Eleanor Neale

Members of the royal family even went down to Clapham Common to pay their respects, to leave bunches of flowers and speak with these protesting, mourning women.

Both the mayor of London and the UK's prime minister at the time released statements acknowledging the immense pain her family were in and the urgency that they now had to solve this crime and to keep the streets safe for other women.

And once the news broke that the man responsible for this horrific kidnap and murder was a police officer, well, it only made all that anger and fear even sharper.

One of the very people who trained to protect us had done this to one of us.

He knew that any random woman on the street would trust him and would do what he said.

And he played on that trust to kidnap, rape and murder Sarah.

Now, of course, trust in police has never been a universal thing, especially among marginalised communities and especially in countries where corruption within law enforcement is even more visible than here in the UK.

But the Metropolitan Police in London are meant to represent safety.

They're meant to be the people that you would run to in a state of emergency when you need help and protection.

And for so many people in the UK, especially for women, Sarah's case completely shattered that illusion.

We are not safe.

There was immense pressure on the police to reassure the public in the aftermath that they, as an institution, they were taking safety concerns seriously.

Women were rightly saying that if they were now approached by a police officer, they would be scared.

They wouldn't have trust in him.

And so different police officers and officials were making very ham-handed statements across the media, including this one prick called Philip Allott.

He was a crime commissioner in North Yorkshire at the time, and God, the disappointment that I felt when I heard that this was a fellow Yorkshireman.

He went on the BBC News,

in October, so a month after Sarah's murder, and he said that women need to be more streetwise.

They need to know their rights.

They need to know when they can and can't be arrested.