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.
There are two main reasons why race remains such a potent factor in police decision-making, The first is the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism. Ever since the late Eighties, successive governments have baked antiracism into law. The reasoning here was essentially benign: nobody would deny racism has long dogged British policing, from the bungled investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder to concerns over stop and search.
Yet given the scale of the rape gang scandal, is it now unreasonable to ask if any babies were chucked out with the bathwater? I think they were. I describe it as “Tsunami Policing” — where the solution to a policing problem is, initially, like a gentle offshore wave. Then, as it rushes towards the landmass of reality, urged on by opinion formers and politicians and grasping police managers, it becomes a monstrosity. This describes the post-Macpherson Met’s obsession with race, whereby Scotland Yard played “trendy vicar” one minute, Torquemada the next. By the mid-2000s, any ambitious officer unwilling to play nice still was unlikely to make National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) rank, the policing equivalent to army brigadiers and above. This quickly shaped decision-making at senior levels across the country: what happens in London soon spreads to provincial forces.
With so many incentives to toe the line, no wonder more free-thinking coppers stayed away, with the remainder grimly susceptible to groupthink. We used to call it “having the CD Rom inserted” — whereby a reasonably competent copper would morph into a pound-shop commissar to achieve the next rank. The next time you watch a press conference with a senior officer, play “bullshit bingo” with the language they use, usually involving words like community, proportionality and diversity. Meanwhile, away from the TV cameras, thousands of young girls were raped, abused and treated like chattel in their own hometowns.
The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.
Given the Government’s unwillingness to launch a full public inquiry, we’re sadly unlikely to see a candid account of the informal “corridor conferences” held at force HQs, let alone the “Gold Group” decision-making meetings held by senior officers. Instead, under-trained and under-resourced constables, working in child protection, will be used as scapegoats. Far better, instead, to boost transparency at the highest levels: wouldn’t it be glorious if officers at Gold Group meetings were forced to wear body-worn video cameras?
Of course, a lack of accountability infects every corner of the British state: see the public inquiries into Royal Mail or Covid. Yet, to my mind, this gives the police even less of an excuse. We expect the police to be better, to be held to a higher standard. There’s an old saying in the job: the public get the police they deserve. Except they don’t. The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.
A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees: the panacea of multi-agency working, with police units moving into town halls and going native with their social worker colleagues. Suspects became “clients” and cases were viewed through the prism of equity rather than justice. Beard-stroking and hand-wringing became the order of the day, freeing officers to attend development courses and conferences while they planned their next promotion.
Of course, race wasn’t the only issue. Investigations into the rape gangs disaster have discovered the usual witches brew of public sector failure, from parlous resourcing to recruitment, training and retention. Yet all this surely raises one more question: what can be done? If nothing else, we need the same enthusiasm for reform as we saw in the Nineties, when a laddish “canteen culture” was rightly expunged, even as their technocratic replacements just made the same mistakes in reverse. As for more specific changes, there are currently far too many forces, leading to inconsistencies in operational practices and decision-making. Another problem involves a lack of proper oversight; far better to replace the disastrous Police and Crime Commissioner experiment with non-partisan local police boards. The post-Blair mass of ill-considered law needs to go too. On that last point, the police should find some courage, finally calling bullshit on time-wasters like Non-Crime Hate Incidents.
In the meanwhile? The centre cannot hold. The rape gangs scandal is the quintessence of two-tier policing, which is probably why the Government is more comfortable with public inquiries into ancient history like the Miners’ Strike. Whatever the answer, it requires moral courage. I hope, somewhere inside the policing machine, a new generation of coppers is prepared to show some minerals, to shake the tree, to remember why they joined in the first place. To police, in short, without fear or favour — because who wants to live in a society that stands by while children are raped?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/