A serial rapist London police officer was sentenced to life imprisonment for carrying out an “unrestrained campaign of rape and abusing” 12 women over almost two decades.
David Carrick pleaded guilty to 49 charges that include 24 counts of rape and further counts of controlling and coercive behaviour, sexual assault and false imprisonment. The 48-year-old most recently served in the elite force protecting the UK’s Houses of Parliament and foreign embassies.
The conviction has plunged London’s Metropolitan Police Service into a fresh credibility crisis. The organisation has been beset by a string of damaging scandals that have shaken public trust in the UK’s biggest police force.
“There are women whose trust in the police is profoundly shaken,” said Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner. “We have let down women across London but we are more determined than ever to put it right.”
Touching on that issue, Cheema-Grubb said that the repeated reluctance of his victims to come forward illustrates “an astonishing degree of moral corruption” in the way victims of sexual crime are treated in society.
“You drilled into her that you’re the police, you’re the law and you owned her,” Cheema-Grubb said referring to accounts of one of the victims.
Carrick exploited his position as a police officer to commit the offenses and silence victims, lawyers said. He committed many of the offenses in three coercive relationships where he kept the women under constant surveillance and controlled when they slept and what they ate.
Source: Serial rapist London cop sentenced to life in prison | Australasian Lawyer