Plymouth shooting: police urged to take misogyny more seriously

Gunman who killed five regularly expressed hatred of women but had firearms licence reinstated in July

Kevin Rawlinson
Sat 14 Aug 2021 11.04 BST

Police must start taking misogyny more seriously in order to prevent more tragedies such as that in Plymouth, a top prosecutor has said, after a man who had regularly expressed his hatred of women killed five people and wounded two more.

Nazir Afzal, who was previously chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, said Jake Davison should have been on a police watchlist.

Davison, 22, killed his mother on Thursday in the Keyham area of Plymouth before going on to shoot dead four more people, including a three-year-old girl, and injure two others.

An investigation has been launched by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) into Davison’s possession of a shotgun and a firearms licence, which were returned to him in July after being removed last December following an allegation of assault against him in September 2020.

Afzal said Davison was “exactly the kind of person that you would be keeping an eye on”. Yet it appeared his licence was returned without analysis of his social media posts, which Afzal said painted a picture of a man who thought women were “lesser beings”.

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