‘Human errors’ led to grooming gang cases being dropped, review finds

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, Shakespeare's Othello, the story about a black man in a white man's world, is arguably the most powerful play about racism ever written. It's now been reprised for London's West End, but what did our theatre critic make of the production?

0:38Oh, beware my lord of jealousy.

0:56But first. Following on from The Standard's exclusive investigation into grooming gangs in the capital, thousands of cases of rape and sexual assault are being reviewed as part of the National Crime Agency's Operation Beaconport. It's set to be the most comprehensive investigation of its type in UK history. Almost 1 ,300 files from 23 police forces have been referred so far to the Operation Beaconport review, led by the National Crime Agency. Deputy Director Nigel Leary said initial examinations suggest there were mistakes in some of the investigations. The early findings show failures such as ignored evidence, poor victim interviews and suspects not being pursued, whilst human error led to some grooming gang police investigations being dropped.

1:49On the 22nd of October, we covered how police failure, institutional cover-up and establishment silence led to the repeated story of vulnerable youngsters being let down. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud said, This government initiated this national policing operation to track down the evil child rapists that perpetuated these crimes and put them behind bars where they belong. There will be no hiding place for those who abused the most vulnerable in our society. Joining us now is The Standard's Chief Political Correspondent, Rachel Burford. Rachel, can you remind us of your original investigation?

2:29The Standard did an investigation into grooming gangs and how prevalent they were in London. I think a lot of the reporting around grooming gangs has been focused on the North and the Midlands after there was some very sort of high profile trials there and a lot of victims from those areas came forward. And the capital has kind of escaped scrutiny. The mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the police until recently have always talked about grooming gangs in London as mainly sort of focused on county lines, drug dealing. And that is a significant thing in the capital. And there are children being groomed to deliver and sell drugs.

3:04The sort of sexual exploitation, I feel, of young girls and boys in London has been sort of overlooked by authorities. And we found case studies done and reports done by councils in the capital about young girls who it seemed had been groomed. Many of them were in care from vulnerable backgrounds. And they had been groomed by multiple men placed in care homes all over the country and some really horrible things had happened to them. So we sort of uncovered those reports and put it into our investigation. The Met announced that It was reviewing 9 ,000 cases of child exploitation going back 15 years to see if mistakes were made.

3:43So tell me a bit more about Operation Beacon Port and what it's trying to achieve. The National Crime Agency are leading something called Operation Beacon Port, which is designed to rectify police failures to tackle grooming gangs all over the country. It's been passed almost 1 ,300 files from 23 police forces. They have been referred to the operation so far. 236 of those cases are being examined as a priority because they involve allegations of rape. The NCA Deputy Director Nigel Leary said initial examination suggests there were mistakes in some of these investigations. He said initial reviews have identified that in some cases where there has been a decision to take no further action, there were available lines of inquiry that could have been pursued.

4:26He said that we've seen in those cases what appears to be potentially human error. I think there's probably a lot more to come out about this and about what those errors were. What we saw in our investigation was that sometimes police treated teenagers as if they were sort of bringing the situations that they found themselves in on themselves. What is clear is that there are a huge number of cases coming in from police forces all over the country. The 9 ,000 child exploitation cases that the Met is re-examining, some of those are expected to be passed to Operation Beacon Paul for review as well.

5:00It's going to take a lot of time and it may be many, many years before these cases actually result in court action. OK, so do we know what the early findings are? The only sort of early findings that we know at the moment are that there was mistakes made by police forces when they said that no further action would be taken in some of these cases. Nigel Leary said that we've seen in some cases that those investigations haven't followed what we would categorise as proper investigative practice. And that would have contributed to police forces deciding no further action should be taken. So I think it's going to be quite clear that in some of these cases, police forces were at fault and they decided not to take victims' cases forward for prosecution or pass to the Crown Prosecution Service.

5:46And that was a mistake. There are now offenders out there who may still be offending, who may be dangerous. That is because mistakes were made in previous investigations. And this really seems to add weight to the standards investigation and what you discovered. Yeah, exactly. Some of the cases that we uncovered, there were very young girls that had been raped, girls of 11 that were found with sexually transmitted disease and found to be raped. And some of those cases had been taken to court, but had not resulted in prosecution. And the reasons why were really unclear. This big National Crime Agency investigation is going to hopefully answer some of those questions about why these victims were let down.

