One of the UK’s biggest police forces has historically failed children and was “borderline incompetent” in the way it previously dealt with organised grooming gangs, its current chief constable has said.
Stephen Watson, the head of Greater Manchester police, last week apologised in person to three women who were victims of gangs in Rochdale more than 10 years ago. It came with “substantial” damages and after a long, attritional campaign to get the force to admit failures.
On Tuesday Watson, speaking to BBC Radio Manchester, 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, I don’t think people did it because they were incompetent. But I think organisationally we were borderline incompetent in the sense that we just didn’t do things then that we absolutely do now.”
The Rochdale case prompted a national debate. Concerns about the grooming and sex trafficking of predominately white working-class girls by predominately Asian men began to be raised in the early 2000s but it was not until 2012 that anyone was brought to justice.
Two of the three women who last week received apologies were repeatedly treated as criminals, rather than being seen as victims in need of protection. One still has a criminal conviction that she will have to disclose when applying for certain jobs.
Watson said the force “parked” an element of professional curiosity.
He said when he was a young police officer there were things done then that would not be done now. If a missing child was found with an adult, the focus was on recovering the child, whereas now the adult would, “as night follows day”, be locked up.
He said child sexual exploitation sometimes resulted in “very unfortunate behaviours” from victims: “It messes up young people.”
In the past “people didn’t see past the behaviour, as opposed to questioning: ‘Why on earth is this youngster finding themselves in this position, in this situation?’ And that’s what I mean by a professional curiosity,” he said.
Watson was appointed in 2021 to lead a force that was widely seen as having lost its way. It was placed in special measures in 2020 after inspectors expressed “serious cause for concern” when the force failed to record a fifth of all reported crimes.
The apology only came after what Kate Ellis, a solicitor with the Centre for Women’s Justice, described as a protracted battle. “It really felt for a long time that it was a war of attrition,” she said.
Proceedings on behalf of the Rochdale women against the Crown Prosecution Service are ongoing.
