'Treated like a piece of meat'

DETAILS OF 'UNLAWFUL' ARRESTS AND STRIP-SEARCHES OF VULNERABLE WOMEN REVEALED BY THE BAIRD L INQUIRY AS GMP TOLD TO CHANGE

- ETHAN DAVIES, PAUL BRITTON & JOSEPH TIMAN

HARROWING and humiliating stories of women arrested and detained in custody by Greater Manchester Police have been revealed in a report published yesterday after an independent inquiry sparked by a series of complaints.

They include a domestic abuse victim awaiting a hysterectomy who was left sitting in her own blood in a cell for 16 hours begging for medication and sanitary products.

Another woman, who was throttled unconscious by her drunk husband in a Manchester hotel, rang the 101 number 14 times over a five-hour period outside a police station in Salford for help. Officers only responded when she told them she would ‘drown herself’ were it not for her children.

After her subsequent arrest – branded ‘unlawful’ by the inquiry – she was strip-searched ‘completely naked’ and later charged with malicious communications over her desperate phone calls.

The woman told the inquiry the strip-search wouldn’t have happened if she was a man – and that she felt she was ‘treated like a piece of meat’ by police in a city she didn’t know.

Another woman was stripsearched ‘in a room close to the custody desk with a glass door through which anyone could see her in her underwear’ without an appropriate adult being present. The inquiry found the strip-search was ‘no doubt’ done ‘unlawfully’.

The inquiry’s report – which highlights a series of ‘unlawful’ arrests and strip-searches of vulnerable women – concludes there’s now an ‘overwhelming case for women officers taking sole responsibility for women detainees’.

GMP has been told it must be ‘an explicit policy’ that across the force ‘there is never a woman detainee in any GMP custody suite who does not have continuous female welfare support throughout’.