The X owner shared false claims that a Home Office memo urged police not to intervene in child grooming cases.
www.bbc.co.uk
I heard a discussion about this on the BBC - i think it was early this morning. It seems that the idea of the Home Office giving a steer to police that some young people - technically 'children', were making choices of their own to 'go with' older males, began with Nazir Afzal's remarks in a couple of interviews. There is no memo.
The campaigner Maggie Oliver also has repeated the idea of a Home Office Memo, but she says she had it from Afzal's interview, and she took it as authoritative, because of his position in the CPS. Afzal has done much to improve the prosecution rates. When he had the authority in the North West, he really increased the prosecution rates and re-opened cases which had been shelved for prosecution on the grounds that the young girls would not make good witnesses. He re-opened them and pursued them to conviction.
However - while BBC Verify have shown there was no such official memo from the Home Office -in reality, it makes no difference, if the custom and practice of the Crown Prosecution Service was to discount months of police work by shelving cases (as Maggie Oliver describes happening to one of her cases) because the victims were a bit rough and ready.
Why would anyone be surprised that police at ground zero, showed a reluctance to pursue cases to charge, when they knew the CPS would be unlikely to take the cases to court? One officer said to a victim's father, 'I hope this teaches her a lesson', after his daughter was admitted to hospital because of horrific internal injuries done to her in a gang rape that she suffered as part of long exploitation, by hideous Pakistani offenders.
The fact that the CPS between 2000 to about 2014, was so unwilling to prosecute these gang members, is for all practical purposes, the equivalent of having an official policy of non intervention.
Afzal changed that.
One thing to say about the official inquiries we have had - both the Jay one and the Home Office one that Peter linked to a couple of days ago, is that they persistently avoided noticing the heavy involvement of Pakistani criminal gangs. Jay in particular looked at evidence from police forces without any prosecutions for this particular boyfriend grooming prostitution model of cases now called grooming gangs. I believe itonly looked at two police areas which had this kind of offence prosecuted, inspite of the fact that this mode of pimping out girls to huge numbers of offenders was all over the country. THIS COST £200 MILLION! USELESS!
In the Home Office Inquiry, the word Pakistani only came up once I think and that was in connection with a Pakistani girl victim. I find it VERY HARD not to be convinced that the authorities have not been EXTREMELY reluctant to open the box and really take a hard look inside. It seems to me that they consider that anything is better than upsetting the multi cultural apple cart, no matter how rotten it is.