No Comment: What I Wish I'd Known About Becoming A Detective

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More than twenty years on, Ronnie is still obsessed with delivering his peak performance, but success has now taken on a new meaning for the world champion. Framed around twelve lessons Ronnie has learned from his extraordinary career, with this book he takes us beyond the success and record-breaking achievements to share the reality - and brutality - of what it takes to rise to the very top, whatever your field. People complain to the police all the time that they’re not doing enough [to secure a conviction], but what they have to understand is that our work was often frustrated by the next step in the criminal justice system. The Crown Prosecution Service isn’t really fit for purpose; they’re failing to keep people safe time and again. If the CPS doesn’t deal with it properly, then there’s only so much the police can do.” McDonald says she didn’t experience sexual harassment in the Met, but she knows women who did. Her friend Mel was living in police accommodation when she caught a senior officer using his mobile phone to spy on her in the shower of their shared bathroom. Fortunately, another officer intervened and the culprit was arrested, but by the time his case came to court, Mel had quit the force. “She’s said to me since, would she have reported it if it was just her and him? Probably not, because he’s more senior,” says McDonald. A relationship ended, and now the bulk of her social circle was made up of fellow trainees. After graduating, she was posted to east London, and worked largely with domestic abuse cases. Almost 11 per cent of all crimes reported to the police concern domestic abuse but, McDonald says, these are often the hardest to get a conviction for. In the summer of 2017, McDonald was between jobs, having cycled through careers in management consultancy, advertising and tech sales. She was shadowing a barrister and considering going into law when she saw a female detective testify at a child abuse trial and realised that hers was a job capable of changing lives.

Drew Pritchard set himself up as a dealer when he was a teenager, rooting around in scrapyards, working out of a shed and getting about in a ropy old Transit. Now he's a leading figure in the antiques trade with an international online business, and he's hugely popular presenter of hit TV show Salvage Hunters. But he's still as driven by the thrill of the find as he was forty years ago. In this engaging and informative narrative, clearly structured into practical themes, Drew reveals what it takes to start with nothing but an obsession and a dream. He shows you how to create the opportunities, establish a network, get the best out of auctions and fairs, spot the fakes, develop your eye, build a reputation, buy and sell and yes, make a profit. The woman reported him, and the husband was arrested. “We charged him, had him remanded, but he kept appealing, and kept winning. He’d go to court and say things like, ‘Oh, but I’m going to miss my sister’s wedding,’ and the judge would let him go.” I do want to point out that there are some really good people in the force doing an incredible job in very tough circumstances,” she says, “but, yes, there are some really bad apples, too.” These findings shook a nation whose trust in policing was already plummeting. The latest poll shows just 40 per cent of Britons have confidence in the police – down from 67 per cent last year, and 87 per cent in 1981. All the while, across the country antisocial behaviour is rising even as officer recruitment does, and more than nine in ten crimes in England and Wales now go unsolved. You could be the first person they’d spoken to about it and they’d honestly believe you were going to help them – and you’d really want to help,” she says. “So you’d put everything together and work really hard and take it to the CPS – and it was so hard to get anything prosecuted. After all that, you’d often have to say to someone who’d told you what was happening to them that you couldn’t do anything.” Finding the suspect was easy – if not the partner, it was generally someone the victim knew, with “stranger rapes” in dark alleyways so rare that they were dealt with by a separate unit. The hard part was charging them.

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Unlike the women she worked with, McDonald said she would still report a sexual offence to the police (“I’d write my statement myself”). But with two-year waits for rape trial dates, she conceded that “you don’t have meaningful access to justice”. She has learned from her time in the police to protect herself. She asked the officer conducting the interview how a jury would decide who to believe. “And the detective, who was relatively senior, said: ‘Oh no, crap rape, it’s not going anywhere – don’t worry about it.’ And I was like: but how is it not going anywhere? It’s got to go somewhere.” How could conflicting accounts simply be deemed to cancel each other out, she wondered, without trying to establish the truth? With only 1.3% of police-recorded rapes in England and Wales leading to prosecution in 2020-21, many women’s worst nightmares must have been written off as “crap rapes”. In a statement, the Met said that after McDonald raised bullying concerns, she had been offered “substantial management guidance, advice and welfare support” and encouraged to come forward with more information; it insisted that it takes allegations of officer criminality, as in Mel’s case, “incredibly seriously”.

Borrow I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was → The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Secret, by Victoria Belim Looking for something new to read? Browse our recommendations. Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History, by Tracy Borman The moment she qualified, the regularity of her previous working life evaporated. “It’s all shiftwork, so you no longer have a Monday to Friday, and you don’t have weekends off. Instead, you have rest days. But if you’re working a particular case, you just see it through to completion. The work-life balance,” she notes, “wasn’t great.” Borrow The Rooster House → Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama Borrow How Not to Be an Antique Dealer → No Comment: What I Wish I Knew About Becoming a Detective, by Jess McDonald

The vast majority of people join the police to make a difference and to help, and they’re awarded these powers to help with that. However, some people join the police for the powers. And people who seek power to abuse power are at the heart of a lot of really serious crimes,” she says. “In my experience, within the police, everyone knows who the dodgy characters are. Everyone’s talking about it, but no one can take it anywhere, because that’s committing career suicide, and nothing’s going to be done.” I was dealing with more trauma on a day-to-day basis than the average person would see in maybe two years