The Police Can’t Just Expect Trust
As appalling as the case of rapist police officer David Carrick is, I hope the 30 year jail sentence for the former London officer, brings some sense of justice, peace and stability back to the lives of his many victims. I realise it is not going to repair the harm done, or tackle the wider problem at hand, but his victims and other women are safe from him now. The UK government has made clear he will never be released from jail. Sadly however, this is not even the beginning of the work that needs to be done to ensure the absolute transparency, integrity and reliability of the police’s institutional response to allegations of criminal misconduct, corruption and other breaches of trust. The warnings and red flags around Carrick were there to see for a sustained period of time, and yet a well-resourced national authority, specifically designed to investigate crime, prevent it and arrest its perpetrators, failed to do any of those things, allowing a timeline not of enquiry and enforcement, but of rape, intimidation and avoidance.
The police have a vital and often thankless role to fulfill; we badly need them even more than we realise or care to admit. And decent officers everywhere will be as horrified and shocked by this case as anyone else, perhaps more so. But horror and sorrow and ‘lessons learnt’ are not enough. The Met leadership, the government and even the state security forces…
