Are Police Covering Up Child Sex Abuse?

Franklin Coverup NY Times article scan

Jimmy Savile

The countries Inspectorate of the Constabulary found that 38 percent of inquiries into a sample of nearly 600 child sexual abuse allegations were not conducted to a good enough standard.

The news comes in the wake of warnings by officials that child sexual abuse cases are expected to top 70,000 in the country by the end of this year – nearly double the number recorded in 2012.

Dru Sharpling, who led the review said on “too many occasions,” police investigations into child abuse or neglect were poor and plagued by delay.

Late last year, the Ministerial Department of the Government of the U.K., known as the Home Office, found after an internal review, that the department “lost or destroyed” 114 files concerning allegations of child sex abuse dating from 1979 to 1999.

The Home Office is responsible for “immigration, security, and law and order.” As such, it is responsible for the police, U.K. Visas and Immigration, and the Security Service (MI5).

Ministers asked Peter Wanless, head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, to examine how the Home Office dealt with files alleging abuse from 1979-99. Wanless’ report said it was impossible to say whether files were removed to cover up abuse – but that nothing was found to support such a claim.

British Conservative politician, and current U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May, however asserted that there “might have been a cover-up.”

Wanless and other investigators had tried to track down the 114 files, but found just one. Another was found shredded by the Ministry of Justice.

“It is… not possible to say whether files were ever removed or destroyed to cover up or hide allegations of organized or systematic child abuse by particular individuals because of the systems then in place. We cannot say that [any] file was removed or destroyed for that reason,” the Wanless report concluded.

The report also revealed a list of names which officials were asked to search under when looking for the missing files – suggesting possible links to a dossier compiled by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens containing details of establishment abuses. Dickens says he gave the dossier to then-Home Secretary Leon Brittan in 1983.

He says it included known pedophiles such as Cyril Smith and members of the Pedophile Information Exchange, which campaigned openly to legalize sex with children.

It also featured senior political figures such as former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, Labour peer Lord Janner, and two Tory grandees, Sir Peter Morrison and Sir Peter Hayman, who are both now dead.

Police have questioned Lord Brittan and searched Lord Janner’s home, but neither were charged.

In a statement to MP’s, Mrs. May said of the findings: “It doesn’t prove or disprove the Home Office acted appropriately in the 1980s,” but added that “there might have been a cover-up.”

In March, May set up an major inquiry into child sex abuse following revelations about crimes committed by the deceased DJ Jimmy Savile, who was found to have deep connections to the British Royal family – as well as disclosures regarding abuse in Derby, Oxford and other alleged pedophile rings across the country.

“The inquiry won’t probe individuals, but where there is evidence a person has abused their position – no matter how high or low that position – it will be passed to the police to investigate,” May said. “If there has been a cover-up, we will uncover it. And if perpetrators of child sex abuse are found, they will be brought to justice.”

The UK Government has denied any dealing with the dossier and David Cameron has called the allegations a “conspiracy theory.”

United States

IG Ed Quatrevaux describes NOPD child-sex-abuse probe in Nov. 2014

In recent years, probes into police departments in the U.S. have yielded similar results.

In one of the most glaring, a November 2014 report looking into the New Orleans Police Department found officers charged with investigating sex crimes failed to pursue 86 percent of reported cases.

Prepared by the city’s inspector general, Edouard R. Quatrevaux, the report found that 840 of 1,290 reported sex crime cases where shelved by New Orleans police detectives from 2011 to 2013.

The report also found that of the 450 cases that were investigated, no documentation outside of an initial report was found for 271 of them. The report describes how victims’ charges of sexual assault were ignored, referrals from medical personnel were dismissed, and evidence was not processed.

In some cases, the detective would mark down in a report that evidence had been sent to the state laboratory, though no records could be found that the laboratory received anything.

In one case, a two-year-old was brought to the emergency room on suspicion of having been the victim of a sexual assault and was found to have a sexually transmitted disease. Investigators did no follow-up and closed the case.