6:28How will victims or survivors be treated in this investigation? The National Crime Agency said officials would be recording the ethnicity of suspects and victims as part of the review because they found a lot of gaps in the existing data and they're trying to fill those out. And they also said that investigators have pledged to be honest and transparent with victims to avoid them getting unrealistic expectations in some cases. I think Nigel Leary said not all of the cases that are reviewed by the NCA, even where they're reinvestigated, and even when the victim or survivor says, I want that to be reinvestigated, will produce a criminal outcome.

7:02And that'll be for a variety of reasons. Justice means different things for different victims and survivors, and no one victim or survivor is the same. Some of these survivors just being believed, perhaps for the first time by someone in authority and being listened to, might hopefully be enough. If survivors don't want a case to go to a criminal trial for whatever reason, that will also be taken into account as well. They were quite keen to get across that they will be speaking to survivors and victims and they will be listening to them and what they want will be driving some of these decisions.

7:34But also at the same time, they want to sort of temper expectations that not all of these cases may result in a criminal conviction for a variety of reasons. Some of these cases date back sort of 15 years. Evidence may have disappeared. Some of these perpetrators may not be in the country anymore and things like that. They're obviously going through hundreds and hundreds of cases and every single one will be different. Finally, how widespread is this crime and what needs to happen to stop it occurring in the first place? We've seen other cases of child exploitation in things like the Catholic Church, the Lambeth Care Home scandal in which hundreds of children in the care system were abused in children's homes in South London.

8:18This is not a new crime. This is something that's been going on for a very long time. What the National Crime Agency are trying to do now and police forces across the country trying to identify is where mistakes have been made in recent history and how police practices have changed so that if a young child was abused sort of a decade ago, how that would be investigated differently now. I think there is so much more attention on this now and people have realised what a sort of devastating impact this has. There has been changes to the way police investigate these sort of crimes already. This big investigation is so that if it happens again, if it happens in Manchester, police practices are followed as if it happens in London.

8:59Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, can the deployment of a prestige cast in a classic bring new audiences to Shakespeare's work? We'll see you back here in just a moment.

9:16Welcome back. David Harewood was the first black actor to play Othello at the National Theatre in London almost 30 years ago and has now returned to the role in a new, highly anticipated version of the play at the capital's Theatre Royal Haymarket after a glossy career spent mostly on screen. Shakespeare wrote Othello in 1604 about what happens when race relations in 16th century Venice don't go terribly well. But will a modern day audience be captivated by Iago's festering hatred, Othello's disfiguring jealousy and Desdemona's growing despair? Joining us now is The Standard's chief theatre critic and host of the London Theatre Review podcast, Nick Curtis.

10:01Nick, Othello is probably one of Shakespeare's better known plays. Can you remind us of the story and what themes it explores? Yeah, it's basically a tragedy about a black general in Venice who is much admired and beloved by the ruling class until he marries the white daughter of a local nobleman. All the sort of innate racism in the society comes to the fore. His flag bearer, Algo, who's been passed over for promotion as his lieutenant, decides to make it his mission to destroy Othello by making him jealous of Dizimoda believing that she's unfaithful. Now, you gave this a middling review of three stars.

10:37Do you think an opportunity was missed to provide some modern-day context or comparison or just bring it up to date a little? We don't lack for Othello. There's been quite a lot of revivals of it recently. There was one in the National Theatre with Giles Torreira not that long ago, one at Shakespeare's Globe. And the problem with this one is it's very star-heavy. So it's got David Harewood as Othello. It's the second time he's played it. He was the first black actor, amazingly, to play Othello at the National Theatre in 1997. He's now come back to it in his late 50s, when he's probably closer to the age that Othello should be.

11:09We've got Toby Jones, you know, the incredible sort of best-to-every-man actor, character actor we have at the moment, playing Iago. And we've got Caitlin Fitzgerald playing Desdemona, Othello's wife. It's got an impeccable cast. It just sort of feels lacking in pace. It's lacking in energy and propulsion. They all speak the verse very well. Emotionally, they're all there. It sort of feels like this production could have taken place at any time in the last 50 years. I've heard it described as a show which will appeal to Shakespeare's purists. Would you agree? I mean, I guess in terms of the speaking of the verse, it's very straightforward.

