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?

Why the need to set it apart out of interest? I’ve done zero research on this but just hear it being discussed

This is completely untrue. The police record the ethnicity and these statistics are fed into the Home Office. The reports are publicly available. I work in policing, but honestly it's not beyond the wit of woman to actually do a modicum of research before posting false claims on an online forum. It was the same with all those who assumed that a black man who ran amok on the train between Peterborough and Huntingdon must have been an asylum seeker because he was black. Nope, British, born here. While the hero of the day was a muslim immigrant.

Edit my quote function isn't working. This was in response to the poster who claims that perpetrator ethnicity isn't recorded by the Home Office.

Telepathy fail.

If people have spare time can they go into whether rape survivors have credibility in UK courts and what we can do to improve judges' and juries' understanding of the effects of trauma?

My work break is over.

Do you think the police have no training at at? No video enhancement, no one looking at how the perpetrators moved etc.
Even a vague description could include for example 'a group of five masked men two at least of whom were black and one at least of whom was white and wore glasses. They are believed to be between the ages of 15- 25. They left the scene via.....Rd'

Does no one remember the aftermath of the train stabbing? The perpetrator was identified in the media as black so the usual anti immigration rhetoric started, but he turned out to be a British citizen.

If the police released a description of, for example, 4 black males, then the same will happen. People banging on about immigrants, religion, deport them all, when it may end up being British national people.

And as for the "white men don't gang rape" thing, that's absolute tosh. There have been cases of young girls being gang raped by packs of white men. One case stuck in my head as the lads attacked the girl several times in different locations, including outside someone's front door. They also were contacting other men to come and join in.

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/ethnicity-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2024/statistics-on-ethnicity-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2024-html

Are you actually going to tell me what type of crime these white youths are committing in broad daylight?

You are very naive if you don't know why they have not released the details.

Your post made me go and do some research on the gentleman you mention and the first hit on Google was certainly interesting.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20d2xgwz7vo

You are still massively deflecting here and everyone can see it.

I have no idea why you think this is effective.

There is a really good argument against making assumptions about who the perpetrators are. It is that no matter what the statistics say - they could say that 90% of stranger sexual assaults are Welsh men - you cannot extrapolate that to a single actual incident.

That is logically and mathematically true and inarguable and when people lose sight of that it can easily result in the wrong people being convicted, or innocent people being hurt, or even the real perpetrators getting off the hook.

It's this deflecting shit which people see a mile away, and which makes them distrust motives, that means this inarguable message is lost. The focus becomes the deflection, not the solid methods of the investigation process.

It's such a massive own goal by those who dismiss people's observations about cultural attitudes to women and sexual assault.

There was also this case of three white men gang raping a woman here. They were sentenced last year.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cded919pn2zo?app-referrer=deep-link

Also:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2024/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly-england-and-wales-year-ending-december-2024

Well I don't think anybody is denying what you say here but, respectfully, this is not what is being discussed.

I think @Whatafustercluck was referring to Samir Zitouni, the member of train staff who was injured trying to protect passengers?

This is awful. Perhaps more care should be taken on vetting all men arriving.

I think people assume policing is like on TV and that's what causes a lot of this demand for information immediately.

There's always crystal clear CCTV of the perpetrators which is unbroken in its coverage across miles of a city, and everyone is identified, arrested, and charged within a neat half an hour window so we can all go and put the kettle on.

It's either that or the insta-gratification of social media is rotting everyone's brains.

I suspect very few people have any semblance of an idea how fucking hard actual policing work is.

I have reported to @MNHQ that posters on this thread seem to want to derail a discussion about an individual woman's trauma into a culture war. This is not troll hunting but realism that Mumsnet is a major platform and will attract what major platforms attract.

I am sorry that my post about violent gangs/groups of local, white, mixed-sex young people in my area was deleted after being reported. It was an attempt to counter the insinuations and fearmongering here about 'Other' men. And mentioned disenfranchisment caused by vast social inequalities and the selfish aims of the super-rich.

They don't care about the rape victim, just the colour of the attackers skin.

You have also said @EvangelicalAboutButteredToastis paid, which is not the case. Let women speak on this.

@EvangelicalAboutButteredToast Indeed. When the police get it wrong, there are very public repercussions (rightly so), so better that, when they're able to, they take the time to issue correct information. The train stabbing was slightly different I suppose in that they were responding to a live incident, and the man was likely falsely detained in the heat of the moment because all they had as a description was 'black male' and they needed to act quickly to prevent further injury to anyone. See also: Menezes in the wake of the London bombings.

The collecting of data is another point of controversy, not helped by the obfuscation of sex and gender on records and different police forces adopting different policies when it comes to self-identified gender/biological sex. We know the statistics of crime and sex/gender are totally inaccurate now. If we used that data to put funding towards the uptick of women commiting sexual attacks and violence it would be money poorly spent.

Equally we don’t believe the data being collected when it comes to race/religion. If I hear that crime has gone down one more time I think my head might explode. I don’t believe it. I think potentially an aspect of crime might have gone down, for instance murder, but I fully believe that knife crime, shoplifting, sexual violence, theft and robbery have gone up.

No one will talk about that though. All the politicians ever do is discuss the stats that prove the positive. It’s gas-lighting again. When they are called out they refuse to answer the question and stutter and stammer and deflect. This also feeds in to a distrust of authority, they lie. We know they lie, we can see they lie, we can even prove they lie and yet they wriggle and squirm and nothing really happens.

The OP was about people's perceptions and the concerns of the police about vigilante violence.

We all read it ourselves.

Not at all, but another source for purposes of comparison/corroboration would be useful.

It seems to me that stats relating to characteristics of people arrested and/or convicted of a crime may be quite different from those relating to perpetrators of that class of crime generally, eg if a particular group is more likely to be easily identified and/or convicted.

It's a shame that there's no equivalent of the British Crime Survey for sexual offences, which could include the perceived ethnicity of perpetrators where it is known.

It is. Someone specifically asked 'how can they not have a description' alongside others asking 'why have they not released a description they have'.

I think its fair that some people have a lack of trust that the police have a description and have chosen not to release it yet due to risk of riots and wanting to either avoid them or get support in place to deal with them.

But it is also true that there are reasons why a victim cant describe them well and people are explaining the why of that aspect.

If you believe that all victims can describe perpatrators clearly you are left with only the option that the police are lying in the statement, not two options.

Because there’s not a great deal we can do about our home-grown rapists, but we can stop importing them from other countries. That’s why people get more angry when the perpetrators are non UK nationals.