Why the police ignored the rape gangs – UnHerd
The statistics behind the rape gang scandal let s banish the wholly inadequate word grooming are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.
That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.
The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation. That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.
via unherd.com
Dominic Adler.