Who Protects Us?
One of the core duties of the state is to protect its citizens. If it persistently fails in that duty, it cannot expect to retain its monopoly on justice.
Early last Friday morning a 30-something woman called police in Moorends, a village in the northeast corner of Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She had a horrifying tale to tell. After a late-night visit to a local shop, she said three men had taken her to a flat above the shop and gang-raped her. The assault was so horrific that the occupants of a house across the street heard her screams. Police arrested three men, aged 49, 34 and 24, on suspicion of rape and false imprisonment.
Then some clown released them on bail.
Frankly, this decision is incomprehensible. These three men are suspects in a particularly nauseating violent crime. The police and legal system have a responsibility both to protect the public from them and to prevent them escaping justice. It’s clear they’re potentially a danger to the public, because they’ve been arrested on suspicion of a violent crime which occurred in a property they own. Whose interests are served by releasing them on bail?
Locals clearly feel their interests aren’t being served, because they’re furious. Yesterday, Monday the 11th of December, a crowd gathered outside the shop where the alleged crime took place. Describing the situation as “low-level disorder”, police arrived to disperse the crowd. In a statement Detective Superintendent Eleanor Welsh complained about “speculation and some misinformation shared online” concerning the alleged rape.
Now, I don’t know what this “misinformation” might have been, but I can take an educated guess. Social media rumours say it took paramedics two hours to stabilise the victim after the attack. This contradicts the official police statement, which says she was taken to hospital for checks then discharged. I’m inclined to believe the police on this one.
Other rumours - darker rumours - say the suspects have been reported multiple times for sexually harassing girls in the shop, but no action has been taken. Unfortunately, I find this allegation a lot more credible - and I can explain why with one word:
Rotherham
Rotherham is in South Yorkshire, less than a dozen miles down the A630 from Doncaster, and both towns are served - I use the word somewhat ironically - by South Yorkshire Police. In January 2011 Rotherham started to become notorious when a lone journalist, Andrew Norfolk of The Times, began reporting on allegations of child sex slavery taking place in the town. According to Norfolk the abuse, mainly perpetrated by immigrant and immigrant-descended men with roots in the Pakistani city of Mirpur, was widespread, and the number of victims potentially ran into the thousands. Worse, he said, it had been going on since at least the early 1990s and South Yorkshire Police had known about it for more than ten years - yet almost nothing had been done, for fear of causing “community tensions”. A few of the more egregious perpetrators were jailed in 2010, but the police - along with social workers and the council - refused to admit the sheer scale of the problem.
Norfolk’s articles poured petrol on a fire that had already been smouldering despite the efforts of police and local authorities to damp it down. In 2003 Labour MP Ann Cryer complained about “Asian” - in other words, Pakistani - men perpetrating sexual abuse against girls in her Keighley constituency in West Yorkshire. She was shouted down, accused of racism and bombarded with death threats, forcing her to have a panic button installed in her home. Police did nothing until 2015, when twelve men, all of Pakistani origin, were finally convicted. Also in 2003, NHS crisis co-ordinator Sara Rowbotham submitted the first of more than 180 separate complaints of child sexual abuse by Pakistani-origin men to police and social workers in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. No action was taken until 2011; in 2012 nine men, eight of Pakistani origin and one Afghan asylum seeker, were convicted of rape and other offences. Since then another 13 have been convicted, and investigations into other suspects are still going on.
Finally, public outrage about Rotherham grew strong enough that South Yorkshire Police were forced to act. A major investigation was launched in 2013, culminating in the 2015 trial and conviction of four Pakistani men and two English women. Since then another 36 men - all but two of Pakistani origin - have been convicted. Another 20 Pakistani men and one woman have been charged. Investigations into almost 400 more suspects are still in progress. The scale of the abuse is simply staggering, far greater than even Norfolk had suspected - and it had all occurred while South Yorkshire Police turned a blind eye. A series of later inquiries by the Home Office, the National Crime Agency, the Independent Police Complaints Commission and two specially appointed investigators uncovered a horrifying saga of official indifference, attempted cover-ups and even active sabotage of those who attempted to expose the scandal.
Rotherham Police, it emerged, had routinely failed to record the ethnic origin of alleged abusers, conveniently masking the pattern of what was going on. Home Office-appointed investigator Adele Weir found that data had been removed from her office, and the minutes of meetings she hadn’t been invited to - one of which took place while she was on holiday abroad - had been altered to show she’d been there and had agreed with the official policies she was actually protesting about. It later emerged that social workers, the council and the police had held a meeting about Weir and decided to rein her in. She was also forced to attend an ethnicity and diversity course as punishment for naming Asian men as the abusers. Eventually she was suspended for passing information about the abuse to the Home Office - which, let’s not forget, is the government department responsible for policing.
