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Serendipitous addendum to my previous addendum on the "250k grooming gang victims" figure
Two weeks ago I posted an article on my Substack about the Henry Nowak murder and how it's been covered (or, in many cases, not covered) by progressive journalists. In that article, I took Irish outlet The Journal to task for their claim that there's no evidence that "two-tier policing" is a thing, except in the sense that British police officers conduct stop and searches on black Britons more often than they do white Britons.
Anyone familiar with the 13/52 meme will know there's a better explanation for this phenomenon than just cops being racist. I wanted to demonstrate this, so the last few days were spent doing a deep dive into Ministry of Justice conviction stats from the last decade. The end result was this article, which showed that, unsurprisingly, black Britons are 6 times more likely to be convicted of homicide than white Britons, and are responsible for at least 14% of all homicides in England and Wales.
Why "at least"? Well, that was the most surprising thing I found in my deep dive: we don't know. And this has implications beyond black knife crime.
In less than a week, MP Rupert Lowe's report on the scandal of Pakistani grooming gangs has already achieved infamy, in particular its claim that the number of young girls who were victimised by these gangs (almost all of them white working-class girls) could be as high as 250,000. I initially accepted this claim at face value, pointing out that the grooming gangs scandal has been ongoing since the 1970s: 5,000 victims a year in a country with about 1 million white working-class girls between the ages of 10-16 sounded well within the realm of plausibility to me. Two days ago I walked that claim back after learning that the 250k figure only includes girls who were victimised between 2000-18, and that this figure seemed implausibly high for such a short timeframe. I tried to explain my reasoning in more detail, using intuition pumps like comparing this figure to the number of children admitted to hospital in the period, or the rate of child sex abuse in Britain's nearest neighbour. Others pushed back with their own reasoning for why they believed the 250k was credible, and perhaps even an undercount.
But I discovered something very alarming when digging through Ministry of Justice conviction data. For the overwhelming majority of criminal convictions between 2017-25, the police and justice system did not bother to record the defendant's ethnicity at all.
Look at this screenshot from the dataset, which specifically looks at people convicted of sex crimes in the period. Of the ~60,000 convictions in the period, the convict's ethnicity is listed as "unknown" in nearly 16,000 cases. And the proportion not being recorded is trending upwards over time, from 22% in 2017 to 26% last year. And those are just the convictions: of the 93k people who were charged with sex crimes, 26k of those did not have their ethnicity recorded.
I don't know who these "unknowns" are, but I have to assume they include a lot of men with names like Muhammad, Hasan and Wahid.
We can tell a story wherein the grooming gangs scandal finally broke in the mid-2010s, and the police and justice system belatedly began handing down indictments to those responsible – but, in the interests of not "inflaming community tensions", the officers and magistrates conveniently forgot to write down the ethnic background of those they charged. If we assume that those whose ethnicity was listed as "unknown" are disproportionately Pakistani, there might have been as many as 3,000 Pakistani men charged with sex crimes every year since 2017. If each of these defendants had sexually exploited, on average, two white girls apiece, and for each one who was charged, another Pakistani wasn't charged – all of a sudden, the 250k figure doesn't seem half as implausible as I thought two days ago.
Journalists neglecting to mention the ethnicity of a suspect which is known to them is one thing. Police officers and courts not bothering to write it down is a whole other ball game. If you'd told me that the UK's criminal justice system didn't bother to record the ethnicity of 71% of people it convicted of criminal offences, I'd have thought you were mad. But that's literally what happened!
I genuinely don't know what to believe anymore.
I'm getting a "not found" CDN page from the link.
Where did the 71% figure come from? Up until this point it seemed like the no-record figures you mentioned were more around 30%.
In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.
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