To suspect police are worried about vigilantes - Epsom attack

[ReadingCrimeFiction]

I live relatively close to Epsom and so this appalling assault is all over my news feeds and social media.

BBC News - Town left in shock by appalling rape outside church
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8dl5yevjg9o

The police have asked for witnesses but no descriptions have been given. Cue lots of very disturbing posts and comments from people who very clearly think these men are not white.

I can think of half a dozen scenarios where this is not being disclosed but, based on the comments, I think it all comes down to fears that local communities will take it on themselves to "apprehend" anyone who even vaguely looks like the perpetrators? And while the comments I am seeing are mostly white people being disgusting in their assumptions about brown and black people, i can imagine police would he equally concerned if, for example, the woman was Asian or Black and her attackers were white.

Is this where we are at? Where people make horrible racist assumptions and/or where police have to worry about how they will protect the broader community if they give any details of criminals?

No one is doing that.

The quote I responded to suggested that people were victim blaming. I haven't seen that.

I'm not concerned about the perpetrators. I'm concerned that people have jumped to an assumption about who the perpetrators are and have then lumped a large group of people together - based on their race/ethnicity - as a problem who need to get out of the country. That's racist.

The 'Illegal Migration Bill' passed into law in July 2023 making it a legal duty to detain and remove immigrants arriving by illegal routes in breach of immigration control and (broadly) barred them from obtaining asylum or right to stay.
In July 2024 Labour brought in regulations reversing part of it, making asylum claims possible, then brought in their own Border Security Asylum and Bill in January 2025 (passed into law in Dec 2025), to repeal other parts of the Illegal Migration Act 2023.

Kind of making my point for me!

You've assumed that the individuals who committed this attack are from a group you object to. That isn't a given.

The attack is horrific and the people who committed it need to be apprehended and justice meted out.

Yes, there are a lot of rapes by white males, but there are also some demographics who "hunt in packs". That's why our thoughts jump to them first.

We will have to see what it is all about. Rape is the most awful crime, but being rounded on by a pack and gang raped should result in the most severest of punishments for all involved, even if a bystander.

It's not always so straightforward as is the person white or brown. If the police release information to quickly in order to satisfy a baying mob and get it wrong they are then accused of a cover up. Or set hares running.

Exactly mob rule cannot dictate how an investigation should go.

I don't understand how police can appeal for further witnesses from the general public if they don't disclose the information they know so far of the perpetrators.

It's not always straightforward. Obtaining a good, detailed, reliable description of a suspect is one of the most difficult aspects of policing. Eyewitness accounts may vary and cctv footage is often of poor quality. Obviously the police won't want to release a description until they are sure that they have collected all the evidence they are likely to get on that point.

Absolute nonsense. The police are independent. Do you really think the government told the police not to release the ethnicity of suspects because there is an election next month! That is not how the world works except in the mind of paranoid idiots. What if the suspects were arrested tomorrow? Are the police going to keep that a secret too?

Completely agree. We are not entitled to details. British values to me have always included proper process. Not our systems have to answer to baying mobs.

Look at the riots in Ballymena a few months ago with similar circumstances.

So hypocritical considering NI has the highest counts of VAWAG in the UK, and there hasnt been a single riot about any other incident but they were out chanting "protect our women" over this one, purely because of race. Quite a significant number of the protestors themselves had previous charges of domestic abuses against them too.

Racists who every other day of the week DGAF about womens safety.

The data is imperfect but while certain demographics are over represented relative to their population, c.50% of gangs are white - so we cannot make assumptions. And we don't know, what we don't know. Gisele Picolet. Epstein. These are things that we would never have imagined until they came out.

I called 999 a few weeks ago about an incident outside my house. The call operator kept insisting I say what colour / ethnicity the man was, and I kept trying to be clear, but honestly in the dark and the particular colour of the street lights I couldn't actually say whether he was white / dark skinned white (e.g Spanish) or S Asian .

