Metropolitan Police officer David Carrick is among the country’s worst ever sex offenders
(Picture: PA Media)The mother of the rapist Metropolitan police officer David Carrick said she thinks he exaggerated his difficult childhood to try “to get his sentence reduced”.
The 48-year-old was given 36 life sentences at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday after pleading guilty to 85 serious offences including 48 rapes against 12 women.
The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, said the disgraced firearms officer had spoken to a probation officer about traumatic experiences in his childhood.
But his mother Jean, who is estranged from her son, said he was “never neglected”.
The 67-year-old told the Guardian: “I reckon it was to try to get his sentence reduced. I might be wrong, I don’t know.”
Sentencing Carrick, Cheema-Grubb said: “You described childhood trauma to the probation officer which must have affected your personality. You grew up with parents who drank to excess and neglected you.
“When they separated, you became the target of abuse by a stepfather in your teens. Like any child, you should have been nurtured and taught moral strength and you were not.”
But his mother said it was “not true”.
She said: “The quote about me and his dad drinking is not true. He was never neglected, and his stepdad was only there for a few years with him and, as far as I know, they got on all right.
“He did taekwondo and we went to all the things with him and he got up to a black belt. We went to all the competitions with him, everything. As far as I know he had quite a good life.”
Carrick’s sentencing is the latest in a line of scandals to have rocked the Met including the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer and officers taking sharing photographs of the bodies of murder victims.
Speaking earlier this week, The HM Inspector of Constabulary Matt Parr said “finally the penny has dropped” for police leaders that standards need to be raised following the Carrick case.
Mr Parr said that the series of revelations surrounding the Metropolitan Police shows the force is “finally getting their act together and getting the wrong ones out”.
He told LBC: “In the past I’ve described the Met as being defensive, as being complacent. I don’t see that now under the new leadership, not just of Mark Rowley but of others in the top team.
“I think that policing as a whole realises that this can’t go on any longer.
“Finally the penny has dropped and police leaders have realised that they have got to take much more interest in who gets in and who stays in, and that standards across the board have got to be raised.”