In another, a nurse collected DNA evidence from a victim in a rape kit, but the detective apparently never submitted the kit for testing. In a log book, the detective explained that the kit was never submitted “because the sex was consensual.” That same detective, the report said, told at least three different people that he “did not believe that simple rape should be a crime.”

The findings are not new to the New Orleans police force. In 2010 and 2011, the Department of Justice found that the department routinely discouraged sexual assault victims from pursuing prosecution and that reclassifying rapes as miscellaneous charges was so common that it had the effect of “shutting down investigations for a significant proportion of possible sex crimes.”

Inspector General Quatrevaux said at the time that the report arose from a random audit of police cases that his office conducted earlier that year, which found that rape was routinely classified as another, lesser crime by the department and that detectives had even backdated reports to make it appear that they had performed necessary work.

The report primarily focused on five detectives within the special victims section; there are typically 16 detectives in the section, with eight or nine dedicated to investigating sex crimes. Record-keeping was so meager in a large majority of their cases that “no evaluation of their police work was possible.”

Out of 119 cases that were assigned to one of the detectives, only 17 were found to have any records beyond an initial report. Another detective was assigned 40 cases and produced supplementary reports in only six of them.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael S. Harrison said the unidentified detectives in the report were transferred from the special victims section, as were some of their supervisors.

The Police Department’s Public Integrity Bureau, which worked with the inspector general’s office in preparing the report, is still investigating the detectives, who could potentially face criminal charges. The department is also conducting a review of all the cases the detectives handled in the special victims section.

“As the chief of police, I am deeply disturbed by the allegations in this report,” Superintendent Harrison said at the time. Since, Harrison says he has replaced “every level” of leadership over the Special Victims Section, and has advocated for further reforms.

Scotland

New Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police Dept

Government watchdogs in Scotland, launched in March, an investigation into claims that Scotland Yard covered up child sex abuse crimes because of the involvement of MPs and police officers.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is still investigating at least 16 separate allegations of alleged corruption by MPs and Metropolitan Police relating to child sex offenses from the 1970s to the 2000s claiming officers suppressed evidence, hindered or halted investigations and covered up offenses to protect their colleagues.

“These allegations are of historic, high level corruption of the most serious nature,” deputy chair of the IPCC, Sarah Green said at the time. “Allegations of this nature are of grave concern and I would like to reassure people of our absolute commitment to ensuring that the investigations are thorough and robust.”

Among the allegations include a claim that government documents found at a child sex offender’s address tied a number of “highly prominent individuals” including senior police officers to a pedophile ring before no further action was taken and the investigation was dropped.

Another allegation claimed officers omitted a senior politician’s name from an abuse victim’s police report.

Other claims implicated a police coverup of child sex abuse allegations involving a former senior Met Police officer and “further members of the establishment including judges.”

The IPCC said also, that an investigation into young men being targeted in Dolphin Square, an apartment complex popular with MPs, was also allegedly abandoned because officers were “too near [to] prominent people.”

Other allegations claim surveillance operations of a child sex abuse ring that was shut down because “high profile people” were involved, and that intelligence gathering on a politician suspected of being involved in pedophile activities in the 1970s was ended by a senior MPS officer.

In still other claims, it was even alleged that police officers sexually abused a boy and carried out gang-stalking-type surveillance on him, and that an investigation into a pedophile ring that resulted in multiple convictions, did not take action against “more prominent individuals.”

“The [Metropolitan Police Department] recognize[s] the severity of the allegations, and the importance of understanding whether or not our officers had in the past acted inappropriately, a Met Police spokesperson said at the time.

The spokesperson added, “ongoing investigations and recent convictions by officers from the Sexual Offences, Exploitation and Child Abuse Command have shown that the MPS is fully committed to investigating non-recent allegations of [child] sexual abuse.”

No recent news of the investigation has been released.

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