Just Whose Side Is the Independent Office for Police Conduct on?

Survivors of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, have long known that the authorities failed them. Now, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has corroborated that view. Their investigation into the matter, Operation Amazon, has now confirmed that senior South Yorkshire Police officers (at the rank of chief superintendent and above) neglected their duty to protect children from 1999 until 2011. This failure enabled mostly-Pakistani-heritage rape gangs to exploit vulnerable girls, despite police having enough information and evidence to intervene.

Intelligence about known offenders was shared as early as 2001, but often ignored or not passed to frontline officers. Reports from 2002 to 2006 linked perpetrators to victims, yet senior leadership failed to act until further investigations commenced in 2008. Their unwillingness to act resulted in convictions only after years of further neglect, allowing abuse to continue unabated until 2016. These are truly damning findings. 

There are, however, other concerning issues relating to the IOPC investigation into South Yorkshire Police. One is that the full report is still not available to the public; all we have thus far is a summary. Another, in the ‘Outcome’ section of said summary, is this quote:

Throughout the investigation, there was no indication that any officer may have committed a criminal offence or behaved in a manner that would justify disciplinary proceedings.

This is a strange statement, especially in light of the IOPC stating quite openly that South Yorkshire Police had “actionable intelligence which senior officers could and should have addressed and taken responsibility for.”   

The summary appears to demonstrate that the behaviour of senior officers in this case, far from indicating that they hadn’t infringed any regulations, may have committed the offence of Misconduct in a Public Office. This offence includes the following consideration: “wilfully neglecting to perform their duty … to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification.”

The scale of the grooming gangs issue nationwide and the extent of officialdom’s deliberate overlooking of it has caused widespread damage to public trust in institutions upon which we have traditionally relied. The police should be near the top of any list as a body we should be able to trust, and South Yorkshire Police, being one of the first to discern this monstrous pattern of offending (including its fundamental racist component), had a duty to forge an investigative approach which could have been shared as best practice nationwide. Instead, they looked the other way and repeated the contrived ‘diversity is our strength’ refrain. Despite all of this, the IOPC has decided that no senior officers in South Yorkshire Police have fallen foul of criminal or disciplinary standards? Come on.

It is worth noting that this is the same IOPC which decided that it is still going to force the firearms officer who shot career gangster and gun user Chris Kaba to a misconduct hearing. The officer fatally shot Kaba in September 2022 while he was at the wheel of a large 4×4 car, trying to violently ram his way out of a Met Police hard stop. An Old Bailey jury cleared the officer of murder after only 16 minutes of deliberation. But, vindictively, the IOPC is still chasing him.

This is also the same IOPC which investigated officers for not being nice enough to a youth who had attacked them and spat at them after being arrested, and the same IOPC which thought it worthwhile to look into cops’ ‘misogynistic and ableist’ conversations. 

I could go on, but you get the picture. There is a clear discrepancy between the enthusiasm of the IOPC to investigate frontline police officers for some ridiculously trivial matters with that of their unwillingness to scrutinise senior ranks for some of the most damaging allegations the British police have ever faced, allegations which have demolished the lives of generations of working class girls across the United Kingdom and which have damaged the country’s reputation worldwide. 

Why is this so? Well, it is this cohort of high ranking officers who are the backbone of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, bodies which have been at the forefront of turning the police from neutral upholders of the law into political enforcers for an Establishment which scorns vast swathes of its own citizens. The IOPC, being staffed largely by people of a similar mindset and aspiration, are plainly reluctant to go after their own. So a sergeant who shares an inappropriate meme feels their wrath, while the senior ranks go unpunished for the most vile dereliction of duty in British policing history.

The perception of institutional reluctance to challenge senior figures within the police is very real. But failing to hold them to account will damage public perceptions much more than any potential damage to the ‘reputation’ of the police as an organisation. Indeed, to pursue the allegations would surely enhance law enforcement’s reputation amongst the cohort of society who have traditionally been on the wrong end of the two-tier justice system, the existence of which only the ideologically captured can now deny. 

The IOPC should fulfil its mandate and reinforce the principle that no one is above the law. Its reluctance to pursue criminal or disciplinary charges against senior officers for neglect of the most basic, core duty to protect some of the most vulnerable people in society is yet another stain on British policing.