A woman walked into a police station in Tottenham in January last year. She had been raped in a car park. She had a broken collarbone. The officers ran her name, found a community order she had breached, and put her in a cell. Consider what that took. Somebody had to be free to process her. Somebody had to key in her details, take her property, and walk her down the corridor. The Metropolitan Police had the manpower and the paperwork and the will to lock up a homeless rape victim on the same morning it decided her rape was too difficult to investigate. They said afterwards she had given the wrong date once, that the car park had no cameras, and that she was hard to reach because she had nowhere to live. In March, Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, was found dead. They arrested Simon Levy within days. They found his DNA on her body. They STILL did not open a murder investigation. In August, Sheryl Wilkins, 39, was murdered in that same Tottenham car park. Then, and only then, the machinery moved. Yesterday a jury convicted him of killing them both and of raping the woman with the broken collarbone. He had convictions for attacking women going back to July 2018. In 2022 he sexually assaulted a female prison officer while inside HMP Brixton. Between October 2023 and May 2025 he assaulted 10 more women on the Underground and the suburban lines, and for those 10 women he was given 6 years. Every institution that handled him knew who he was, what he was, and the level of threat he posed to every woman who was unfortunate enough to cross his path. Not one of them treated it as urgent. The polite version of this argument says our police are overstretched and doing their best. They are not overstretched when it comes to the things they believe in. There is always an officer available for the man who posted something coarse on the internet, always a unit for the reassurance visit, always budget for the strategy, the action plan, the lanyard and the away day. There is always a diversion scheme, always a report explaining that the perpetrator was himself failed, always a mechanism to let him out early because the estate is full. The money and the manpower exist. They are pointed somewhere else, deliberately, by people who have decided what the police are for. What they are not for, evidently, is women with broken bones, who have been violated in the most deeply personal and abhorrent fashion; for women dead in a stairwell. Well if you're not for those kinds of women, you're not for women at all. This is a class with an ideology, and the ideology says that the criminal is a product of his circumstances, that punishment is a failure of imagination, that a force's reputation for sensitivity matters more than its clear-up rate, and that the one unforgivable sin in British public life is to appear harsh. Every part of that costs something, and the people who hold the belief never pay it. It is paid in women. And to those who hold that ideology, their message to women. "We will sacrifice as many of you as necessary to ensure that our ideology is served." They know the price. They will make you pay it. They have been making you pay it, case after case, for 20 years. Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, the Angiolini review, and now a car park in Haringey. It is written in a charge rate of 2.8% for rape and 4.2% for sexual offences, and in the plain fact that a man could assault 10 women on public transport across 19 months while the state looked at its phone. Progress will double the police force, because 2.8% is what happens when nobody knocks on doors. Rape will carry a minimum of 10 years, and 15 where there are multiple victims. Sexual assault will carry a minimum of 3 years, so that 11 counts against 11 women cannot come to 6. Repeat offenders will face compound sentencing, so that a record running back to 2018 counts against a man rather than being read out as background. And we will publish these decisions, every one, so the next family finds out what was known and when without waiting on a watchdog. Above all we will put people in charge of British policing who believe that the safety of its people is the first duty of the state, and that the rights of the law-abiding and innocent shall never be drawn to compete against the interests of the criminal. We shall do these women honour, though it can only be too late. Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo was 53. Sheryl Wilkins was 39. The third woman has no name in any of this, and she walked into a police station bleeding only to come out in handcuffs. They were sacrificed to an idea. We are coming for the idea.