On one occasion police caught one of the ringleaders of the gang abusing a girl in a car parked beside the police station, but took no action even though he admitted abusing her. In two cases, fathers who tried to rescue their daughters from abusers were arrested by police. On other occasions the victims were arrested on minor public order offences, such as being drunk and disorderly, while their abusers were allowed to go free. Police told investigators to send reports to an electronic drop box - which was never checked.
In the wake of the scandal, the government tried to clean up Rotherham. The 2015 Casey Report concluded that Rotherham Council was “not fit for purpose”; the council’s leader resigned, the Police and Crime Commissioner - who refused to resign - was forced out, and all the elected councillors were dismissed and replaced by a team of five commissioners appointed by the Home Office. South Yorkshire Police, however, got off much more lightly - despite having been a major factor in the abuse continuing so long. In fact it could be continuing to this day; there are persistent reports that Mirpuri men still see Rotherham as their sexual playground, are still abusing girls there on an industrial scale and are still being enabled by the inadequacy of the police and council.
Given this dismal record, am I prepared to dismiss rumours that South Yorkshire Police would turn a blind eye to repeated reports of sexual offending by shopkeepers, perhaps with the goal of protecting “community relations”? Sadly no. I am not able to do that. Given what happened in Rotherham, these rumours are depressingly credible.
The Edge Of Anarchy
Our police are still good at arresting people, when they want to be. If you’re suspected of a particularly heinous crime, such as Misgendering With Intent or Eating While Being Tommy Robinson, you can expect the rainbow-flagged arm of the Law to grasp your collar fairly rapidly. Waving a placard calling for a final solution to the Jewish problem, however, will just trigger a half-hearted attempt to identify you on social media - although the Metropolitan Police will acknowledge that “We understand why people are angry and disappointed that this man wasn’t arrested yesterday during the protest.”
So that’s the state of policing in Britain today. Eating breakfast gets you arrested on the spot, dragged into the street by 20 officers, then pepper-sprayed after being handcuffed, while calling for Holocaust: The Sequel doesn’t. Most people, understandably, aren’t happy with these priorities. They’ll be even less happy if it turns out that the rumours from Doncaster are true; that those three shopkeepers had been reported for harassment or abuse before; that, yet again, sexual abusers from a specific “community” had been encouraged to escalate their crimes by official indifference.
People will only suffer this in silence for so long. We pay taxes on the understanding that, in return, the state will provide certain services. One of those services is protecting us from criminals. The police and courts between them are responsible for doing that, and we expect it to be done without fear or favour - and yes, that includes the fear of upsetting “community relations”. If a “community” is unhappy that its menfolk keep getting arrested for gang rape it shouldn’t complain about how everyone picks on it; it should look at its own culture, and the values that culture instils in people, then take a scalpel and cut out the rot. If the “community” itself is unwilling to do this then it’s up to the police to wield the knife, because that rot must be excised - and “community relations” be damned. A “community” that breeds this sort of vile misogyny has no place in our country.
But what if the police keep failing to do this? What if the police ask a man who’s already been accused of sexually abusing children dozens of times why he’s parked beside the police station with two young girls in his car, to which he replies “She’s just sucking my c**k, mate” - and they let him go? What if the police repeatedly claim there’s nothing they can do about protesters with Palestinian flags desecrating our war memorials, but instantly order people to remove Israeli and even British flags?
People won’t stand for this forever. If they see the police ignore certain classes of criminal time after time, while clamping down hard on others for much lesser offences - or even diverting time and manpower to investigate things that aren’t crimes at all - they will lose patience and take the law into their own hands. After all it has to be in somebody’s hands, and if the police drop the baton ordinary people will finally be forced to pick it up. Right now, as anger at so-called two-tier policing rises, we are stumbling towards the edge of anarchy.
Last night the people of Doncaster set out to look for three alleged rapists that some fool chose to release. I hope they don’t find them - but only because I’d hate to see fundamentally decent people end up in jail for doing something impolite to a sex offender. As well as that, of course, I’d much rather not live in the sort of country where alleged rapists end up dangling from the nearest lamp post. But would I prefer that sort of country to one where women and girls suffer the most appalling indignities because the police are unwilling or unable to apply justice equally? Perhaps it’s best I end with a simple “No comment”.
Excellent article. Frightening too. There is no room for wokery in the Police. Neither is there space for the Law ignoring crime such as that seen in Rotherham in the supposed interests of public relations. We are in the UK, it is UK law to which we adhere, all people who choose to live here must do the same. If they don’t, we expect them to be dealt with appropriately.