So it’s another day and yet another child abusing beast in police uniform has been caught and gaoled. In this instance it is Police Constable Farooq Ahmed who pleaded guilty at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester to child sex offences.

Ahmed has been gaoled for two years for sexually assaulting a girl that he targetted when the girl was in primary school. The account of the offences committed by Ahmed as published by the Bolton News are revolting and I will not recount them here. Apart from the grave nature of these offences, what’s worse is that these offences are not just relatively recent but occurred prior to his joining Greater Manchester Police force. This makes me wonder whether the vetting procedure that Greater Manchester Police employed prior to hiring Ahmed was deficient in some way? The crimes only came to light when he voluntarily confessed to them at a police station.

Were there no background checks into this man or were they deliberately less vigorous than they could be so that GMP could tick the ‘Asian officer’ box on their diversity monitoring forms? Surely a bit of a dig around in his background and associates could have uncovered information to show his unsuitability for police work?

Now over the course of my life I’ve know many people who have either joined the police or have attempted to join the police and they’ve told me that when they applied to join the police, the moral standards that they were required to uphold were stringent. These included potential officers to demonstrate that they would police the public without fear or favour, even if the criminal was from within their own family. It does not appear that such vigorous moral standards seem to be demanded by Greater Manchester Police.

What should bother anyone in the Greater Manchester Police area is that had not Ahmed had a moment of contrition and confessed to these offences, nobody would be any the wiser. He might even have become as sexual predator in uniform using his position to acquire victims and silence victims?

This is one of those cases where there is very little in the way of mitigation. The only thing was the early guilty plea. He cannot claim that these offences happened when he was young and not yet fully formed as a moral person nor that he was one of those who learned to abuse after being abused himself, after all these offences happened when he was in his thirties when he should be expected to know right from wrong. There’s also no suggestion that this abuse was learned abuse. From what I read of this case, Ahmed is an abusive person who decided to abuse. Because of the lack of mitigating factors in this case I’m disgusted that the Judge only gave him two years. With early release factored in, he will probably be back on the streets in about a year maybe a little more. I believe that because Ahmed was a serving police officer and therefore in a position of responsibility and influence at the time of his confession, he should have got a far more stringent sentence than he has got.

I don’t know why he walked into the police station and confessed, it could have been an act of genuine contrition or it could also be because he realised that the story was going to come out anyway and decided that an early plea was the best option, maybe we will never know. But his case does raise questions that need to be answered and one of the biggest questions is this: How many other Farooq Ahmeds are currently within Greater Manchester Police? If one abuser like this can slip through the vetting either through incompetence or through a twisted desire by the force to have more ‘Asian’ officers, then could there be a few or many more? We know that Ahmed is not the only police officer who has been caught being sexually deviant and targetting children and we also know that not all these officers who have behaved in such a way are ‘Asian’, and it is quite possible that there are many more child sex beasts in uniform than we might suppose.

If it is the case that there are many sexually deviant, child sex abusing police officers who are currently serving, then it is something that the public need to worry about. We should expect police officers to be morally sound but in this case and maybe in many others, we are landed with officers who are the very opposite to being morally sound. This case is yet another nail in the coffin for trust in the police. After all GMP hired him, allowed him to pass his probationary period whilst failing to ascertain whether or not Ahmed was a fit and proper person to wear a police uniform. The guilty party here is not just the offender, but also GMP for hiring him, maybe without proper checks, in the first place.