After 34 years in policing, including 24 in the Island, one of Jersey’s most senior police officers is hanging up her hat this weekend.
Detective Superintendent Alison Fossey, who was awarded an MBE at the end of the year in recognition of a lengthy career in law enforcement which has ranged from investigating child abuse to taking a leading role in the taskforce on violence against women and girls.
Her career as a police officer started in 1992, after a law degree and three-and-a-half years at HM Immigration Service in London.
Specialising in human rights law as a student gave her a “strong sense of justice, public protection [and] protection of the vulnerable,” she said.
“That always sparked my interest. In my first job, which was a civil service job in immigration, we did a lot of work with the police in London. From there, I decided I want a career in policing.”
On her first day st the training centre at Fettes, she entered a “regimented” training system.
“There were high standards of fitness,” she said. “You had to be able to run a mile in such and such time, you had to be able to do all these press-ups, sit-ups, all this kind of stuff.
“So you’re always thinking ‘oh my God, even though I’ve been practicing before, am I going to be able to do this?’”
The level of discipline involved in policing was “a whole new world to me”, she added, “but I loved it from the get-go”.
From there, she was whisked off to the Scottish training camp at Tulliallan for three months.
“In those days, you were still going for runs through the woods, carrying logs, as part of team-building exercises. It was pretty harsh – sleeping in dormitories.
“It was great camaraderie – people came from all over Scotland and you were immersed in that for three months and made some really good friends.”
A contrast to training now, she added – the States police started training officers in the Island last year, having previously sent them to Norfolk for ten weeks.
“If you want to recruit a diverse police force, you have to be more accommodating than that – people can’t give up their families, their entire lives for the duration of a training course,” Det Supt Fossey said.
“When I joined, everyone would have been in the region of between 20 and 30 years old and didn’t have the kind of commitments that some of the candidates that we now attract do.
“We want to attract those types of candidates that are older, that bring life experience with them.”
Starting her policing career in Leith made for “an interesting place to work”.
“It was the Trainspotting days. That’s what Leith was like, it was the heroin capital of Scotland – and it was a great place to learn.”
She recalled one of her first jobs – taking the lift up to see a dangerous dog in a high-rise-building.
“I’ll never forget the minute the doors of the lift opened and you’re faced with this dog running about the landing, going nuts. You just want to press the button to go back down. It was scary stuff.
“I think in the end, we did close it, went back down and waited for the dog handler to come back up with us.”
Det Supt Fossey spent ten years in Leith and Glasgow, before transferring to Jersey, where her then-partner was from.
“I can remember landing at the Airport, the sun was out, there’s palm trees. I was in Glasgow at that point – it was a different world.
“It’s been the best move, and I’ve been really fortunate to have had the opportunity.
“After 24 years, it definitely feels like home.”
She described getting to grips not just with Jersey’s different legal system, but also with “policing in the community that you live in” – a contrast from much larger UK forces.
“I think you then appreciate the issues within the community, the understanding, and you hold a position of responsibility and accountability, and that’s right in policing,” she said.
Jersey also offered a chance to work on a breadth of topics, rather than specialising in the way larger forces do.
For Det Supt Fossey, who describes herself as “ambitious”, working in a small force also meant she had to take each opportunity for promotion “because there’s only a certain number of senior positions and you’re dependent on people retiring or moving on in some other way”.
“I thought ‘I need to go for this now, I can’t sit back and think I’m going to wait till the next time around’ because the next time may never come.”
Her training took her outside of Jersey, including on a 2014 leadership course with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, where she and one police officer from Ireland’s Gardaí were the only Europeans among an American cohort.
“It’s everything that you imagine Quantico to be – including arriving at the Airport in Virginia. You’re told there will be a bus there, but it won’t be identifiable. So you walk out, looking at all these buses, until eventually someone hooks you onto a bus.”
Arriving was “daunting”, as was driving through the FBI’s gates – but it was “a really fantastic experience” overall, with high-tech health analysis, leadership talks and a visit to Washington, she continued.
An interest in tackling abuse, sexual and domestic offences led her to being one of the leading figures in investigating Jersey’s historic abuse, setting up a number of victim support services and overhauling the way the police tackles them.
