An unprecedented scandal, in terms of number and seriousness of crimes committed by a man in uniform unmasked with guilty delay in the guise of the serial rapist; but also for the negligence – if not worse – of those who should have (and could) denounce his crimes from within the ranks and instead ignored signals and suspicions that emerged in vain for about twenty years.
The list of shames attributed to Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police in London, the UK’s main investigative center and national anti-terrorism headquarters, has been struggling for some time with repeated storms and an embarrassing crisis of credibility.
The latest black story concerns investigator David Carrick, 48, arrested in 2021 on serious suspicions of sexual abuse perpetrated under uniform cover during almost 20 years of service. He eventually pleaded guilty before a court of 49 charges: 24 episodes of rape against at least 12 women, as well as various sexual assaults and harassments.
The disputed facts refer to a period of time between 2000 and 2021. According to Barbara Gray, one of Scotland Yard’s deputy commanders, this is precisely an “unprecedented” case in the entire modern history of the British police, in terms of size and criminal weight of the indictment file.
A case for which the heads of the department – starting with the new head Mark Rowley, who took over in recent months from the first female commander, Cressida Dick, not confirmed in the position after being accused of not having been able to face scandals and silences firmly enough inside – they hastened to douse their heads in ashes: promising that they wanted to give a change of pace to clean up, not without admitting the failure of the control systems on Carrick and publicly apologizing for the decades-old “uncollected” alarm signals on its behaviors.
Signals that they “could have allowed us to stop him” sooner, Gray remarked. While Rowley informed the BBC in the evening that internal disciplinary investigations are currently open on 1,000 reports of suspected sexual or domestic abuse raised on 800 staff: and that this time there will be no discounts for anyone, in cases of proven guilt.
“This man – echoed the crown prosecutor, Jaswant Narwal referring to Carrick – played a role in which he was responsible for protecting the public, but in his private life he did exactly the opposite: degrading, belittling, assaulting and raping various women, in a crescendo of crimes that got worse and worse as impunity made him bolder”.
Impunity common to other colleagues involved in more or less recent scandals for too long. Including Wayne Couzens, a former agent on duty in the special unit called upon to protect political powerhouses and diplomatic offices in London, sentenced last year to life imprisonment after being the protagonist of one of the feminicides that most shocked the British capital and made outrage women: the March 2021 killing of Sarah Everard, stopped with the staging of a false arrest for phantom violations of the Covid restrictions then in force, then tied up, kidnapped, raped and ferociously massacred.
David Corrick, for his part, confessed today before a London judge of Southwark Crown Court the responsibilities relating to 4 rapes and other abuses against a 40-year-old woman: the first among his victims to find the courage to report him following the case Couzens. While in a previous hearing held in December, the content of which has only now been disclosed to the media, he had already recognized himself guilty of another twenty rapes and different sexual offenses: and only from that moment, incredibly, was he been suspended from pay by the Met Police.