The story of the alleged gang rape in Epsom in Surrey gets curiouser and curiouser. Faced with growing anger in the town about a lack of information being given by the police to the public, the police released a statement which said that they had found no evidence for the crime ‘as it was reported’. The police also denied that they were migrants involved in this alleged attack and I believe they took this particular step because of all the rampant speculation that’s been going on.
There are a whole host of reasons why the police could be taking this line about a lack of evidence for the crime ‘as reported’. It could be that they have genuinely not examined all the CCTV available as examining CCTV footage is a labour and time intensive job. Stuff like CCTV will be required in order to give corroboration to the initial complaint and the police can’t say ‘yes this happened’ or ‘no it has not’ until that photographic evidence is found and examined. Sometimes gathering and checking CCTV evidence has challenges. Some of the CCTV cameras might not have captured the alleged attack or the footage isn’t clear enough to make an identification and in some cases the CCTV might have been overwritten due to systems being programmed to overwrite on a particular day of the week because disk space is limited (a lot of CCTV systems do this). CCTV footage might not yet been obtained as the custodian of the CCTV systems might not be available. The description given by the complainant might be hazy or confused due to either prior alcohol consumption or trauma or both or the alleged assailants might have disguised their appearance in some way. Investigating some cases, especially the stranger rapes that seem to be coming much more common today, is difficult. In these sorts of cases the police have to gather enough solid evidence to support a prosecution which can be challenging. If they don’t and the case is presented at court without such evidence then the case becomes a ‘he said, she said’ affair which could legitimately and justly result in a not guilty verdict at the Crown Court.
It could also be the case that the complainant has been less than honest with the police with regarding the claim and this is why no corroborating evidence for the attack has yet been found. Whilst said to be rare, these cases do happen. It’s silly to believe that all claims made to the police, not just about this case but about anything, are founded on a bedrock of solid truth. Not all men, women or even children for that matter tell the unvarnished truth when they make a complaint. A false complaint about anything, not just a crime such as that which has been alleged to have occurred in Epsom, could be made for a whole gamut of reasons. These reasons could range from a person voluntarily putting themselves in a situation that they later regretted, trying to hide questionable behaviour from a partner or a family, or being a person whether that be an adult or a child, who for reasons of mental illness or to gain an advantage or revenge against someone or just by being generally dishonest and self serving in character, is willing to be untrue even if the cost to others who may be innocent might be high.
One of the things that court reporting told me is that there are all sorts of people and they all sorts of dubious incentives to make them do wrong, the envious security guard who joined robbers, the man caught up in the excitement of a football fight who fought his ‘standing’ would improve in his group by doing violence that ruined both his victims life and his. These people made one bad decision with massive negative impact. I’ve yet to see enough evidence that satisfies me to say one way or another whether this is of those life ruining bad decision false claims of a crime being committed or whether there has been an actual crime. There’s so much of this case in Epsom that we do not know at this stage that it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw of a Jackson Pollock picture with no guiding image. This grey area and the uncertainty about whether what is being claimed is true is why I try whenever possible when covering cases like this where where the main story is a claim by a complainant, to use the word ‘allegedly’ when writing about them.
All the reasons above are legitimate reasons why the case of this alleged rape are not progressing as some on the outside of police circles might have hoped. There’s evidence acquisition issues, a complainant who might still be traumatised and a media spotlight on the town that would immediately make any suspect with even a small portion of functioning brain go into hiding.
But there could be more illegitimate reasons why this case has not progressed as much as people might have expected the case to progress. There’s all manner of claims being made out there ranging from this case being fake to discredit nationalists to it being some sort of government plan to draw people into conflict with the police and trying to protect the mostly unwanted imports. However my non tin foil hat real world money would be, providing that the case has merits, on the police having messed up some aspect of this case which is why thing are progressing slower than they might and they are covering their own arses about the mistake especially now that the case has become a cause celeb re. Oh dear how cynical have I become about Britain’s public services.
The problem for the police in general and especially in this case where they are taking a lot of flak is that Britain’s police are considerably less trusted than they once were. Forty of fifty years ago there was much more public trust in the police and their statements but a string of scandals in recent years where the police have not acted because of political and ideological reasons or have failed due to institutional incompetence in cases of serious crime or incidents has shattered that trust. The Rape Gang scandal, Hillsborough, Birmingham Six, the police failure to apprehend the Yorkshire Ripper in a timely manner, the police becoming PR agents for the Cult of Trans, the corruption scandals of the 1970’s and the 1990’s, the two tier policing allegations, the ‘community leaders’ being allowed to dictate operational policing, the failure to deal appropriately and robustly with the ‘Palestinian’ hate marches and much more have contributed to the current broken trust between the public and the police.
I’m not saying that the police in Epsom have done wrong, they might be having genuine problems in ascertaining exactly what has happened and piecing together the evidence they can get to make a coherent narrative. They might have buggered something up by incompetence rather than malice. However they, the police, are having to work at a time when there a febrile but genuine fear and anger among the public about what some of the recent imports to the UK have done and are doing. The police being watched by the public every step of the way in cases such as these and by a public that is considerably less deferential to the police than maybe they once were. There’s an incredible amount of pressure on the police to get this one right whether by catching the alleged miscreants or admitting that they can find no corroborating evidence and satisfying the court of public opinion that they’ve made the right decision.
Where the truth lies in this case I now really could not say. The initial allegations might be true but then again they might not. It’s only really when or if a case comes to court that evidence, whether prosecution or defence evidence, can be properly tested. Having seen a lot of people, including some I respected, go overboard on false information in previous cases I’m now wary of declaring certainly at the beginning of contentious stories like this one. I recall some very high profile people fall for so-called secret information in the Emily Jones case where a 7 year old girl was stabbed to death in a park by a nutter. This false information allegedly supplied by unnamed ‘police contacts’ with regards to the Emily Jones case in 2020, wrongly claimed that ‘a Somali Muslim’ was behind the murder of Emily. I’m rightly suspicious of uncheckable information from those who claim ‘inside knowledge’ of cases, it’s so often bullshit or attention seeking behaviour. In the Emily Jones case the murderer was not a Somali Muslim and it was not a jihad attack that the police were hiding, it was instead a murder carried out by a woman possibly of Albanian or Slovakian descent who was clearly a mental case and who killed at random. This poor child was murdered by someone who shouldn’t have been here but she was not murdered for the reasons or the by the type of individual that some claimed.
So what’s my current position on this case? My position is that I’m much more confused about it than when this story first broke. At first it looked like yet another of the myriad of cases where a British woman had been attacked by an unwanted import but now I’m really not sure. There could be a grain of truth to this case or it might be that this grain is sterile and will not sprout. We really really don’t know one way or the other. I do believe that Surrey Police have buggered up the PR with regards to this case but only time will tell where the full truth lies.
Links
The Emily Jones case showed how wrong information can spread quickly and lead people to come to the wrong conclusions.
Statement, via an X post by Surrey Police on the Epsom gang rape allegations.
Meanwhile, the Manchester airport attackers have still not been brought to book despite the whole bloody lot being on video