RUTHFULLY YOURS

A couple of years ago, I was encouraged to apply to sit on a board that would help the College of Policing produce a new code of ethics. My unsuccessful application was perhaps fatally brief. When asked what attributes should be central to a new code, I replied, simply, ‘moral and physical courage’.

I was put in mind of this after the smouldering rape-gang scandal exploded into flames this month, fanned by the most networked man on the planet, Elon Musk. Now momentum is gathering behind calls for a national inquiry – and in particular, into the behaviour of the police. Why did the gatekeepers for public safety desert their posts?

The charge sheet is stark. In multiple grotesque examples of child sexual exploitation by organised gangs of men, police forces failed to act to safeguard victims and deliver justice. The reports and reviews, delivered piecemeal after various grooming-gang court cases, revealed staggering incompetence and callous indifference on the part of far too many police forces, from Thames Valley to South Yorkshire to Greater Manchester. There was a pattern to their failures. Their investigations were inadequate. They failed to see brutalised young girls as victims. And they put the protection of their reputations ahead of justice.

In each instance, the victims were predominantly white girls and the perpetrators were predominantly older, south Asian men, most of them of Pakistani heritage. The police should have responded by upholding the law and protecting the vulnerable regardless of the seeming racial, ethnic dimension to the offending. The actual response was very different. As Professor Alexis Jay’s 2015 report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham revealed, 1,400 children were sexually abused and raped in the town between 1997 and 2013. Jay found that both the police and council staff were reluctant to confront the problem due to the ethnic origins of the perpetrators and the fear of being labelled racist. The lack of police action allowed the abuse to continue unchecked.

You would have thought heads would have rolled for such a gross dereliction of duty. But not a bit of it. Following a seven-year-long investigation into police officers’ behaviour in Rotherham by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, there was barely a slap on the wrist for anyone.

Professor Jay went on to lead the nationwide Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which reported in 2022. The final report did make many important recommendations for improving the police response to the problem of large-scale child sexual exploitation. But thanks to its focus on child sexual abuse in general, from in the home to in schools and churches, if failed to focus in any depth on abuse carried out by predominantly British Pakistani grooming gangs. It certainly didn’t address the police’s reluctance to tackle child sexual exploitation when there’s an ethnic dimension involved.

The role of the 1999 Macpherson report in all this shouldn’t be downplayed. Having excoriated the bungled and prejudiced investigation into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a white, racist gang, Sir William Macpherson famously accused the Metropolitan Police of suffering from ‘institutional racism’. It is more than possible that this accusation led to an over-correction in operational behaviour. Indeed, perhaps the need to demonstrate organisational repentance turned into unforgivable inertia in many police forces when it came to taking action against networked child abusers from ethnic-minority backgrounds.

Police higher-ups are still not helping matters. Speaking last week, Becky Riggs, the lead for child sexual abuse on the National Police Chiefs’ Council, ignored the public clamour for an investigation into police and other agencies’ failures over grooming gangs. Instead, she urged officers to remember children were at risk of abuse from ‘all races and genders’. While this is statistically true, police leaders’ unerring willingness to ignore the question of why so many officers turned a blind eye to the abuse of mainly white kids by Asian men will not do much for community cohesion. You cannot defuse a bomb by pretending it isn’t there.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government may still be resisting the calls for a public inquiry into the nature and extent of the grooming gangs. But the case for understanding the true scale of this awful cruelty, and holding the police among others to account over it, is overwhelming. Only by pulling back the covers of this national scandal can we bring justice and closure for past victims, and protect those who are still very much at risk today. Moral courage is the key.