A whistleblower has claimed that an inquiry into the Rotherham child rape grooming gang scandal intentionally avoided implicating senior police officers in a report on local failures to protect young girls in the English town.
The left-wing Labour government of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has claimed that previous local investigations into Muslim grooming gangs have been sufficient and that a fresh national inquiry into the widespread child abuse and the politically correct failures to safeguard primarily young white girls is not needed.
However, a whistleblower has claimed that one of the top reports was hindered by an institutional desire to obfuscate the potential role of police leadership.
In an interview with the Times of London, an unnamed whistleblower involved in Operation Linden by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) said that the investigation was underfunded, unnecessarily limited to Rotherham, and was told where not to look too closely, and thus “barely scratched the surface” of the scale of the scandal.
“We were actively told not to pursue senior officers… It was just largely incompetent. There was just no passion or desire within the IOPC to understand what went wrong in Rotherham and find out why those girls were let down,” the whistleblower said.
“We were told to focus on junior officers who handled the complaints from individual victims. But this was happening across the country, where lower-ranked officers were ignoring CSE [child sexual exploitation],” the whistleblower continued.
“I thought it was important to know why that was. Whether this culture was sanctioned at higher up levels. But I was told ‘you cannot pursue senior officers, suggesting they should have known what was going on’.”
The whistleblower said that in light of “all the failures in Rotherham, I don’t think the public would really buy that” no senior officers plaid a role. The whistleblower also accused the IOPC of overlooking incidents of police failing to investigate or even question “older Asian men” found with young and drunk girls.
“There were so many allegations of ‘no-criming’ [failure to file a crime report] and different approaches to avoiding investigating CSE — we just didn’t get to the bottom of it,” the whistleblower said.
“Meanwhile we were told to focus on Rotherham alone, but it was very clear not only that there were force-wide systemic problems but problems in other parts of the country. I don’t think the failings have been truly properly investigated.”
Despite findings from the Jay report that at least 1,400 young girls were systematically sexually abused in Rotherham, no police officers were meaningfully punished or fired following the completion of the investigation from the Independent Office for Police Conduct in 2022. At most, some officers were given written warnings or “management advice”.
Contrary to longstanding denials of politically correct failures from police and local officials, the IOPC had previously found that police in Rotherham had been aware that child rape grooming “had been going on for 30 years and the police could do nothing because of racial tensions,” given that most of the victims were young white girls while most of the perpetrators were of South Asian heritage, a British euphemism typically referring to Pakistanis, or others from the subcontinent such as Bangladeshis and Indians.
The watchdog cited one unnamed Rotherham Police chief inspector as saying: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out as Rotherham would erupt.”
Former police detective turned grooming gang whistleblower Maggie Oliver claimed at the time that the decision by the IOPC not to fire or punish officers involved in the failures demonstrated the “corrupt” nature of such reports.
The latest revelations come amid increasing pressure on the left-wing Labour government of Prime Minister Starmer to launch a national inquiry. Starmer, who has dismissed demands for a national investigation as coming from the “far-right“, ordered members of his party to reject a motion in the House of Commons to open an inquiry.
Contrary to Starmer’s claims that the demand for a full investigation as being a product of the “far-right”, a YouGov survey last week found that 76 per cent of the public back an inquiry. Additionally, a poll from More in Common found that 41 per cent believe that the grooming gang scandal was intentionally covered up.
Responding to the claims from the whistleblower, a spokesman from the IOPC said: “Every one of the 91 investigations within Operation Linden was carried out thoroughly and all lines of enquiry explored by up to 50 IOPC staff. Throughout the seven-year investigation, the second largest in our history, our priority was the welfare of the survivors, who showed incredible bravery in coming forward.
“We identified systemic issues including failures in leadership, lack of professional curiosity, cultural issues and gaps in skills and training. Where individual failings were identified, they were addressed.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: Follow @KurtZindulka or e-mail to: kzindulka@breitbart.com
Read the full article here
