Top cop: Our incompetence with grooming gangs
THE Chief Constable of England’s third biggest police force says the way it dealt with sex ºgrooming gangs was “borderline incompetent”.
Stephen Watson, who became the head of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in 2021, said the force lacked “an element of professional curiosity” in its methods, something he said was now “radically different”.
He apologised last week to three grooming gang victims who police failed to protect. The women had taken legal action, backed by lawyers from the Centre forWomen’s Justice.
They claim that from the early 2000s there was evidence from multiple sources that gangs of mainly Asian men were grooming, trafficking and sexually abusing mainly white working-class girls in Rochdale.
The force paid substantial damages in an out-of-court settlement. Speaking on BBC Radio Manchester, Mr Watson said: “The bottom line is we’ve failed children in the past.We simply did, there’s no beating around the bush.
“I don’t think people did it out of a sense of badness. But organisationally, we were borderline incompetent in the sense that we didn’t do things then that we do now.”
Mr Watson said when he was a young police officer, if a missing child was found with an adult, the focus was on recovering the child, whereas now the adult would be arrested “as night follows day”.
Noting that child sexual exploitation can result in “very unfortunate behaviours” from victims, he added: “Once… people didn’t see past the behaviour, as opposed to questioning, ‘Why on earth is this youngster finding themselves in this position?’
“And that’s what I mean by a professional curiosity.”