One of the core public rationales for policing is that it provides a necessary institutional response to protect citizens from crime and to maintain order. This is a powerful rhetoric that plays on people’s fears and insecurities, even where they have witnessed or experienced police violence or the failure of police to provide protection or assistance. This chapter considers perhaps one of the most contested points of argument in calls to defund the police: are police necessary to ensure the safety of women against harassment, violence, and sexual assault, and do they provide these outcomes? It is argued that the evidence shows that police as an institution fail to protect women and this particularly (although not exclusively) impacts on specific groups of women from Black, First Nations, Brown, racialised, poor, and other minoritised communities.

At the time of writing this book, there were vigils in London for the killing of Sarah Everard, a White professional woman in her early thirties. A police officer was charged with her kidnapping and murder. A vigil for Ms Everard on Clapham Common in mid-March 2021 resulted in a violent police response which led to arrests and the dispersal of women who attended. There was widespread condemnation of the violence of police tactics, although a later police inspectorate report exonerated police and argued that the Metropolitan Police did not have a ‘choice’ but to use force. The death of Sarah Everard and police violence at the subsequent vigil for the dead woman was problematic enough. However, a further dimension was the relative silence around the murders of other young women in London who were Black. Mina Smallman questioned why the deaths of her two daughters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, killed in London nine months before Ms Everard, had received comparatively little attention and why police were slow to respond to their disappearance. In that case, two police officers were subsequently suspended and arrested after allegedly taking ‘selfie’ photos with the bodies of the two women. A 19-year-old male was later charged with their murder.