Also - with the general lack of ability in the public to look at any facts behind the headlines, I really worry that the S London news outlets (the 'local guardian' type) that all say "Methodist Church Rape Case" and Methodist Churches will now be subject to mob attacks. FFS.

The police have asked for witnesses but no descriptions have been given. Cue lots of very disturbing posts and comments from people who very clearly think these men are not white.

Well it's hardly surprising then, is it? Unless the victim was blind or completely unconcious you'd usually expect appeals for witnesses to be accompanied by a description of the culprits. It's completely pointless otherwise.

If the police already have a good idea of the ethnicity of the men, ask yourself why they'd not be motivated to disclose it? They risk being deluged with responses from people who all saw some men in the area, just not the right men. That's a pretty inefficient and illogical way to go about collecting information. It's bound to lead to people jumping to conclusions.

However, the angry pitchfork wielders all banging on about skin colour are using clumsy, racist rhetoric that does them no favours. It's not the skin colour itself that is concerning people here, is it? Not really. It's the problematic cultural values and attitudes in relation to women and the suspected immigration status of the people involved. Skin colour is part of the Venn diagram, but not the most salient part.

The comment I see most often bandied around in these situations is 'it will be those doctors and engineers again' or 'Aah,cultural enrichment. Isn't it wonderful?'

I think that's a much more powerful way of making your point than bringing skin colour or religion into it.

It doesn't mean that at all.

So as women we have to choose between being against domestic rape or public rape, @Divebar2021? This whataboutery is so tiring. Many of us who have an interest in sex equality are well aware that the vast majority of women and girls subjected to rape are attacked by someone within the home/known to them. That doesn't mean we can't be angry upon hearing of instances of women being attacked in the streets. It also doesn't mean that if there is a rise in public rapes, we shouldn't pay any attention to that because the majority of rapes are domestic.

We need robust, accurate reporting of proportional citizenship status and ethnicity for violent crimes. And, if it is shown that the UK's immigration policies are leading to an increase in sex crimes against UK women, we need robust deportation systems to remove offenders from the country. You do not get to claim asylum in the name of having your human rights protected and then violate the human rights of the citizens of the country you have come to (and as an aside, this is one of the reasons why people get more angry at non-British men committing crimes than they do at British men; there is an extra layer of audacity.)

Both sides should support this, as it would prove once and for all who is right about whether migrant men or British men are more responsible proportionally for sex crimes, and prove if certain ethnicities are proportionally more involved in sex crimes or not. Both sides currently claim very different narratives regarding this and get very frenzied, so sunlight would surely be helpful.

Finally, a post of sense.

I think you'd know if he'd raped you though.

The statement I read gives a time frame and a location and is an appeal for any footage you have in that timeframe rather than witnesses as such. it also. asks if anyone saw or spoke to a distressed woman in her 20s

Most people know if they were in espom at those locations between 2am and 4am and have any cctv footage or if they saw a distressed woman even if they dont have an accurate description of the men.

I watched a woman on YouTube recently who used to work in msm and is still a journalist and knows her stuff says this government will not allow the media to give descriptions of terrible crimes if the perpetrators are non white basically because of unrest and upsetting the narrative that diversity is our strength.
Remember when the guy in Liverpool hit the crowd in his car the fact he was white came out immediately.

No it didn't.

There were posts for several days about how it must have been a terrorist attack committed by someone brown.

The photos / video stills from the incident, which were taken of the suspect while driving the car, were indeed of a white person but the skin colour of his arms and hands looked darker behind the window glass.

Even without these images, all of the initial speculation was that he was not white. It was only a couple of days later that we learned his identity.

Who is this journalist?

I know a BBC Journalist who makes no such claims that we do not have a free press.

And this is plainly nonsense: non-white perpetrators are identified all the time.

And in Liverpool hundreds of people saw the driver with their own eyes as it was happening.

Reporting ethnicity is very difficult to do accurately. Lazy labels like 'Black' or 'Asian' are so vague as to be useless. The police also depend on the criminal to self-identify what ethnic grouping they belong to.