Police in Rotherham, where the authorities failed to tackle South Asian heritage “grooming” gangs due to political correctness for years, failed to record most abusers’ ethnicity in the year to December 2019.
Despite national and regional inquiries all concluding that victims had been failed and claiming lessons had been learned after the grooming gangs scandal was finally exposed at scale, an investigation by The Times has found that every police district in South Yorkshire, a major centre of abuse, still “routinely failed to log the ethnicity of those suspected of sexually abusing minors”.
Rotherham, which along with Rochdale was arguably ground zero for the scandal breaking nationwide, was the district most reluctant to log predators’ ethnic background, failing to record the ethnicity of an astonishing 67 per cent of suspects.
Independent investigations strongly suggest that a highly disproportionate number of grooming gang abusers are men of South Asian, mostly Pakistani Muslim heritage, and their victims largely white working-class girls and young women, but members of the media are still generally unable to describe suspects as anything other than “Asian” — to the chagrin of British Sikhs, among others — because the authorities almost never release information on their national and religious background.
“I reviewed these historic failings and, like this investigation by The Times, found that data collection on offenders is still poor, which is why I am making it mandatory for police forces to record the ethnicity of those arrested and held in custody as a result of their suspected involvement in grooming gangs,” commented Home Secretary Priti Patel of the situation, not explaining why she did not implement such a measure before the newspapers highlighted police failings if she was already aware of them.
The Tory MP, whose department has broad responsibility for policing, border control, deportations, and national security in the Boris Johnson administration — and is performing rather poorly across the board — added that “community and cultural factors are clearly relevant to understanding why people offend”, although to date police, prosecutors, and judges have remained unwilling to concede that the systematic abuse of mostly white non-Muslim girls and women by mostly South Asian Muslim men is racially or religiously...