11:39It's quite a traditional, old-fashioned staging. As I say, the sets look like they could have happened any time from the 1950s to the present day. There's lots of spotlights for the soliloquies and lots of sort of slow motion acting in the background, which feels quite old-fashioned as well. There's nothing particularly radical about it compared to, say, the one at Shakespeare's Globe had two actors playing Othello, one as the sort of conscious mind and one as the sort of jealous id, who is driven mad. Probably does work for purists. I'm not sure how many purists there are around there anymore, though.

12:07And what was it like to see David Harewood in this role again after first playing Othello nearly 30 years ago? I love David Harewood as an actor, and I like him very much as a person. I've met him a couple of times. He's really sort of straight down the line, very normal, incredibly charming. a lecturer of tremendous charisma and detail and depth. He brings all that, plus now a few more years on the clock, a great many other roles that he's played in between, both on stage and on screen. I also think, I mean, he's taught very movingly in a book he wrote and in documentaries about crisis points in his own mental health, and also about the way colonial history impacted his life.

12:44His ancestors were enslaved by the Isles of Harewood. So that sort of, in some ways, I think, informs this character who is deranged partly by the machinations of his servant, but partly also by the fact that he's constantly combating this level of innate racism in the society. We can't forget about Iago either, can we? Othello is, of course, about Othello, as the title suggests, but part of it is watching the conniving of this utterly sort of evil man. I read an interview to Toby Jones before the play opened where he was sort of saying half the people who talk to him sort of say, oh, you only ever play heroic characters like Mr.

13:17Bates in the post office drama, or you only play villainous characters like you did in one of the Marvel movies. And the thing is, he plays both. I mean, he is an astonishingly versatile and hardworking character actor. I mean, there are times when it seems like he's in everything. But he makes a tremendous job of Iago, utterly unsympathetic, horrible to his wife, horrible to his general. It's just a deeply nasty piece of work. And the interesting thing about Jones in this is he sort of sends Iago making it up as he goes along and having to act on the spur of the moment when he's almost caught out or when opportunity presents itself.

13:49Caitlin Fitzgerald is very good as Desdemona as well, which can be a very wet role. Caitlin Fitzgerald is, A, almost as tall as David Harewood, so she's a very imposing figure. And she's not a kid as well. Harewood is 59, she's 42. So there's that less of a sense of her being a waif or a damsel in distress in this. She gives almost as good as she gets, although it does not end, spoiler alert, very well for her. So Shakespeare wrote nearly 40 plays. How does Othello compare to the rest? Othello is one of the greats. I think King Lear is incredible as well. I like the propulsiveness of Macbeth. It's very hard to pick a favourite.

14:22Those would certainly be in my top ten. And one reviewer said it's heartening to see Shakespeare back in the West End. Do you agree? I would agree with that. And I also, some people get very snippy about star casting. There was a news report this week about the increasing dominance of that in the West End. I don't have a problem with it. And I'm actually delighted when stars come back to the theatre in service of Shakespeare or in service of new plays or whatever they choose to do really I think that is entirely admirable. Definitely it's good that somebody with the gravitas and the stage chops of Harewood will come back and do Othello doing it for the second time I think it's terrific that he probably feels he can mine new things from it.

14:58Finally there's much more of a crossover between stage and screen actors nowadays isn't there? When there used to be a divide that if you were a great classical actor you didn't sort of sully yourself by appearing on screen and I think everyone's realised that that's absolute nonsense now. I think as well that the theatre's become a lot more flexible, that actors don't have to be locked into incredibly long runs. This is something they're doing at the Haymarket, where this play is on, which is a huge, historic, venerable theatre. And they've sort of reinvented it as a place where famous people can come and do classics.

15:27So they've had Tamsin Gregg in The Deep Blue Sea, Lucian Masmati in Ben Whishaw in Waiter for Godot. It has sort of varying results. The problem with that, I suppose, is that it does become quite old-fashioned. You have this classic play, you have this famous cast, and it feels slightly sort of fusty and 1950s-ish. That was kind of the feeling I got off this one, although, again, I would like to stress absolutely no criticism of the actors who I think do a tremendous job.

15:54And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. we'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm we'll see you then