Rotherham police not recording ethnicities of suspected child abusers

Police have been accused of once again failing the victims of grooming gangs after an investigation found that the force at the centre of the Rotherham scandal was still not recording the ethnicities of suspected child abusers.

A secret intelligence report showed that South Yorkshire police were still disregarding basic details of child sex offenders up to December 2019.

Despite national and regional inquiries all concluding that victims had been failed and claiming lessons had been learned after the grooming gangs scandal was finally exposed at scale, an investigation by The Times has found that every police district in South Yorkshire, a major centre of abuse, still “routinely failed to log the ethnicity of those suspected of sexually abusing minors”.

In the 12 months to December 2019, officers in all four South Yorkshire police districts routinely failed to log the ethnicity of those suspected of sexually abusing minors. The highest failure rate was in the Rotherham district, where the ethnicity of 67 per cent of suspects went unrecorded.