Failed by Met Police: When the System Makes You Prove You Deserve Help

When the System Makes You Prove You Deserve Help

SUPPORTING Documentation 

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to get help from systems that are supposed to protect you.

It is not just the original event that harms you. It is what happens afterwards.

You report something to the police. You explain what happened. You provide evidence. You tell them you are distressed. Then you are told it is not a crime, or it belongs to another department, or there is no record, or you need another reference number, or you need to explain everything again to someone new.

You contact one authority and they tell you to contact another. The second authority says it is outside its remit. The third tells you to go back to the first.

Eventually, the person asking for help becomes the case manager.

You have to remember every reference number. You have to preserve every email. You have to work out which department has responsibility. You have to understand complaints procedures, appeals, police recording rules, safeguarding processes, housing legislation and government structures while you are already dealing with whatever happened to you in the first place.

That is not access to justice.

The damage caused by fragmentation

My own experience has repeatedly been one of fragmentation.

I have had situations where I believed something serious had happened and later discovered that it had not been recorded in the way I thought it had been. I have had to chase for updates, make complaints about the handling of previous complaints and repeatedly explain events that were already documented.

At other times the response has effectively been: something may have gone wrong, but it is not for this department.

That sentence can be devastating when you are the person living with the consequences.

If an organisation believes something serious has happened but does not have jurisdiction to deal with it, there should be an obvious next question:

Who does?

The responsibility should not simply fall back onto the victim to find out.

A functioning system should be capable of saying: we cannot investigate this part, but this is the body that can, we will explain the route clearly, and where lawful and appropriate we will help ensure the information reaches the right place.

Instead, people can spend months or years being passed between agencies.

Victim support should not depend on persistence

One of the hardest things for me has been the absence of meaningful victim support.

Support should not be something that only reaches the people who are organised enough, well enough and persistent enough to keep asking for it.

The people most affected by trauma are often the people least able to navigate complicated administrative systems.

Trauma affects concentration. Anxiety affects decision-making. ADHD can make long forms, scattered correspondence and constantly changing processes extremely difficult to manage. Depression can make answering one email feel impossible.

Yet many public systems are effectively designed around the assumption that a distressed person will behave like a professional caseworker.

If you miss an email, misunderstand a procedure or become overwhelmed, your case can simply stop moving.

Then your apparent inability to navigate the system can itself be interpreted as a lack of seriousness.

Policing is only one part of the problem

This is not just about the police.

My experiences with housing and local government have raised many of the same concerns.

In my dealings with Redbridge Council, I have often felt that different services were operating as separate islands: housing, domestic-abuse support, safeguarding and other services each dealing only with the narrow piece directly in front of them.

From my perspective, the overall experience has been a serious failure of coordination and support.

That does not mean every individual employee has failed. Many people working inside these organisations will themselves be constrained by policy, workloads and fragmented systems.

But that is exactly why the system itself needs scrutiny.

A vulnerable person should not need to understand the organisational chart of a council or police force before they can receive appropriate help.

The hidden mental-health cost

We often talk about the NHS mental-health crisis as though the demand appears from nowhere.

But many people become mentally unwell, or considerably more unwell, because they spend years trapped inside unresolved housing problems, abusive relationships, financial disputes, policing failures, immigration problems, family proceedings or administrative battles.

Then the mental-health service receives the consequences.

A person may arrive with anxiety, insomnia, depression, trauma symptoms or suicidal thoughts, but behind those symptoms may be years of fighting institutions that repeatedly failed to resolve the underlying problem.

If government genuinely wants to reduce pressure on mental-health services, it also has to look upstream.

Justice, housing, policing, safeguarding and public administration are mental-health issues too.

What I think needs to change

The principle is very simple:

No wrong door.

When somebody reports something serious, the first organisation they approach should not be able simply to say, “Not our department,” and close the conversation.

There should be proper routing, written explanations, continuity between agencies and a clear person or team responsible for helping the individual understand what happens next.

Victims should not have to repeatedly reconstruct their own history for every organisation they encounter.

And when an authority can clearly see that something has gone badly wrong, the response should not end with an explanation of why someone else is responsible.

Someone has to take ownership of getting the problem to the right place.

I have spent far too much time learning how systems work simply because the systems themselves did not connect.

I do not want other people to have to become investigators, lawyers, administrators and advocates just to be heard.

Sometimes the greatest reform would be the simplest one:

Listen properly. Record properly. Connect the information. And when it is not your responsibility, make sure it reaches the person whose responsibility it is.