My 30 horrific years in racist, sexist Met police. Force’s most senior Asian woman tells

Off The Beat 

Nusrit Mehtab

Torva £20, 288pp

You’re too short and too big to be an air hostess,’ said the careers adviser in 1987 to the young Pakistan-born Muslim Nusrit Mehtab, who’d grown up in East London. ‘The police are recruiting – go and do something worthwhile.’

So Nusrit applied to the Metropolitan Police. The candidates were told to wear a bra and knickers for the medical after the interview. Nusrit ignored this, and wore an all-in-one leotard and leggings.

‘Take your top off and touch your toes,’ said the doctor (‘a white-haired old man’, writes Nusrit in her memoir chronicling three decades of her experience of institutionalised racism and sexism in the Met).

Nusrit applied to the Metropolitan Police. The candidates were told to wear a bra and knickers for the medical after the interview

‘No,’ said Nusrit.

The doctor looked up from his notes, lost for words. ‘In that moment,’ says Nusrit, ‘I wasn’t trying to find the logic in why female recruits needed to remove their bras, I was just affronted at being asked to do so.’

After an awkward few moments, the doctor dismissed her, and she hurried away. She was surprised and delighted to hear a few weeks later that she’d been accepted.

I re-read that passage about the medical examination, just to check. Yes, Nusrit recalls wondering why ‘female recruits needed to remove their bras’. But they weren’t being required to do that. She had hyped up that memory.

So, I was a bit sceptical from this moment on – and that was only the beginning of Nusrit’s catalogue of injustices that she suffered over her 30-year career in the Met, at the end of which she was so crushed from the institutionalised racism and sexism which had hindered her progression through the ranks at every turn that she was diagnosed with PTSD. She almost broke down while being interviewed by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 about her horrific experiences.

At the start of the training course at Hendon Police College, she refused to wear the skirt, which was women’s uniform in the late 1980s. ‘It’s not part of my culture. We wear trousers instead.’ So she had to go without a uniform, which made her stick out. She found the Met was ‘ready to diversify in name, but not in reality’. Eventually she was handed a pair of trousers, but they were huge men’s ones, so she looked ‘like Charlie Chaplin’. It all seemed part of a ritual humiliation.

One of her colleagues in her first posting couldn’t pronounce her name so he called her ‘Nidgit’. It stuck: another mark of disrespect. Sexual banter was rife among the officers: ‘Let’s see if you’re wearing the full kit’ (men feeling for the women’s stockings and suspenders) and so on. Nusrit was spared the initiation rite of being held down over the desk while the office stamp was printed on your buttock. But her male colleagues put a vibrator in an envelope in her pigeon hole, doubling up laughing when she opened it. She was labelled as unable to take a joke.

‘Ah, but that was just the bad old 1980s,’ I thought, expecting conditions to improve over the increasingly enlightened successive decades. But what this book shows, shockingly (and my scepticism did gradually wane as Nusrit described in detail her soul-destroying battles for promotion over the years), is that – as Baroness Casey’s 2023 review clearly stated – the Met is still institutionally misogynistic and racist.

We think of Wayne Couzens, who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, a Met officer who was a serial rapist. In its defence, the Met often pleads that, with 44,000 staff, there will be a small number with unwelcome attitudes.

The narrative blames ‘a few bad apples’, Nusrit writes – ‘a term that undermines all those who have been the subject of misogyny, racism and homophobia within a system that has enabled and endorsed it. In reality, the orchard is crawling with maggots.’

For 30 years, Nusrit found she had to work twice as hard as everyone else to earn the respect of her team – first for being a woman, and then for being a brown woman. Whenever she tried to apply for promotion, and for a new post within her new rank, she was nearly always told that someone else (usually a man) had been parachuted in, with no due process. Time and time again, she had to raise a grievance and insist things were done properly. This earned her great unpopularity: ‘My card was marked,’ she writes. And sure enough, when she was applying to become a chief inspector, the male colleagues she’d worked with for years blocked her.

Nusrit writes that the term ‘a few bad apples undermines all those who have been the subject of misogyny, racism and homophobia within a system that has enabled and endorsed it’

Nusrit with her mother, who was intent on arranging her marriage while she was working for the Met

Having kicked up a fuss, she did get the job – and overheard a colleague saying, ‘You’ll never believe it. The Doris got the job. How did you let that happen?’ (‘Doris’ was slang for a woman.)

It was not just the men who were nasty. There was a female clique she describes as white women of privileged background, who told themselves they were backing diversity but were actually even more insidious than the men. Nusrit calls them ‘the Mean Girls of the Met’.

She hoped that under Cressida Dick this vileness would be stamped out, but it wasn’t. Even when Nusrit was the most senior Asian woman in the police, she did not feel safe and protected but vulnerable and exposed.

She gives us memorable descriptions of what some of her jobs over the years entailed. As a ‘decoy prostitute’ in ‘Clubs and Vice’, her job was to stand on street corners with a mic in her pocket, waiting for kerb crawlers to solicit sex from her. Quite something for a Muslim woman of strict religious upbringing to do. She refused to wear a skirt for this, and was dressed in jeans and a thick coat. ‘Men had to suggest a sex act in return for payment to complete the offence,’ she explains.

She would arrive home after such shifts (she still lived with her mother) and find a prospective husband waiting in the sitting room with his parents – her mother was intent on arranging her marriage. Nusrit kept quiet to her prospective in-laws about what she’d been doing. When they heard she was a police officer, most walked out. ‘We don’t want an independent girl. Let’s go!’

One night, Nusrit arrived home and recognised the prospective husband in the sitting room – he’d been one of the kerb crawlers.

This angry memoir gathers momentum, and amounts to a devastating critique of the Met – who, all too often, are allowed to ‘mark their own homework’, perpetuating the rottenness at the core.