Public must ‘keep calm’ over ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, says Louise Casey
The public must “keep calm” over the ethnicity of grooming gang offenders, the author of a high-profile report has urged, saying police data from one region suggested that the race of child abuse suspects was proportional with the local population,The comments from Louise Casey came as Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, defended herself from claims that she was attempting to politicise the scandal of the organised rape of girls by men across dozens of towns over at least 25 years,Lady Casey’s report on Monday found evidence of “over-representation” of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among suspects of “group sexual exploitation” of children, according to data from three police forces,Casey told MPs on Tuesday that she was concerned that the limited data available on the race and ethnicity of offenders was not being used responsibly as part of the public debate on grooming gangs,She said the report examined data from Greater Manchester police (GMP), which covers towns including Rochdale and Oldham where convicted grooming gangs operated.
“If you look at the data on child exploitation, suspects and offenders, it is disproportionately Asian heritage,” she said.“If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate and it is white men.“So just a note to everybody, outside here rather than in here, let’s just keep calm about how you interrogate data and what you get from it.”According to the report, GMP’s figures showed that 52% of suspects involved in multi-victim/multi-offender cases of child sexual exploitation over a three-year period were Asian, compared with 38% who were white.When examining suspects for all child sex abuse crimes, not just grooming, the same force’s data shows that 16% were Asian and 44% were white, while 32% of suspects were of “unknown” ethnicity.
The last census figures show that 57% of Greater Manchester is white and 21% is Asian, according to the report.Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionKeir Starmer said later on Tuesday that Badenoch had done about grooming gangs when the Tories were in power and asked why she had not brought forward a mandatory duty for authorities to report child sexual exploitation when she was a minister.“Why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you say one word about it?” the prime minister asked in a direct message to Badenoch as he spoke to reporters at the G7 summit in Canada.Starmer also defended his record, saying he brought about the first prosecutions of grooming gang members while director of public prosecutions, changed the rules to make gang prosecution easier and called for mandatory reporting, which the Conservatives rejected.“I’m now the prime minister who has passed into law mandatory reporting, who has taken forward the unique identifier for children, because I’ve always been really worried that children falling outside of school are not being picked up, and they are very vulnerable to exploitation,” he said.
“And obviously now [I have] announced this national inquiry.”Casey told the BBC’s Newsnight on Monday that she was “disappointed” by the Conservatives’ response to her review of the grooming gangs scandal.“We need to change some laws, we need to do a national criminal investigation, we need to get on with a national inquiry with local footprint in it, and ideally wouldn’t it be great if everybody came behind that and backed you?” she said.“I felt the opposition could have just been a bit, you know, ‘Yes we will all come together behind you.’ Maybe there’s still time to do that.
I think it’s just so important that they do.”At a hastily arranged press conference, Badenoch said she was “not doing politics now” but criticised people who sought to “tone police those who are pointing out when something has gone wrong”.“I do think that we should take the politics out of it.But who was it that said when we raised this issue that we were pandering to the far right? That’s what brought the politics into it,” she said.Badenoch said her party backed a national inquiry into the scandal and had been calling for one “for six months”.
Bar Council is wise to the risk of AI misuse | Letters
In your report (High court tells UK lawyers to stop misuse of AI after fake case-law citations, 6 June), you quote Dame Victoria Sharp’s call that we, the Bar Council, and our solicitor colleagues at the Law Society address this matter urgently.We couldn’t agree more. This high court judgment emphasises the dangers of the misuse by lawyers of artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, and in particular its serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system.The public is entitled to expect from legal professionals the highest standards of integrity and competence in appropriate understanding and use of new technologies, as well as in all other respects.The Bar Council has already issued guidance on the opportunities and risks surrounding the use of generative AI, which is quoted by the court, and is in the process of setting up a joint working group with the Bar Standards Board to identify how best we can support barristers to uphold those standards with appropriate further training and supervision
Watch out, hallucinating Humphrey’s about in Whitehall | Brief letters
I doubt that government officials consulted their AI tool, Humphrey, on what it should be called (UK government rollout of Humphrey AI tool raises fears about reliance on big tech, 15 June). It could have advised that in the 1970s the name was used for a milk marketing campaign: “Watch out, there’s a Humphrey about.” That line will now have a whole new meaning. Having spent the last few weeks voting in the Lords to try, in vain, to achieve protections for the creative industries from AI abuse, that meaning might be prophetic. On a personal level, my husband is angry that his name is being stolen again
Facial recognition technology needs stricter regulation | Letter
The Metropolitan police’s recognition of the value in “some sort of framework or statutory guidance” for live facial recognition is welcome (Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars, 24 May). However, it is not just police use of this technology that needs a clear legal framework.Despite the scale and speed of its expansion, there is still no specific law providing a basis for live facial recognition or other emerging biometric technologies, whether these are used in the public or private sector.Biometric surveillance is expanding rapidly, not just in policing but across society: in train stations, schools and supermarkets. Newer biometric systems go further, claiming to infer people’s emotional states, raising serious concerns about their accuracy, ethics and legality
Tell us about your best Reddit moment
Reddit celebrates its 20th birthday at the end of the month. With 17 million daily viewers, the online community forum has brought various issues to people’s attention, from the timely and topical to the bizarre.We’d like to hear about your best Reddit moment. Perhaps you’ve been able to share a personal experience and felt you found your tribe discussing it with others. Or maybe you’ve had a complex issue explained to you like a five-year-old, or just found yourself laughing along with a viral moment with millions of others
DNA testing firm 23andMe fined £2.3m by UK regulator for 2023 data hack
The genetic testing company 23andMe has been fined more than £2.3m for failing to protect the personal information of more than 150,000 UK residents after a large-scale cyberattack in 2023.Family trees, health reports, names and postcodes were among the sensitive data hacked from the California-based company. It only confirmed the breach months after the infiltration started and once an employee saw the stolen data advertised for sale on the social media platform Reddit, according to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office – which levied the fine.The information commissioner, John Edwards, called the months-long incident across the summer of 2023 a “profoundly damaging breach”
Meta sacrifices a heap of money at the altar of AI
Mark Zuckerberg announced in April that the company would make huge capital expenditures in the coming year to keep up in the race to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He made good on that promise last week with a $15bn “AI superintelligence” team that would feature reported nine-figure salaries and a 49% investment in Scale AI. Meta also hired Scale’s 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, a former roommate of OpenAI’s Sam Altman.Before Meta’s investment, Scale counted most of the major players in AI among its clients, and some of them were less than thrilled with the development. Bloomberg puts it succinctly: Scale AI’s Wang Brings to Meta Knowledge of What Everyone Else is Doing
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