"The Met Police Have Failed Us"
Shut Them Down and Start Again
By Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday
Britain’s biggest police force is now institutionally unjust, and so is not fit for the task we have entrusted to it. The report by Sir Richard Henriques into its ‘VIP paedophiles’ investigation is one of the most devastating ever published about any official body.
If any other organisation was involved, we would disband it and start again, as I increasingly believe we should do with the police. This horrible mess is closely linked to their failure to control or deal with the crimes they increasingly regard as petty, of theft and disorder. The same sort of mind that ignores these things is all-too-readily convinced by mad claims that the country is beset with high-level paedophile plots.
The Met’s Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, did not respond to the report in person, but instead sent her deputy, Sir Stephen House, out on to the doorstep. He gave a sort of railway apology, pungent with insincerity. He was ‘deeply sorry’ for mistakes that ‘were made’ – not mistakes that he had made or the force had made. They had ‘been made’ passively by somebody or other, not named.
The force, he explained, did not agree with everything Sir Richard Henriques had said. I’ll bet it doesn’t. People who have been caught bang to rights tend not to agree. And why should they? The officers involved have escaped any serious action against them despite withering criticism.
The force may have had to fork out a bit of public money in compensation to the innocent men whose reputations it casually besmirched and whose private lives it publicly trampled on. But no deterrent or exemplary punishment has been exacted and, in my view, nobody will change his or her ways. As usual in her magically propelled career, Dame Cressida, Madam Teflon, is wholly unaffected despite her personal involvement at the start of the whole thing.
Nor could her underling, Sir Stephen, stop making the same basic, wilful mistake that led to all the other miseries and stupidities that ended with his officers bursting into the home of a wholly innocent war hero in his 90s. Before he vanished back into the warmth of New Scotland Yard, he repeatedly used the word ‘victim’ to describe sex abuse complainants.
The Henriques report hammers home the point that those who allege they have been sexually abused just must not be called ‘victims’ until their alleged assailants have been convicted. The use of the word ‘victim’ prejudices the whole procedure from the start. It lay behind all the cruel mistakes of this investigation. Some complaints are false and so those complainants are not ‘victims’.
But when I asked the Yard why the Deputy Commissioner had referred to ‘victims’ in defiance of the report, it responded with a flat refusal to pay any attention. It said the Henriques recommendation that they should stop talking about ‘victims’ before trial ‘was not accepted by the Metropolitan Police Service as this is a commonly accepted term across a wide range of guidance, policy and legislation.
‘This issue has been widely debated and differing views exist. The use of the word victim is not intrinsically linked to the issue of belief. The Met police continues to support the use of the term “victim”. This does not confer any judgment on the allegations they make which will always be investigated impartially and with an open mind.’
Which is pure garbage from start to finish. The word is plainly prejudicial. It is a direct attack on the presumption of innocence, which is all that stands between us and tyranny. Investigated and excoriated by a senior judge of huge experience, the force refuses to punish anybody, claims that plainly wrong actions were fine and continues to defy the most basic rules of justice. I wish I thought this would finish it. But it will not.
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