The release of the report into the murder of 21-year-old Katie Simpson from Tynan, County Armagh – and the utter failure to protect her or even properly investigate her killing – has cast a brutal light on the institutional misogyny that runs deep within the PSNI.
The 203-page report makes for harrowing reading. In its own words, Katie was “let down at every step”. Witnesses were brushed aside. Evidence was ignored. Clear warning signs were missed. A history of grooming and abuse was disregarded. The word of a convicted abuser was taken at face value. As the BelTel podcast put it, “there is a potential front-page story in every other page [of the report]. It is horrendous. It is failure, after failure, after failure.”
In a region with one of the highest rates of violence against women in Europe – with tens of thousands of domestic abuse incidents reported every year and 30 confirmed femicides since 2020 – the report raises an unavoidable question: how many lives could have been saved, and how many cases of abuse, sexual violence and femicide have been brushed aside in the same way?
As the report itself concludes:
“This was not a failure of one officer or one decision. It was a failure of the system: a policing culture characterised by complacency, institutional misogyny and the tendency to minimise risk.”
There is no reforming the PSNI. It needs to be abolished, together with the sick system that breeds such disgusting violence and abuse against women.
Grooming, abuse and murder
In August 2020, Katie Simpson was brought to hospital mortally injured after her lifelong abuser, Jonathan Creswell, claimed she had attempted suicide. She died from her injuries six days later.
Despite her body being covered in bruises, and despite the fact she was found almost entirely naked from the waist down except for bloodstained underwear, PSNI officers took Creswell’s story at face value. Not only was he not arrested nor questioned, but evidence was not gathered, photographs were not taken, and the crime scene was simply ignored.
As shocking as this already sounds, it is only the beginning of the web of abuse, negligence and dismissal exposed by the report.
It turns out, the very same Creswell had 27 convictions to his name, including six for serious assault on a former partner. He had also been reported by Scottish police for indecent exposure in the workplace – an allegation that the PSNI apparently simply ignored.
Working at the stables Katie attended from childhood, Creswell began grooming and abusing her when she was just 10 years old. For more than a decade he physically and psychologically abused and controlled her. As one account described it, “she was basically a human slave to this man.” Throughout those years, Katie repeatedly attended A&E with serious injuries and trauma.
Talk about a flashing light – here you had several flares fired into the night.
Any serious scrutiny by the PSNI would immediately have raised suspicions about Creswell’s version of events. But that ‘scrutiny’ only came much later, under pressure from family, friends and whistleblowers.
On several occasions the PSNI was contacted with concerns about the story Creswell had concocted around Katie’s death. Again and again, those concerns were brushed aside. A former Detective Chief Inspector even jokingly referred to Creswell as something of a “bad boy” or “philanderer”. In actual fact, since Katie’s case has come to light, a further 37 people – as young as nine years old – have come forward to report abuse by this so-called “bad boy”.
Here, in black and white, is a detailed account of the attitude the police take towards violence against women. At every step, the brazenly misogynistic and sexist culture of the PSNI stands utterly exposed.
Violence and abuse are systematically ignored and minimised – even joked about. Serial abusers are blindly believed. And when victims, survivors, or their friends and family come forward, they are the ones subjected to scrutiny, ignored, and left isolated and helpless.
For all their grand statements about the ‘need to tackle violence against women,’ this is the reality.
Reform?
To be sure, that the PSNI is a rotten institution, sexist and misogynistic to its core, will come as little surprise to many people. After all, this is only the latest in a never-ending series of scandals exposing it for what it truly is.
In the two years leading up to February 2024, 51 PSNI officers were accused of domestic abuse or sexual assault. Yet in almost two-thirds of cases, they faced no professional discipline.
An Ombudsman report from 2025 into the conduct of PSNI officers responding to a domestic abuse case found officers using abusive and degrading language towards the victim, including calling her “mental”.
Another report, commissioned in the wake of the brutal murder of Sarah Everard and published just weeks before the Katie Simpson report, details several cases of officers accused of misogynistic behaviour, domestic abuse, sexual assault, and even “abusing their position for sexual purposes”.
The list goes on and on. In fact, a recent statement by the Ombudsman found that “Police predatory behaviour now makes up 30 percent of the most serious cases being investigated by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, a figure which continues to rise,”
In response to the publication of this latest report, the PSNI Chief Constable issued a formal apology for the force’s “failings” and promised to address the concerns raised.
Needless to say, we have absolutely zero confidence that anything will change. The purpose of such statements is not to uproot the culture of misogyny and sexism within the PSNI, but to contain public anger, deflect responsibility and move on as quickly as possible.
For its part, the report ends with a list of recommendations aimed at restoring public confidence in the PSNI and protecting “policing by consent”, through measures such as training officers against “cognitive and confirmation bias” and improving “investigative standards”. But all of this is so much wishful thinking.
First off, to talk of “policing by consent” in relation to the PSNI is frankly laughable. Here’s a police force designed to protect British rule in the North of Ireland, with deeply sectarian, sexist and racist roots. Time and again, scandals expose the same reality: misogyny, sectarianism, cover-ups and contempt for ordinary working-class people.
Nor is misogyny in policing unique to the North. From the scandals surrounding the Metropolitan Police in London to countless cases of domestic and sexual violence ignored in the South, the pattern is the same.
That is not accidental. Police forces under capitalism do not exist as neutral bodies standing above society. They exist to defend the interests of the ruling class and the system of exploitation and oppression they preside over – and are fed a diet of reactionary propaganda in their training and throughout their work and life to carry on this task. Misogyny, racism, and – in the North – sectarianism, are intrinsic to the role of the police as a bulwark of the capitalist system.
There is no hope in ‘fixing’ an institution like this through reforms, training schemes or public relations exercises. It needs to be abolished – together with the system it defends, and the disgusting violence the latter breeds.
