Ex-British policeman sentenced to 30 years in prison for 48 rapes

UPDATE DAY

The case has deepened the crisis of confidence that Scotland Yard is going through: an ex-London police officer, David Carrick, was sentenced in London on Tuesday to life in prison for dozens of rapes and sexual assaults on twelve women. 

“You have taken monstrous advantage of women,” Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said before announcing the sentence. “You behaved like you were untouchable,” she continued. “You joined the Metropolitan Police in 2001, which put you in a unique position with exceptional powers of coercion and control.”

Considered one of the worst sexual predators in recent UK history, David Carrick, 48, was sentenced to life in prison with a 30-year security period. In the box, he kept his head lowered and his eyes closed throughout the reading of the judgment.

He was prosecuted for at least 85 offenses, including 48 rapes, facts which occurred between 2003 and 2020. For part of this period, he was part of the capital's elite police unit responsible for protecting Parliament and diplomatic representations.

The police missed nine opportunities to arrest this serial rapist who was able to rage for 17 years. He was finally arrested in October 2021 for a first rape case, then other victims came forward.

Having pleaded guilty, he did not have a trial as such, but two days hearing Monday and Tuesday to determine his sentence at Southwark Crown Court in London.

On Monday, the prosecutor delivered a harrowing account of the “systematic” attacks committed by David Carrick by taking up the account of his victims , vulnerable, whom he “humiliated”.

He used his “charm” to “seduce and deceive” his victims, and his status to dissuade his victims from denouncing his actions, explained the prosecutor Tom Little.

To a woman met in a bar in 2003 he introduced himself as “the safest person she could be with,” according to the prosecutor, before placing his gun to her head and repeatedly raping her.

Yet another recounted being beaten with a whip, locked in a cupboard and whistled like a dog, with Carrick treating her as his thing, which “belonged to him and had to obey him”.

Their depositions tell how they felt “trapped” and the fact that they “no longer trust the police”.

Shockwave

The revelation of these rapes and assaults created a new shock wave in the United Kingdom, less than two years after the case of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old Londoner kidnapped, raped and killed by a police officer in the capital, since sentenced to life imprisonment.

London police renewed their apology for the Carrick case on Sunday. “He shouldn't have been a police officer,” Deputy Commissioner Barbara Gray said, stressing Scotland Yard's determination to hunt “those who corrupt our integrity”.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman urged police forces to clean up their ranks to root out “corrupt officers”.

Police in London said 1,633 cases of alleged sexual assault or domestic violence involving more than 1,000 officers and constables over the past ten years would be reviewed to ensure the proper decisions were made.

After the Sarah Everard scandal in March 2021, police was accused of having ignored alarming signals about the behavior of the kidnapper, rapist and murderer Wayne Couzens.

The independent investigation opened after this case was extended to the Carrick case.