The percentage of successful rape convictions as a proportion of complaints remains, campaigners say, in single figures
Delroy Grant, the so-called night stalker, was convicted yesterday of 29 offences, including a series of rapes of elderly women. The first was carried out in 1991. Eight years later, there was a chance to link him to what was already a pattern of burglary, violence and sex attacks. Ten years after that, in 2009, he was finally arrested. By then he had committed another 146 offences, including 23 further sexual assaults. The Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into the case found that just three Metropolitan police officers should face misconduct charges.
This is the third such case in two years – and that is just in London. In March 2009, the taxi driver John Worboys was convicted of 19 charges of drugging and assaulting 12 women. Worboy's attacks spanned a five-year period and probably involved at least 19 other women. This time, the IPCC report led to the disciplining of five officers, and an overhaul of the way the Met investigates sex crimes. Weeks later, another serial sex attacker, a south London chef called Kirk Reid, was found guilty of raping and assaulting 71 women over seven years. Again, he might have been caught earlier. This time, the IPCC report led to five more officers facing disciplinary proceedings.
London might have the mournful title of UK rape capital, but the pattern is familiar across the country. Despite a concerted effort by the last government, the percentage of successful rape convictions as a proportion of complaints remains, campaigners say, in single figures. Progress like the network of sexual assault referral centres where police and medical staff are trained to help the vulnerable women who are most often (but by no means the only) victims have a proven record of success, and the number of cases pursued to prosecution – where the conviction figures are nearly 60% – are rising. Yet the Delroy Grant case is a tough reminder of how much is still to be done. The IPCC's light-touch approach to discipline is not helping.
Nor is the government. The home secretary should be cheered for taking up the recommendations of her predecessor's Stern report into rape complaints, but it seems reckless that, having been stung by the row over anonymity for those on rape charges, Theresa May then abandoned an inquiry into the bungled investigations. The police argue that better systems and smarter technology would prevent a repetition of the mistakes. They point to the rise in the reporting of sex offences. Yet they admit that there is one last victim of Delroy Grant's two decades of violence, and the errors that left him free to terrorise a community, and that is public confidence in their ability to hunt down such people in the future.