Police homophobia: the issue Stephen Port jurors couldn’t consider

Jurors were not asked to consider if prejudice, homophobia or discrimination contributed to the deaths of Stephen Port’s victims after the Metropolitan police “fought tooth and nail” to keep the hotly disputed issue out of the inquests, despite relatives feeling police had written off their loved ones as “gay druggies”.

Though the coroner judge Sarah Munro QC ruled as a matter of law jurors could not consider those issues as possible factors, the charge of “homophobia” was levelled against officers by family and friends as one explanation for the disturbing incompetence seen in all four investigations.

As John Pape, a friend of Gabriel Kovari, put it, police didn’t feel it was “worth keeping an open mind and being curious about them”. He told the inquests he believed police were guilty of “institutional homophobia”.

Anthony Walgate’s mother, Sarah Sak, told the Guardian she was “really bitterly disappointed” jurors were not asked to consider the question of homophobia.“The Met had fought tooth and nail to keep the homophobia question out,” she said.

“It was clearly the case. Anthony’s investigation was shut down after two weeks. I said to police at the time, if it had been a 23-year-old woman found dumped outside a bin, if four young women had been found so close together, there would have been uproar.”

Walgate, 23, a fashion student who very occasionally supplemented his student finances through carefully selected escort work, was summed up as a “male prostitute” by one officer, which left Sak “really, really angry”.

Another officer believed Kovari, 22, and Jack Taylor, 25, could be drug users because they were “skinny”, the inquest heard. Taylor’s father, Colin, believed because they treated his son as a drug addict “the police didn’t look any further”.

A Barking police family liaison officer recorded Port’s first three victims as “all gay and they were using dating websites to meet men and also attending parties that had been organised where it appeared there were drugs actively being used and sexual activity happened”.

None of that was true, but it was the false narrative Port had posted under an alias after befriending Kovari’s former partner on Facebook after his death.

Officers denied Ricky Waumsley, Whitworth’s live-in partner of four years, access to his supposed “suicide note”. They dismissed him “in every single way”, Waumsley said, “because we were a gay, unmarried couple”.

When Whitworth’s father, Adam, and stepmother, Mandy, asked police what the drug GHB was, they were told to “Ask, Ricky, they know about this stuff,” he said. Waumsley had never heard of GHB. By “they”, the officer said under questioning, she meant as Whitworth’s partner, not as a gay man.

Postmortem injuries on Whitworth’s body were attributed to possibly being a result of “rough sex”, though there was no forensic basis for such inference. When his body was found in the Barking churchyard where two others were also dumped, the duty inspector described the location in an email as a “haven for gay sex (even dogging) and rough sleepers”, implying Whitworth was there for sex.

Sean Wilson, Barking’s deputy borough commander, admitted police failed to proactively engage with the LGBT+ community, but individual Barking officers vehemently denied unconscious bias.

The Met’s lawyers, addressing the coroner in the absence of the jury, argued the claim of prejudice should not be an issue left to the jury to decide. The mistakes by individual officers could be explained by “forgetfulness, indolence, lack of training, stress, overwork or inadequate supervision and management”. Lack of resources, and management structure failings, were valid explanations, rather than prejudice.

Pape, who was Kovari’s landlord until Port offered the Slovakian student free accommodation at his Barking flat days before he died, said mistakes were made because police “just didn’t value those four young men”.

“To my mind, the only thing that makes any sense of how disturbingly incompetent this investigation was is prejudice: conscious and unconscious. And, in my opinion, I think if that means the lives and deaths of young gay and bi men are not treated with significance and respect, I think that amounts to institutional homophobia,” he told jurors.

Pape said the inquest had exposed underfunding as a factor, and officers were “overstretched”. “But, consequently, they ‘prioritised’ in ways that exposed their prejudice. It led to incompetence and unequal treatment.”

“What disturbs me now, is knowing how the Met actively shut down anything that challenged their incorrect assumption, that the victims willingly took a date rape drug…

“They discriminated against Ricky, Daniel’s partner of four years, by not allowing him to see his boyfriend’s supposed suicide note. They didn’t even take a statement from Gabriel’s partner when he was giving them leads on a plate that would have led to Port. They ignored multiple emails from me, with information I had, about older men drugging younger men.

“The definition of institutional racism in the Macpherson report states: ‘It can be detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and stereotyping.’ Without acknowledging the core problem as underfunding and prejudice combined, the Met inhibit change and leave open the possibility of this happening again,” Pape said.

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