’d ask, “Why didn’t you report it to the police?” The answer would be because they don’t even prosecute rape: “They never pay attention to me,” they said. “There is a general, low sense of how the police look after women in public or private. Women have nowhere to go where the police will take them seriously. So you knew there was going to be a huge crescendo that would force the authorities to look at why the police were so bad at this.” In addition, Dame Vera says the police still have a way to go to tackle domestic abusers and sexual predators within their own ranks, partly because of poor vetting of recruits. It was a matter exposed by the transfer of Everard Wayne Couzens’ killer to the Metropolitan Police, despite earlier evidence of his misogyny, and is expected to be the subject of a damning HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report next month. He recalls how, in one force, senior officers placed an officer accused of domestic abuse on “light duty”. “That may be the right way to react as an employer, but it’s completely the opposite of reassuring the victim that anything will be done about that person by the very people who put them on light duty and will probably send them home her”. she says. Dame Vera claimed in her first annual report that rape had been “virtually decriminalised”, with perpetrators being convicted in only one in 100 cases. Asked if she still believes this is the case, she says: “The data speaks for itself. Prosecutions have increased very slightly, but given that they fell by 2,000 cases a year in two years, it’s not promising.” What is promising, he says, is the development of Operation Rescue by forces including the Met, where officers focus on investigating the ways in which rape suspects behaved before, during and after reported assaults rather than testing the victim’s credibility , which has been blamed for an increase in victims withdrawing from cases. “You just have to read the latest reports – from the Inspectorate for Police and Fire and Rescue Services – about women who have had their entire phone downloaded and checked, school reports, medical records and any treatment thoroughly checked and the accused is not even arrested,” he says. “The police take every other type of offense seriously and believe it. You call them at your house and say you’ve been robbed even though there’s no sign of it. They don’t start asking people about their background to see if they can find out if you’ve lied in your past. They take it and deal with it. Rape is very different. It’s very misogynistic. It happens to men, but it mostly affects women.” Dame Vera backs the Government’s criticism of rape, which has previously seen the release of video evidence, special rape courts, millions invested in specialist counselors for victims of sex crimes and performance charts revealing delays. But he cautions that these are, so far, “the tiniest of steps.” “These are the seeds of its return as a criminal offense that is taken seriously by the authorities, but there needs to be enormous political will to make that happen,” he adds. She remains convinced that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has changed a lot since “failing to prosecute a very large number of men because they did not have sufficient confidence in whistleblowers”. “I don’t have any sense that they’ve admitted they did something wrong and need to do more,” he says. Every victim of burglary should be visited by police, says Dame Vera, admitting this week’s report into the Met’s failure to respond to and investigate neighborhood crime was “breathtaking” revealing that “the police don’t seem to be doing bread and -butter policing properly’. The police underestimated the trauma of burglary and theft at risk. “People can get to a point where they don’t feel safe in their own home,” he says. “And they don’t feel safe getting out of it in case they get robbed while they’re away. That I have treated it with such contempt amazes me. This is consensual policing – no victim consents to this kind of treatment.” Much of the blame for falling rates of street burglary and theft – which have at least halved from 10.8 per cent to 5.4 per cent and 2.6 per cent to 1.3 per cent in six years – attributed to the decimation of neighborhood policing and loss of experienced officers. “When we had neighborhood policing, they were a deterrent to neighborhood crime and a huge source of information,” he says. “You’d get a little chat from someone on the street who could reveal that there was some serious drug dealing going on at number six.” All this has led to the public feeling “alienated” from the police who have lost “much” of public trust, he says. “The police have become detached from the people they police in the communities they occupy, which means people may be reluctant to come forward to help catch criminals.”