“I think that’s been a gradual thing – certainly when I joined the police in Edinburgh, at that time, if you were a female police officer on the shift, most jobs involving child protection or sexual offences would come to you.
“I’ve got a vivid memory very early on in my career, going for some continuous professional development and we were looking at the Orkney inquiry in the early 1990s, where there had been a child protection abuse investigation. We were learning the lessons from that inquiry, and I think that really then started to plant the seed for me that this was the direction that I would definitely like to take my career.”
For Det Supt Fossey, who is from Dunblane, the 1996 shooting at her old primary school hit close to home. By then, she was working in Glasgow as a Detective Constable.
“A lesser known fact around [perpetrator] Thomas Hamilton was he was a sex offender, and he had been abusing young people, and the council were beginning to close in on him, close down all the clubs that he was involved in.
“That’s what sparked that lack of control, that he lost control, and prompted the shootings in Dunblane, where children and the teachers tragically lost their lives.
“Back in those days, management of sex offenders was nowhere near as robust as it is today. I would hope that we would never see that repeated again, certainly not in Scotland, due to the gun controls now – but equally, because the management of sex offenders is so much more improved now.”
The theme continued in Jersey, where Det Supt Fossey worked tackling serious crime and rose up in ranks, becoming Detective Superintendent in 2021.
She joined the Family Protection Team in 2005, and later was part of the team was launched Operation Rectangle, an investigation into historic child abuse that was later a significant focus of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry. An otherwise bleak report praised very few people – Det Supt Fossey was one of them.
By the time of the inquiry, Det Supt Fossey described herself as “the last person standing”.
“Those who had been involved by that point were long gone, although some of them did come and give evidence at the Care Inquiry, but the person with the corporate knowledge and the evidence was, of course, myself, and that can be quite a lonely place to be,” she said.
“However, it comes with the job. If you get promoted and seek promotion, then you’ve got to be willing to take on that responsibility and accountability.”
The investigation, which uncovered years of routine abuse of children in care, was ultimately overshadowed by sensational stories and mismanagement, she said.
The atmosphere at the time was “tense”, she said.
“The media was sensationalising the activity, the digging that went [on] up at Haut de la Garenne. That is undoubtedly where the investigation lost its way, and where there was a failure of leadership in that respect. And that’s sad, because it detracted at that time from the reality, which was that a lot of children had suffered, over a number of years, abuse in Jersey’s care system.
“And that has to be the message, and that has to be what’s remembered.”
The investigation and the Care Inquiry continue to feel like they are at the front of people’s minds. So how does Det Supt Fossey look back at that time?
“I think I look back on it positively, because it did take the lid off what had gone on for decades and decades,” she said.
“For me, I took a lot of learning from that investigation, a lot of learning about leadership, about responsibility. I think it was just such a pivotal moment for Jersey. I do feel proud of it. I feel proud of the investigation.
“Sadly, we didn’t get justice for as many victims as we would have liked, but sometimes that’s the nature of non-recent abuse allegations. Your opportunities to secure evidence years and years on is not as easy.
“Quite often, some of the perpetrators were dead, so it was challenging from that respect. “But I did take comfort from the Care Inquiry and the fact that they absolutely said it was a necessary and valid investigation.”
Finding herself at the centre of an investigation that was clouded by political chatter, Det Supt Fossey said it was important to stay independent and only ever let others be “background noise”.
On Friday, her last day on the job, Det Supt Fossey said she expected some kind of presentation “despite my protestations”.
“I’m actually quite a shy person… but as everyone says, you’re going to have to suck it up.”
Then, Det Supt Fossey is off to Lake Maggiore for some cycling and walking in the mountains – before returning to Jersey in August, when the trial for the Haut du Mont explosion is scheduled. As the senior investigating officer, she said it was “really important that I stay with it and see it through to its conclusion”.
Meanwhile, a new recruitment drive is starting.
Having kept it together for our whole conversation, Det Supt Fossey only became emotional as she tried to encourage others to follow in her footsteps.
“I’ve been extremely fortunate in my policing career. Policing has been a really wonderful career for me, and has given me far more than I could ever hope to get back,” she said.
