Investigators who examined police failings in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal were told not to investigate senior officers and no one lost their jobs, a whistleblower has said. The Times has the story.
No officers lost their jobs and only those in lower ranks were investigated for misconduct despite findings that police had failed to investigate the sexual exploitation of at least 1,400 young girls by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage.
The Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) carried out Operation Linden, which found that police did not make crime records even when rapes and sexual assaults were reported, did not question older men found in the presence of young drunk girls and viewed vulnerable children as troublesome problems instead of victims.
The watchdog, which has rigorously defended its investigation, concluded in 2022 that there were systemic failings at South Yorkshire police, which enabled industrial-scale child sexual abuse between 1997 and 2013.
A whistleblower has told the Times that Operation Linden did not delve deep enough, standards of investigation were poor and there was “no desire” by the IOPC to properly uncover the reasons behind the failings.
“We were actively told not to pursue senior officers,” the whistleblower said. “It was just largely incompetent. There was just no passion or desire within the IOPC to understand what went wrong in Rotherham and find out why those girls were let down.
“We were told to focus on junior officers who handled the complaints from individual victims. But this was happening across the country, where lower-ranked officers were ignoring CSE [child sexual exploitation].
“I thought it was important to know why that was. Whether this culture was sanctioned at higher up levels. But I was told ‘you cannot pursue senior officers, suggesting they should have known what was going on’.”
The IOPC carried out 91 investigations into police failings, covering 265 separate allegations made by 51 complainants. It examined 47 officers and found that eight had a case to answer for misconduct and six for gross misconduct.
None lost their jobs, the most severe sanction was a written warning and some other officers received “management advice”.
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